Tsarist Russia was a “nightmare” to Bolsheviks, who had come to power in 1917, and they had come to make a heaven in “one, separate country”. In 1956 Khrushchev announced that socialism built by Stalin was a rather wrong socialism, in which “cult of personality” was in place, and he was going to build socialism with a “human face”. In Brezhnev’s times Khrushchev’s “voluntarism” was being condemned, in Gorbachev’s times – Brezhnev’s “stagnation”, and Yeltsin announced, that past 70 years were a “nightmare”. Armenian National Movement (ANC) was also of that opinion. Kocharyan followed afterward and announced that ANC regime was a regime of “robbers” and “murderers”. It seems now the time has come to name all past 27 years a “nightmare”.
Majority of the people who have lived a conscious life until 1990 consider the years of independent Armenia a “nightmare” because it deprived them of the opportunity of living a safe and stable life. Many of my peers (let us confess frankly) do not gather enough strength to live with the present, with today, and the main way of their self-sustaining is speaking about “olden but golden days”, the system which “these lads ruined”. People of this age group welcomed “Velvet Revolution”. They think it will promote “Nairit’s” re-opening. People born 1990 forward consider past 27 years a “nightmare”, inasmuch as they had and have an opportunity to compare the development of our country of the past 30 years with other countries, due to the absence of the “iron curtain” and availability of information, and that comparison majorly does not speak to the benefit of ours. Indeed, why Armenia is not the way the Czech Republic, or, for example, Croatia is? Consequently, we have been engaged in some stupidities for 27 years, if, of course, we have not “struggled against the regime.” Now the time has come to build a fairytaleish country.
In reality, bringing the past as an antonym to the present, putting a “+” or “-” before one of them, the promises about the future heaven are solely an evidence of the lack of historical thinking. “Whoever tells something bad to us – the new ones, dreams of the recurrence of the former nightmare” argument is a good propaganda, but a bad one for historical perspectives. If I am a good person not because I do good, but only because the people prior to me were bad ones, then the ones following me will not make efforts to do good. And the nightmare and heaven are not “outside”. Every person can “create” both of them in his or her soul.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
