The last message from dad on the cigarette packet

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A Jewish boy who speaks German better than his teacher

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They would come in like this, they would touch that table, they would caress the flag; this is our ambassador՛s table, this is our this and that... I was constantly crying; I just couldn’t bear it. It was very, very, very moving.

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Movies, music, clothes, let’s say myths, those are different things, aren’t they? That cultural cycle that goes around? And thanks to the Diaspora, this western novelty entered Armenia much earlier than other Soviet countries.

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Now, it may seem like preparation, but those moods were spreading, weren’t they? People were thinking, “Why do we have to live like that?”, “Why do we have to live at this place?” And that music was not just a form. It was a way of thinking; it was also a

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They were “labeled” as they say, people distanced from them. And a group of former students went to visit them. We were probably no more than six or seven people, from a cohort of one hundred people. In other words, it was a form of protest.

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Later, when the ban was lifted, I thought that back then they were running after those books, they wanted to read them, and now why did that interest disappear. Is it because it is not a forbidden fruit anymore?

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I was young, I don’t remember well, but probably the conversation turned a little “anti”, a little nationalist, “anti”, because when another person came, he wasn’t a friend, but our neighbor, who communicated a lot with my parents, the topic was changed.

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We were all convinced that it would happen one day, that [the Soviet Union] would collapse, it could not last long, but it seemed to us that they would still prolong, prolong, and prolong […] So, as soon as the movement started, everything was happening a

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We had learned to understand so many things between the lines during the Soviet period. We read the same newspapers backword, in the opposite way, to analyze, to decode.

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