Post-Soviet reality is an inseparable union of dictatorship and herd mentality
I must admit that when, during my student years in the early 1980s, I got hold of Boris Pasternak’s Boris Pasternak novel Doctor Zhivago, I was unable to finish it — the book struck me as dull. Perhaps the reason was that I had only one day to read it, which was typical at a time when the novel was banned and unavailable through official channels. (I no longer remember whether the copy I had was an underground Soviet edition or a version published abroad.) Compared to the same author’s brilliant poetry, the novel’s underlying meaning was not clear to me then. And it could hardly have been understood through hurried page-turning.
Only later in life did I begin to grasp the work’s enduring relevance. Without that kind of meaning, it seems to me, literature loses its purpose, and beginning with the Epic of Gilgamesh one can find such meaning in every truly significant work. In Pasternak’s novel, written between 1945 and 1955, the central theme, in my view, is the confrontation between the system — in this case revolutionary, Bolshevik, and Soviet, but in a broader sense any anti-Christian, godless system — and the intellectual.
At the beginning of the novel, Yuri Zhivago’s uncle, a former clergyman, explains why he belongs to no circle or party and concludes: “Only loners search for truth, and they break with everyone who does not love it enough.” On the symbolic level, the novel advances the idea that the masses, their leaders, and their representatives remain loyal to an ideology or an individual, whereas the gifted individual rejects such loyalty. Ultimately, this is the same mass whose representatives, already in the late 1950s, shouted — on instructions from above but supposedly out of “inner conviction” — “I haven’t read Pasternak, but I condemn him.” Those words were uttered during the “popular campaign” unleashed against Doctor Zhivago.
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The Soviet system, of course, embodied in concentrated form the inseparable union of dictatorial power on the one hand and herd mentality on the other. The problem is that for us in Armenia, the Soviet era did not end in 1991. Like Azerbaijan, Belarus, Russia, and the states of Central Asia, we lived — and continue to live — in a typical post-Soviet reality marked by the same corruption, the same arrogance of those in power, and the same state repression against dissenters. I will not hide the fact that in 2018 I believed we would finally break free from that post-Soviet system. Instead, it turned out that we had sunk even deeper into it — regardless of what Emmanuel Macron, Ursula von der Leyen, or Marco Rubio may say.
And under such conditions, I value above all those individuals — those loners — who speak the truth openly, regardless of which electoral list or party they belong to. Tigran Khzmalyan, speaking about Arthur Osipyan — who was jailed for two months for arguing with the dictator, even though the latter used far more insulting language than Arthur did — arrived at an entirely accurate conclusion: “We continue to live in a Sovashen.” In other words, in a post-Soviet reality. The reaction of the “representative of the masses” is predictable: “The court did the right thing — Osipyan should have spoken calmly; everyone has become far too rude.”
…Pasternak’s novel ends with a cycle of poems attributed by the author to his protagonist. The twenty-second poem, “Bad days” , like several others in the cycle, is devoted to the tragic events of Holy Week. I will conclude this article with a quatrain from that poem:
But days grew darker, more severe,
No love could soften hardened hearts;
Brows knit in scornful bitterness—
And now the end, the final part.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
