Armenia’s security and territorial integrity have recently become part and parcel of any discussion about this country’s future. The security of Armenia is defined mainly in terms of military force, and of inviolability of its borders. Yet there is a large internal dimension of security that the general public in Armenia tends to either downplay or forget altogether.
Text: Tigran Zakaryan
Picture: Vasya Lozhkin
Quite recently at the CIS summit in Kyrgyzstan it was announced that Russia has shared its list of “foreign agents” with its partners in the organization. This can be translated as an urge from the Kremlin or even an open demand that those countries follow the Russian lead in suppressing organizations that might be financed by the West and hence theoretically pose a threat to the regimes in those countries.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in an interview just weeks ago, prior to the summit harshly criticized NGO’s promoting “anti-Russian sentiment” in Armenia. In order to understand the less evident part of Lavrov’s remark we need to keep in mind the whole mindset of the Kremlin.
In the ideology articulated by Russia's top leaders and propagated by their henchmen, there are no independent actors in global politics apart from major powers. Apparently, in their opinion, societies in all the countries of the world are manipulated either by their own government if it's strong enough, or by external players.
Such an ideology is highly antipodal to the very idea of Armenia’s independence. Its natural inference is that Armenia’s independence is not only chimerical for the tme being but also impossible in the future and the country is doomed to live under some major power’s shadow, serving the interests of its master.
Sadly enough, this idea is not at all alien to even those who otherwise claim to be staunch supporters of Armenian independence and rhetorically very critical of Russian policies in the region.
Meanwhile we see constantly that currently the Kremlin has a very aggressive attitude towards the independence of former Soviet republics with the propaganda by the state-controlled media is at times outright hostile towards those states. Armenia is no exception. We are well accustomed to the racial hatred propagated by Azerbaijani and to a much lower extent Turkish media, however the Russian propaganda is much more subtle. It is in many cases led by ethnic Armenians while in fact being directed against Armenia’s vital interests. This is indeed a very dangerous sort of propaganda and we need to be clearly aware that the absence of ethnic hatred does not make such kind of discourse less hostile. On the contrary, it can be more subversive because if racial hatred can provoke a mirroring hatred or simply aversion towards it, the anti-statehood propaganda, which may appear as fact-based, “balanced” and dwelling on a solid worldview (already set by the previous waves of propaganda), is in fact utterly disruptive.
It is high time the Armenian authorities back their words with deeds. A month ago the Armenian Prime Minister mentioned a “hybrid war” waged against Armenian statehood. We need this to put it clearly: we accept the challenge (in fact we have to) and we act accordingly. Under these conditions, continuing to freely air Russian propaganda TV programs and pursuing projects that promote Moscow’s interests in Armenia at the expense of Armenian interests is unacceptable and cannot be tolerated by any independent state. We have to be clear that the Kremlin’s policies do not equal the Russian people, thousands of whom have settled in Armenia since February 2022. Russian culture and language are well represented in Armenia and a recent survey proved that point, showing that the percentage of Russian language teachers as a foreign tongue in the Armenian education system is the highest among the former Soviet republics). Those who speak about imagined “anti-Russian” agendas in fact have anti-Kremlin agendas in mind, and this is a fundamental distortion of facts. We can be sure that such manipulations will continue and will intensify if Armenia continues its way toward more independence.
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