Writer Dmitri Bykov recounts an anecdote from the Soviet period where he asked a dissident colleague: “Why do you write? You won’t be able to publish anyway and sooner or later you will end up in prison.” The colleague’s response was, “I’m writing so that I don’t feel ashamed when I look in the mirror every morning while shaving.”
This is a wonderful answer. Fortunately, there have always been individuals and groups who have resisted oppressive circumstances and the suffocating atmosphere around them. (Incidentally, I believe there has never been a perfectly “congenial” climate for resistant individuals because there is always, everywhere, a conformist majority to whom these individuals are alien.)
Another example from the recent past is academician Andrei Sakharov. Around the mid-1960s, when he began proposing reforms for the Soviet Union, the state reacted harshly, ultimately stripping him of his titles of triple Hero of Socialist Labor, laureate of the Lenin and Stalin prizes, and exiling him to the city of Gorky. But he remained an academic. Why? Because only the Academy could deprive him of that title, and there were academics there who, although not dissidents, would definitely vote against such a decision. This is another excellent example of resistance.
We now live in much more “humanistic” times. Prison, in particular, threatens very few, and platforms for expressing one’s thoughts exist in many forms. The main instrument of pressure today (including in Armenia) is not so much the state, but public opinion, which is, in some sense, more difficult to resist.
When the state starts a political persecution against you, at least in theory, you can complain to international structures, although the effectiveness of this is debatable. If you become the target of a group of “haters” (often directed by the government), then there is no way to complain.
It remains to resist, and this often requires the same endurance that the dissidents of the Soviet period displayed. And again, as then, we need the solidarity of thinking people, regardless of political views.
Aram Abrahamyan
