Can a Pro-European Democracy Have Informers and Ideological Enemies?
I see many of my friends on social media criticizing people who inform on others. They are not wrong.
Under Nikol Pashinyan’s government, the old Soviet practice of denunciation has made a remarkable comeback. Reports are filed in government institutions, universities, and workplaces. The allegations are familiar enough: this person is a foreign agent, that one is linked to the former regime, another dared to like an anti-Pashinyan post online.
Such denunciations can lead to criminal investigations or dismissal from employment. But the real issue is not the people who write them. If the practice were not encouraged from above, only a handful of habitual informers would bother. Most people would simply get on with their lives.
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In any case, denunciations are hardly necessary for the authorities to achieve their objectives. If the government decides that someone should be presented as a “Russian spy,” the National Security Service, the Investigative Committee, and the rest of the state apparatus are perfectly capable of carrying out that task without public assistance.
Which raises an obvious question: what are these denunciations actually for?
The answer is simple. They create the impression that the authorities are merely responding to public demand. Every authoritarian system needs the appearance of popular support for actions that have already been decided upon. Repression is easier to justify when it can be presented as the will of the people.
In the Soviet era, denunciations were often endorsed at party meetings in factories and workplaces. Workers would read statements prepared by party officials, declaring that they, “together with the entire Soviet people,” condemned enemies of the people and demanded punishment for agents of imperialism.
By then, the KGB had already done its work and the outcome had long been decided. But the ritual still mattered. The authorities needed the appearance of public participation.
Today, the workers have been replaced by activists, NGOs, and self-appointed representatives of “civil society,” who demand punishment for alleged Russian spies. The rhetoric is remarkably familiar. The methods are familiar. Even the Chekist style remains intact. Only the identity of the alleged enemy has changed.
There is an obvious irony here. Some of the loudest opponents of Vladimir Putin increasingly embrace the political habits and instincts associated with the system that produced him.
Yet the contradiction is not as striking as it first appears.
In modern politics, pro-European rhetoric and authoritarian instincts often coexist quite comfortably. Over the past two decades, much of the humanistic core that once defined discussions of democracy, human rights, and European values has steadily eroded. Once those principles are stripped of their human dimension, one is left wondering what exactly European leaders, bureaucrats, and their local admirers mean when they invoke them.
Recently, I came across an official text suggesting that Andranik Tevanyan is not merely a spy or a criminal, but something more serious: an ideological enemy.
If ideological dissent is now the real offense, the authorities should at least be honest about it. They could amend the Criminal Code accordingly, introducing new offenses such as “Anti-Civil Contract Agitation and Propaganda” or “Disseminating Falsehoods Intended to Discredit the Pashinyan State and Social Order.”
That would be a more accurate description of what is actually being prosecuted.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
“Aravot” daily
02.06.2026
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