Many of us like to call Armenians one of the oldest civilisations, the first Christian nation – and other flattering epithets. Of course, it is difficult to imagine that the title ‘nation’ may turn out to be an exaggeration for an ethnic group that has existed in an organised manner since the beginning of human history. It was also difficult for foreign researchers to imagine this, who unanimously declared Armenia’s advantage at the dawn of the Third Republic – after all, our country did not need to build both a state and a nation, unlike most post-Soviet countries.
What is a nation? Why does the Armenian Republic set the completion of nation-building of the indigenous ethnic group of the Armenian Highlands, a significant part of the Lesser Caucasus and the Kura-Araks lowlands, as one of its key goals?
It can be considered that nations are social constructs reflecting people’s choice to identify themselves as one community. On the contrary, one can agree with the primordialists and consider that nations were formed almost in the Stone Age and are genetically encoded. Whatever definition we choose, it will remain socio-cultural, maybe biological, but not inherently political.
Language, shared norms and customs, of course, create a collective identity, but representatives of different ethnic groups living in the same region sometimes have more in common in this regard than compatriots living in different parts of a large country. What to say about the global Armenian world? No sufficiently complex and advanced system, especially one built from people who have repeatedly been subjected to massacres and deportations, can be linked into a simple sequence of close and distant family ties.
If the interaction between members of a society is determined by personal acquaintances, family ties and informal arrangements, and is not based on functioning institutions and ideas about the common good, then such a society has not progressed beyond the community.
We have repeatedly written that it is impossible to build a meaningful sovereign state without a political nation. It is impossible to formulate a national interest and defend it, if there is no one to define it for, if it is not clear who is part of this nation.
Of course, the coryphaeus of Armenian political thought, Turkish Commandant Nikol Pashinyan, does not agree with us. The creature holding the post of Prime Minister assures us that we must move from a ‘stateless nation’ to a state (!) people. After even such a brief digression given above, is it worth saying that an uneducated yellow journalist contradicts common sense and all existing political theories with such a definition?
In the meantime, before Pashinyan has built a new Armenian ‘people’, which, according to his plan, should become a serving minority on the last physical stronghold of the Armenian statehood, we will begin to inventory what we have as an ethnocultural community now. What is the Armenian identity today? It is a patchwork of competing micro-identities. Every region and even village claims to be ‘real’, denying this honourable definition to everyone else to varying degrees. We will not go down to the level of villages and – let alone – entrance halls (judging by the pollution of the streets in Yerevan, the borders of the homeland for many pass precisely at the entrance doors). This time, let us talk about the perception of Artsakh, one of the three pillars of the once-proclaimed unity: Armenia – Artsakh – Spyurk.
Procrustean bed of the Armenian Nation
Nothing demonstrates the fragility of the Armenian national identity more than the far-fetched ‘conflict’ between the inhabitants of mainland Armenia and Artsakh. In this regard, the Armenians of Artsakh have replaced the Armenians of Baku, Sumgait and Gandzak. However, during the Soviet period, there was a misunderstanding even between the same Armenians of Artsakh and their relatives who lived in these cities of Soviet Azerbaijan. In addition to the native Armenians of those places, there were also Armenians who were gradually transported from Artsakh by the Azerbaijani administration in order to develop Azerbaijani cities and settle Artsakh with Azerbaijanis instead.
Stereotypes are convenient. They allow people to quickly separate their own and others. But naturally, they led to the fact that the first wave of refugees practically did not settle in Armenia and thus became a ‘stranger’. Different parts of the Armenian people should not be blamed for this. Simple answers to difficult questions were given to them by the nascent elite of the ‘Third Republic’. Initially, they did not accept the first planes with refugees from Baku, then they stigmatised them as Russian-speaking. Then they provided them houses with pan-Armenian money, but did not give them the same feeling of ‘home’, at the same time turning many other people, disadvantaged by wars, blockades and the transition to a market economy, against them.
The Armenian state was just being born, and it was born in agony. So, one should not blame that significant part of the refugees from large Azerbaijani cities for not showing enough maturity and wisdom to realise that the country had many other problems, and to have the determination to start from scratch in a poor and hungry country, to learn its language, to go and fight side by side with those who insulted them and called them ‘inverted’ (շուռ տված) Armenians. Tasks of this magnitude, especially in countering the narratives of foreign intelligence agencies, would be within the power of the national aristocracy only. At that time, its ’embryo’ was not up to the fuss of Yerevan – it was fighting for the continuation of the Armenian history in the mountains of Artsakh. It was not destined to return from there – the time-servers who settled in Yerevan could not let that happen.
