Материал: Payaslian S., The History of Armenia From the Origins to the Present

fundamental democratic restructuring and for a favorable resolution of the Karabagh conflict, in April 1990 Harutyunyan resigned from his post. The parliamentary elections of that year rejected—for the first time since the Bolshevik seizure of power seventy years earlier—a Communist candidate, Vladimir Movsesyan, and ended Communist rule. Instead, the ANM and the coalition it led emerged as the majority, electing Levon Ter Petrosyan as president of the Soviet Armenian Supreme Soviet, with Vazgen Manukyan as his prime minister. The election results encouraged wider opposition to the Soviet regime. In August the new government, led by Ter Petrosyan, announced its intention to secede from the Soviet Union and began to introduce political and economic liberalization reforms.102

The conflict in Karabagh had by now escalated into a war. Armenian soldiers initially faced overwhelming opposition from combined Russian and Azerbaijani forces, but the attempted coup by the so-called Emergency Committee against Gorbachev in Moscow in August 1991 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet military enabled the Armenian troops to gain strategic advantages on the battlefield. Further, in the absence of a powerful force both sides acted as independent, sovereign states. According to a Helsinki Watch report, during the spring and summer of 1991 in order to establish “law and order,” Azerbaijani Special Function Militia Troops (OMON) with the support of Soviet Army troops introduced a “passport regime” and “arms check regime” known as Operation Ring throughout the Armenian villages in southern Karabagh and the districts of Khanlar and Shahumyan to the north. The OMON arrested hundreds of Armenian men, deported thousands, and emptied more than twenty villages. Helsinki Watch reported that the operation was “carried out with an unprecedented degree of violence and a systematic violation of human rights.”103

Meanwhile, in response to the waves of opposition to Russian rule, Russian nationalism, long thought to have disappeared in the Soviet Union along with nationalism in the other republics reemerged with a vengeance, as manifested in the antinationalities rhetoric. Russian nationalists demonstrated in the streets of Moscow and other cities demanding the reinstitution of the Russian tsardom of the invincible old Mother Russia to stem the tide of anti-Russian movements spreading across the Soviet Union.104

Events in Moscow pressed Armenia and the other Soviet republics to formalize their independence, although the question of sovereignty was not resolved until the second half of 1991. Although the August coup failed, it nevertheless signaled the demise of the Soviet Union and rendered all efforts by Gorbachev to save the union irrelevant. In the meantime, the Supreme Soviet in Erevan authorized a public referendum on the

independence of the republic. In September 1991 an overwhelming majority of Armenians with a great sense of optimism voted for independence from the Soviet Union, and the new parliament declared Armenia a sovereign and independent state. In October, having won the presidency with 83 percent of the popular vote, Ter Petrosyan, of the Armenian National Movement, was elected as the first president of the newly independent Republic of Armenia. By late December, as more republics declared independence, the Soviet regime, which had ruled Armenia for seven decades but was now rent beyond repair, finally collapsed.105 In December 1991 the official Rossiiskaia gazeta (Russian newspaper) of the Russian parliament declared: “The former union is no more. And much more important, no one needs it.”106 Lenin’s statue in the main square named after him at the heart of Erevan was toppled and the headless statue was removed to the courtyard of the National Gallery. The square was renamed the Republic Square. In December, the Belovezhsk accords, initiated by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and subsequently joined by most of the constituent republics, established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as the successor to the Soviet Union and confirmed their status as independent states, thereby nullifying the 1922 treaty that had legally formed the Soviet Union.

Armenian nationalist, secessionist groups that had remained peripheral rapidly gained in popularity by the late 1980s as economic mismanagement and the government’s failure to address the crisis unleashed by the earthquake in December 1988, combined with the bloodshed in Karabagh, heightened Armenians’ sense of physical insecurity. The tensions between the Soviet ideology of proletarian culture and the national political, economic, and cultural realities could not have been more obvious. For Armenians, the earthquake in December 1988 symbolized the disintegration of the Soviet Union. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the Armenian communities were deeply divided because of the memory of the bloodshed during the Bolshevik seizure of power in Erevan, the Stalinist legacy, and the Cold War ideological conflicts. Yet, with rare exceptions, the new generations of Armenians born in the diaspora were unfamiliar with the culture left behind in the land of their forebears in historic Armenia. Would the independence that the Republic of Armenia regained revive Armenian culture in diasporan communities? Would the republic itself become an economically and culturally vibrant society?

