Leonid Brezhnev died 30 years ago. I was 22 years old at the time, so I was at an absolutely conscious age and understood that this person’s health hadn’t let him for many years not only govern, but also express a few coherent ideas without a paper. That huge country was governed by the system, which was economically inefficient and politically repressive. However, neither I, nor the majority of the Soviet people could imagine at that time that November 10, 1982, would mark the beginning of that system’s end. Then came Andropov who would catch people who went to the movies in the afternoon as if he maintained discipline, then Chernenko who announced some “food project,” after which we had a food deficit. And that’s it – the next Soviet leader realized that the rotten, corrupted, closed system was just self-destructing and he failed to reform that system, or he reformed incorrectly, or, most probably, it couldn’t have been reformed. In a nutshell, the system collapsed and we, its remains, haven’t found our niche yet.
I don’t feel any kind of nostalgia for the Communist times. That regime had the same vices, as today’s, “yesterday’s” and “the day before yesterday’s” regimes. Added to that, it was more hypocritical. So it was also a market economy, the country was also divided between “quick-witted,” “open-eyed” and “naïve” people, as it is now, but the wealth of the “quick-witted” was thoroughly concealed, the same wealthy people would make dishonest and cynical speeches from the platform about universal freedom, absence of exploitation and “national” property. They took us for bigger fools, than they do today.
Now some people want to create an illusion – or perhaps they really believe “post factum” – that everyone was pleased and happy when Brezhnev was in power. However, the person who earned 120 rubles at the time would also complain about life and injustice, since he could never buy a Zhiguli or at least a Zaporozhets for that salary and in order to buy a car, one had to be either in the Communist bureaucracy or a robber. By the way, there would have been an emigration at the time too, if the Communists hadn’t forced people to stay in their apartments as serfs.
If we employ the expression “criminal regime” very often used by the opposition in the past 20 years, the Communist regime was certainly a “criminal” one, as all the other “regimes” both in Armenia and in all the other countries today, as well as 100 or 1000 years ago. However, there were moral and kind people under all those circumstances and there were and are “devotees” of evil.
Aram Abrahamyan