Having successfully driven out the refugees from the Kura-Araks lowland from the country, the new Armenian elite engaged in dividing the state from the inside. The Armenians of Artsakh, who were declared a separate political entity from Armenia, were chosen as the new victim. What internationally-established right of nations to self-determination could there be, if Armenians failed to self-determine on their own territory? Thus, the Armenians of Artsakh were declared the justification for all the subsequent failures of the authorities of the Third Republic, whether they were born in Artsakh (Robert Kocharyan), Syunik (Serzh Sargsyan) or Tavush (Nikol Pashinyan).
By building a new army and an ‘independent’ state (at the behest of Levon Ter-Petrosyan and Robert Kocharyan), restoring houses and installing tombstones to fallen soldiers, the Artsakh Armenians had no idea that in 6 hours (and at that time even 10-12) away from Stepanakert, a full-scale seizure of the nascent Armenian state was taking place from the inside. Allegedly, they had all become part of the mythical ‘Karabakh clan’ – synonymous with greed and insatiability, and they were now the power in Yerevan. By the way, the share of people from Artsakh in power was the largest under Levon Ter-Petrosyan, who sought to increase his legitimacy and popularity at their expense.
But such scapegoats helped not only the authorities (to shift hatred to another object), but also the local population, who could abdicate responsibility for connivance to ‘elites’ and continue to deal only with their own entrance halls. We devoted a separate article to how the governors of the Yerevan ‘elites’ in Stepanakert silenced the population of Artsakh with false ‘unity’ and created the illusion of uniqueness for them.
2023 gave Armenians another bloody chance to finally get to know themselves and each other, to become reliable support for each other. At the end of September 2023, we saw how people from all over Armenia rushed to the vicinity of Goris – both physically and mentally. Predictably, the bot factories of Pashinyan’s Turkish administration and Artsakhophobes, nurtured for decades since Levon Ter-Petrosyan, soon broke this popular impulse towards empathy and true unity. Soon, the avoidance of the toponym ‘Artsakh’ in public speeches was replaced by undisguised Artsakhophobia on the part of Pashinyan’s henchmen.
In today’s Armenia, hatred towards Artsakh and the community of Artsakh Armenians is not just acceptable, but encouraged, even imposed from above. The homeless Armenians of Artsakh, who after just 1.5 years have had almost all possible forms of benefits paid by international donors cancelled by the Armenian government, continue to be presented as ‘freeloaders riding on the back’ of the eternally deficient Nikol’s budget.
However, to formalise the Turkish colonisation of Armenia, it is not enough to transfer its parts to the enemy piece by piece, and it is not enough to demonstratively refuse to respond to enemy shots. The Turkish world is playing a long game – it needs us not only to never get stronger, but also to hate who we are and what belongs to us.
1800 years ago, Mesrop Mashtots founded one of the first Armenian schools in Amaras, Artsakh. This is one of the first monasteries where the Armenian identity was born in its cultural, political and institutional sense, where the languages in which our ancestors and our spiritual leaders thought and began to write merged, and where our ancestors and spiritual leaders independently shaped Armenia’s place in the world political history. It is not surprising that today, along with the Armenian Apostolic Church, it is schools that are becoming the site of constant scandals and provocations by the occupation administration. The question is not about Amaras, Tatev, and Tanahat (where the Gladzor University was located), but about the deep roots that an educated Armenian took there, and what constant spiritual and mental improvement means for a true Armenian. If a normal school and university education is ‘not ours’, then neither is Amaras. Turkish owners do not see it fit for the aborigines on the service floor of ‘Real Armenia’ motel to strive for higher things.
Therefore, we are stuck between ‘learning is fashionable’ from ragamuffins on the one hand and the lost Western Armenia, where Armenian women became the first female doctors and translated world literature, on the other. This is the choice between ‘real’ and ‘historical’ Armenia.
It is precisely because of the incompleteness of the Armenian political identity that the current government has managed to impose an alternative narrative of ‘real Armenia’ – simplified, pragmatic, freed from inconvenient or conflicting elements of the past. The Prime Minister deliberately abandons the germs of national consciousness, replacing a multi-level identity with a function of survival and everyday comfort. Pashinyan completes the process of the long-term decay of the Armenian society, forcing brothers and sisters to hate each other and despise their fathers. This does not erase our differences from other nations at all, but sets us apart as the most stupid students of history, whom it may someday get tired of keeping for another year – and expel forever. This is exactly what Pashinyan’s ‘Real Armenia’ is looking for.
To be continued, of course…