military conflict in Karabagh further exacerbated the situation. President Levon Ter Petrosyan sought to enlist the support of the diasporan communities to ameliorate the conditions, but widespread corruption, poverty, unemployment, and irreconcilable disagreements on foreign policy (e.g., Karabagh) undermined the legitimacy of the government and led to his resignation in 1998. The government of Robert Kocharyan, the second president since independence, hoped to develop a more balanced approach to domestic and foreign policy issues, particularly in relations with the diaspora. By 2000, conditions appeared to be improving somewhat, albeit slowly. The Soviet regime had failed to develop democratic institutions even decades after Stalin’s death, but Armenians were determined to create and cultivate them in the new atmosphere of long-awaited freedom and heretofore untapped potentials and opportunities.

THE TER PETROSYAN GOVERNMENT

The collapse of the highly centralized regime and the transition to independence required the institutionalization of democracy and therefore a complete rearrangement of the political structure and a metamorphosis of political culture. The newly independent state faced enormous challenges in nearly all aspects of political economy. Expectations for a system based on principles of political and market liberalization could not be disengaged from the geopolitical and economic realities on the ground as inherited from the Soviets; moreover, the new republic was mired in the military crisis in neighboring Karabagh.

The task of institution building required a viable constitution, which was adopted by a national referendum in July 1995. The newly independent government, emulating the western tradition, established three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judiciary. Within the executive branch, the presidency represents the chief of state while the prime minister is head of government. The president is elected by popular vote for a five-year term. He appoints the prime minister, who in turn appoints the members of the cabinet, the Council of Ministers. The legislative branch, the National Assembly, or Azgayin Zhoghov, is unicameral, consisting of 131 members elected by popular vote for four-year terms. The judicial system is headed by the Constitutional Court composed of nine members. The presidency, as developed under Ter Petrosyan since 1991, emerged as the most powerful office. The National Assembly has oscillated between loyalty to the president and paralysis because of internal factional divisions and has failed to institutionalize effective means to check and balance presidential authority. The Constitutional Court has thus far failed to gain

independence from political leaders and politics; as a result, it has lacked a sufficient degree of credibility and legitimacy necessary for a democratic society.

In forming his new government, President Ter Petrosyan sought to establish close relations with the large diasporan communities, especially those in the United States, and invited a number of diasporan Armenians to serve in ministerial posts and as close advisers. These included: Raffi K. Hovannisian, the first minister of foreign affairs of the post-Soviet republic; Sebouh Tashjian, minister of energy; Vardan Oskanian, deputy minister of foreign affairs and later minister of foreign affairs; Gerard J. Libaridian, senior adviser to the president and secretary of the Security Council and later deputy minister of foreign affairs; and Matthew Der Manuelian, chief of the North American diplomatic desk.1 Despite the difficult conditions in the republic, the entire nation at home and across the diaspora was ready to serve the homeland, to give concrete shape to its dedication to the imagined independent republic that it had yearned for, from a far, for decades, to transform long-held aspirations into realities. The first term of the Ter Petrosyan government had begun with exhilarating energy, albeit in the midst of crises.

The economic situation was the first issue that the new government had to address, and the problems proved particularly pernicious. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the debates on economic policy centered on alternatives between “shock therapy” and “gradualism” in the transition from the Communist system to free market economy. The Ter Petrosyan government sought to balance the two approaches. As a constituent member of the empire, Armenia had been a part of the Soviet interdependent budgetary, manufacturing, and trade networks. The disintegration of these relations forced the republic to face the daunting task of becoming competitive in international trade and to secure foreign investments, at a time when Turkey and Azerbaijan had imposed an economic blockade on the country. The lack of natural resources and a large domestic market, combined with a general sense of political and economic insecurity, discouraged foreign investments.

The nation’s economy was extraordinarily distressful during the first three years after independence. Observers warned that it faced the danger of sliding into a depression. In fact, Armenia’s economy experienced a financial meltdown. The nation’s industrial output dropped by nearly 64 percent between 1988 and 1993, while gross domestic product (GDP) declined by 50 percent and energy production by 60 percent. In the meantime, hyperinflation as a result of price liberalization sharply increased prices more than thirteen times between 1991 and 1993, and they continued to increase for the rest of the decade. The excise tax of 25 percent on imported oil further contributed to the inflationary pressures. The economic