Of which we still cannot give up
The well-known politician Albert Baghdasaryan recalled that during the Karabakh war writer and publicist Zori Balayan was giving orders, in my opinion, not so sensible. I cannot but believe the human eye and on hearing similar cases I can make a conclusion: the author of numerous open letters was endowed with the powers that were not official, but actually were more powerful than those of the officials. And who and how such powers are given, one can only guess. Anyway, until the year 1991, this power was given to the State Security Committee. From time to time, some politicians and public figures in Armenia are talking about lustration. However, people understand it differently.
If we are talking about revealing the security agent network, it is, in my opinion, a crime. If lustration will give a chance to delve into the old accounts, then, it will not lead to anything good either. But to understand how and with what mechanisms the KGB during the late Soviet period affected Armenia’s state and public life and what was “transferred” from this impact after the independence, perhaps, is not worth. Surely, there are risks here too, and the first one perhaps was the paranoia, when they are looking for “KGB agents” under every bush. The second risk is that when revealing the truth, we can somehow jeopardize the state secrets or overshadow the Nagorno-Karabakh movement or the Artsakh war. The second risk does not seem to me quite significant.
If we see only the bright pages in the history, then we would resemble the Turks who are trying to prove that during those 10 centuries since they appeared in this region, they manifested themselves as angels of God. Why is this “historic lustration” important? It seems to me that these phenomena partly explain the immense and I would even say, the “disproportionate” effect that Russia has on our country. If the government and the political elite had such close ties with the KGB, then it is not excluded that these links are maintained in some place. While our desire should be our country’s independence in all areas where it is possible to be independent, without endangering our security. I often think, why there is a stronger nostalgia about the Soviet past in Armenia than, let’s say, in Georgia.
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If the problem was only in the fact that people were fed up during the Soviet Union, and the country’s collapse made them feel hungry, then this problem equally exists in our two countries. Maybe our difference is due to the fact that after the “Rose Revolution”, Georgian people realized why their life was earlier built on the wrong principles, and the fault is find among the people who had and have ties with certain institutions, institutions in which the fraud, imprisonment and violence make the integral components of its style. The population of Armenia does not particularly worry about these problems. And when there is no social order, there is also no desire among the majority of political and social forces to voice these problems.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
