Yesterday was the day of political prisoners. This day was first marked in 1974 by the dissidents in Mordvinia and Perm camps, who have decided to commemorate all the innocent victims of repression by lighting candles. In the late 1980s and early 90s, these issues were much talked about, later on the public interest faded. People began to live up to their social “sorrows”, and seemingly, very few people are interested in the fighting for freedom, both in the past and present.
I am still interested, although neither I nor my immediate surroundings have not been dissidents. But it seems to me that the movements incurred in the conditions of comparative freedoms in the second half of the 1980s, both in Armenia and the other Soviet republics and in Eastern Europe, were to some extent related to dissidents, because there was honesty and sincere aspiration towards democratic, liberal values and national sovereignty in them, something that now has appeared in the political “marginal”. I am writing this word without irony, because the political mainstream should really rely, on the one hand, on the Kremlin’s favor and, on the other hand, on the majority dreaming of a “good king” and a “benefactor”. Although this is sad, but a political reality.
To facilitate the society to return to the values of the movements of the second half of 1980s, to stop their ideas from being marginal, we should probably realize of when and how we have lost them. There are many hypothesis here, which, of course, is not possible to compose on one computer page. Some say that in 1990-1991, by letting the former communists to come to new Armenia’s state system, the “Karabakh Committee”, PANM did not demand them to repent, and did not insist on giving assessment to the previous, the Soviet system. Little by little, since 1994-1995, this very people obtained a decisive influence, and the country primarily returned to them, to the government familiar to the former communists, although slightly modified.
Some also say that the communist politburo member Yeltsin, in the mid of the same 1980s, cut his ties with the past, whereas the KGB officer Putin preserved and strengthened these ties, again awakening the imperial ambitions in his people. Well, and if one sneezes in Moscow, an epidemic breaks out in Armenia.
There is, of course, a kernel of good sense in all of this. But, perhaps, one of the main reasons is the destitution by the majority of people, under which, he does not expect anything and does not sought for anything but the “charity”. In the second half of the 1980s, the well-fed people were fighting for freedom.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
