Armenia’s Revolution: A Flickering Light in a Darkening Europe

Marc Cooper

 

Next Sunday, on December 9, Armenians are expected to further consolidate their unique and vastly underreported “Velvet Revolution.” On that day, acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s “My Step” alliance is expected to win a large governing majority in the country’s parliament.(*)

Though this has been barely reported, if it all, in most of the Western media, for the past seven months, landlocked Armenia, with only 3 million inhabitants, has flickered as a small light of hope and progressive democratic change in a Europe increasingly shadowed by authoritarian and dictatorial forces—especially in most of the former Soviet-bloc states of Eastern Europe.

Culture of protest: the symbols of Armenia’s Velvet Revolution

Tigran Amiryan

The elevation of protest leader Nikol Pashinyan to the post of prime minister last month was the dramatic culmination of Armenia’s peaceful revolution. Immediately after the deputies in parliament voted for Pashinyan, a truckload of snow was brought from the slopes of Mount Aragats to Yerevan’s central square and dumped in the middle of the jubilant crowd. In the warm light of a sunny spring evening, the joyful protestors staged a celebratory snowball fight. 

This hail of snow was not just a bizarre coda to the weeks of protests that swept the country and brought the streets of Yerevan to a standstill, but reflected the culture of the demonstrations themselves and the beliefs of the young people who drove them.

Armenian youth, the ‘engine of the revolution,’ fight for a fairer society

Bradley Jardine

 

For many of the activists who took to Yerevan's streets in recent weeks to overthrow long-time leader Serzh Sargsyan, his Republican Party of Armenia – which has ruled since 1999 – is the only leadership they've ever known.

The heavy participation of young Armenians was one of the most striking features of the protest movement. University and high school students took to the streets en masse and young working class men with their white Lada Nivas blasting rabiz music became a common backdrop to the protests. In one image that went viral, children emulated their elders by erecting roadblocks with toy cars.

As a result, the relatively middle-aged Nikol Pashinyan, at 42, is expected to be elected prime minister on May 8, taking over leadership of the country from the 63-year-old Sargsyan. The transition has renewed hope among young people in a country that has long offered them few prospects.

Armenia's 'Velvet Revolution': A masterclass in socialism

Arto Vaun

 

Post-Soviet countries are rough and tumble places, full of intense paradox, humour, microaggression, and beauty. There are fifteen former Soviet states, each with its own cultural and socioeconomic components and struggles. They have all been grappling with the ghost of the Soviet Union in different ways, but the one thing they've all agreed on is this: "Capitalism good, Socialism bad". One of the first things to go during the collapse of the Soviet Union were all the statues of Lenin and Marx. It was a collective sigh of relief, a venting of all the misery which that authoritarian system had inflicted on so many lives for most of the 20th century.

Problem was, those statues, and the oppression they represented, were quickly replaced by new figures of oppression - oligarchs with their hyper-capitalism, buoyed (however indirectly) by the neoliberal ideas that have been dragging the West down since the 1970s.

That has been Armenia since its independence in 1991. But a few weeks ago, a different Armenia woke up, as if from a 27-year coma. And the euphoria and empowerment of that awakening have been intense and palpable, from Yerevan to the remotest villages.

A revolution of values: freedom, responsibility and courage in Armenia's Velvet Revolution

Armine Ishkanian

 

In 1978. Vaclav Havel wrote The Power of the Powerless, in which he argued against the communist regime, maintaining that it forced people to “live in a lie”. For Havel, the resistance against the lie was to begin living in the truth and to challenge one’s own powerlessness through recognising one’s agency. Fast forward 40 years, and we are now witnessing a new velvet revolution in post-socialist Armenia, a country which proclaimed its independence from Soviet rule in 1991, but which has long struggled to create a democracy. More than anything else, this is a revolution about values. It is about the values of Armenian society and its domestic, socio-economic and political realities. The revolution is not about geopolitics or foreign relations.