The word “plug-ugly” is related to my childhood memories. Many people, including my parents received apartments from the Academy of Sciences in the building, where I lived. People who had had cabins in that vicinity until the 1960s, which had been demolished to build the Khrushchev apartment buildings, lived in one of the neighboring buildings. We called that building “plug-uglies’ building.” I heard the first swear words of sexual nature from the guys who lived in that building. By the way, I also heard the term “tough guy” in the neighborhood sense from them; the brothers with the nickname Iron were deemed such.
However, it is the so-called depoliticized perception of a “plug-ugly.” I first heard the phrase “neighborhood plug-ugly” in the political sense in 1995 when the teammates of businessmen (the institution of security guards was not established yet) beat up oppositionists on the parliamentary election day. After that, no election has been held without such incidents. For the sake of truth, let us mention that such incidents were less common in the latest parliamentary and presidential elections. However, the institution of the “neighborhood plug-ugly” still exists, and the clash of those plug-uglies with the Armenian National Congress (ANC) activists yesterday is testimony to that. If people just have inclinations of a hooligan, it doesn’t matter for them whether the ANC carries out its campaign or the United Labor Party (ULP), they won’t even care who has come to their quarter and what leaflet he is handing out. (It is a different matter, if they had come, say, to talk about a “neighborhood girl.”) However, these plug-uglies who interfere in political processes are not independent; they are directed and are an obvious political tool.
These politicized plug-uglies rally to the neighborhood administrations, currently called administrative districts. Naturally, their activities are not confined to beating people up; it is a radical means these days, and they are instructed to avoid it, if possible. Under normal circumstances, plug-uglies have three functions: to break into electoral districts in groups and stuff ballot boxes, to hand out election bribes and take bribed people to polling places in GAZelles, and to impede the mass media’s work. We will see on May 5 how that “arsenal” operates; furthermore, an emphasis will probably be put on peaceful methods of election bribery. Without political instructions, plug-uglies are just plug-uglies, and with those instructions, they are “politicians.”
Perhaps when the PACE rapporteurs write about fusion of the state and government they mean that very thing.
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ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
