I don't like to say that word, it's not my term, but there was a kind of holy shudder that I feel now and then, especially when I hear that trumpet music. It was an important thing. It was extremely important. We would go much slower, the transition from a Soviet person to a citizen would be much more complicated and perhaps more difficult.
As they were gathering to sign the Belovezha accords, maybe I don't remember the name well, the leadership of our country did not go there, instead they went to France, where they discussed with the French ambassador the threats to us coming from Moscow. While the Soviet Union still existed.
“Members of the solidarity movement came here from Poland. The Baltic countries were amazed at the bravery of Armenians. They could not talk about independence yet, but we already had its embryos. Even if you don't speak, the demonstration of half a million or one million people means that you are no longer under their subjection, you are not under their subordination. Even if you still believe in it [the empire], that belief will last very short if it doesn't want to solve the problem in the way you want. We all understood that this wouldn’t last for long, and tomorrow we would take the next step.”
There was only one book that was not being published. It was not even published at the time when Solzhenitsyn's “Gulag Archipelago” already existed. “Gulag Archipelago” was widespread, everyone was reading, “Garun” (Spring) magazine was being printed in parts, when you entered the Moscow metro, everyone was reading it (the Moscow reader has one characteristic: you enter the metro, everyone is reading either the same book or the same newspaper. They used to be a much more avid reader than we were, I don’t know about now). However, Gurgen Mahari's “Flowering Barbed Wire”, which was a much more innocent work, was not being published in our country, it was still banned.
In my impression, the party leadership of the Soviet Union was no longer homogeneous at all. There were already opposing movements inside, everyone had their own idea of the future of the Soviet Union. It was the same in the National Security Service, they saw the first signs of the destruction of the country, some were for it, some were against it, some wanted to get something new out of it, some said the beehive will collapse as soon as we mess with it.
There was a common thought. Many people said in Armenia that Perestroika does not extend beyond Ayrum station. In other words, it does not enter Armenia. It seemed to us that positive changes were taking place in the entire Soviet country - maybe there was some truth in it, or at least there were demonstrative signs. Let's say we thought that a TV program like “Vzglyad” could not have been televised in a Soviet country before - and we thought why doesn’t it reach Armenia, why is nothing changing? But they seemed to hit us on our trigger point: nothing else - no environmental movement, no social movement, could get a nationwide response like the Karabakh issue did.
Armenian writer Hovhannes Yeranyan published eight collections of prose: short stories, short novels, novels. He studied at the Department of Theater Studies of the Yerevan Institute of Fine Arts and Theater. The Karabakh movement, i.e. movement promoting independence of Armenia on USSR, began when he was continuing his education in Moscow. After a short time, he returned home to become a witness and participant of historical reality.
He also had a long professional career in print media. He worked in the republican press. Now he manages the cultural page of the weekly newspaper Yerkir. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, studies (literature, theater, etc.). In 1995, at the invitation of the Berlin “Literaturwerk” organization, he gave lectures in Germany on the topics of “War and literature” and “The role of culture in the prevention of wars.” His works have been translated into German, Russian, French, Persian. In November 2004, Yeranyan’s play “The Blind” (in Persian) was staged in Tehran. The same play was published in Tehran.
His book “Angels of the Apocalypse” was published recently.
