Paruyr Hayrikyan talked about Chekists again in the context of the assassination attempt on him. I can roughly tell what he is talking about, but I don’t understand it completely, because words like “Chekist,” “KGB,” and “agent” have different meanings. For example, in
1994, at a rally of thousands of people – there were no social networks and websites at the time, and most of curses were spat out orally – Ashot Manucharyan, a fundamental oppositionist, called me a “KGB agent,” along with other accusations and oaths. As far as I can tell, this figure who was respected by me meant some bad, negative phenomenon. I haven’t had an opportunity to clear up which KGB he meant, Soviet, Russian, or Armenian. An agent of the Soviet KGB, according to my perception, is the man who “informs on” who told a joke about Brezhnev at a party, and then the teller has some problems at his workplace. However, there has been no such problem since 1985, and people who had been engaged in the disgusting business of reporting on other people have found other fields of activity. For example, they have become “national figures.”
However, there are Chekists in the negative sense today too. For example, those who eavesdropped on the conversation between Vartan Oskanian and Levon Zurabyan at a café. (If they hadn’t done it, they would have found the perpetrator long ago and would have put him in prison, as it happened in the case of an actress.) Tell me please what our national security benefitted from this eavesdropping. Nothing. This is the very case when the secret service is used for political purposes.
Probably, when Hayrikyan and other dissidents talk about Chekists, they mean such institutions performing political functions. However, states take actions, which are in the interest of their, those states’ political interests, in their countries, as well as abroad, through those institutions. Therefore, it is not about political functions in general, but those functions that are in the interest of the government, not the state. One just has to prove that some state or even some country’s government is interested in an unstable situation in Armenia.
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…An excerpt from a Soviet movie the title of which I don’t remember. Dzerzhinsky punishes an inferior marine who had “mistakenly” shot dead some suspicious “intellectual.” The marine justifies himself: “Felix Edmundovich, he was against, against; I felt it in my liver.” “Next time,” says the head of Cheka in a strict tone, “You will think with your head, not your liver.”
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
