I read that there should be no nations at the time of communism. And for me it was a shock. I was terribly angry.

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The Soviet Union was in one place, and the world was somewhere else. There was that gap. And I thought that... things were constantly happening in the world: fights, etc., etc. And nothing was happening in the Soviet Union. At least in our time, the time

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What if Brezhnev would last a bit longer, what if he would have died 10 years later? Everything would have been completely different.

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What are our historical novels generally about? All historical novels, be it weak or strong, well written or poorly written, their core, you can read and check it, they are all about statehood, the loss and restoration of statehood. That is the core of ou

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People were working and getting a normal salary. Their job and their work were not connected. Well, they were working, they were getting their money, they didn’t care about what would happen to the alarm clock.

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I don՛t remember anyone complaining about the cold and dark in our house, to be honest. Those were good years for me. I also wrote about them. Those were years of victory for me.

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But when people were shouting Karabakh, in my opinion, they were not just shouting Karabakh. I mean, what happened next. Half of Yerevan poured into the streets. Karabakh itself symbolized all that we lost.

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When I was already a student and could express very harsh thoughts towards the political leadership, Brezhnev and co, my mother even once said: “if you say one more word I’ll call Militia to take you away.”

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For the rest you were a “class enemy”, for them the bad guy was the one with long hair, and they would call names

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Then she’d open the suitcase and would say “we have such jeans, this plastic bag of Marlboro for 5 Rubles,” a bag that in America was used to sell a block of [cigarettes], say 10 boxes, for free

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