Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 30 – Armenia now is
like Vichy France in the early 1940s, Tigran Khzmalyan says, “an occupied
country” governed by collaborators in the service of those who seized it, “without
allies and almost without hope for assistance and with a still weak Resistance
Movement.”
The Yerevan analyst says that “without
these historical parallels, it is difficult from the outside to understand the
mechanism and causes of the total control the Putin regime has over the
marionette government of Yerevan,” one installed by Moscow after the shootings
in parliament and just days before Putin came to power (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5904BA86F4034).
Indeed, he argues on the basis of a
close examination of recent events, “nowhere beyond the border of Russia has
the total control over all aspects of life and the destructive influence of the
Chekist special services on the state and society been manifested to such great
extent as in Armenia.”
And Khzmalyan concludes with a
warning to the West: “If Europe wants to learn how the victory of Putinism
threatens it, it need not look at Russia which after all as is well known ‘can’t
be understood by the mind.’ It is quite sufficient to look at Armenia – or on
what still remains of it.”
To make his case, the Yerevan
analyst provides evidence to show that “Armenia was an remains the testing
ground for the Russian special services’ most sophisticated political
technologies” and that many Armenians have gone along because of Moscow’s
promotion of their fears about national survival.
A major reason that Moscow has
succeeded is that Western scholars and governments rarely pay much attention to
what has occurred in Armenia over the last 25 years and often have accepted
Moscow’s claims that the Armenians have agreed to sacrifice themselves on “the
altar of Putin’s restoration of the Soviet empire” because they have no other
choice.
Neither Western observers nor many
Armenians have paid attention to the fact that Russia has a bad track record as
far as the mass murder of Armenians is concerned. Moscow did little or nothing
to prevent the Sumgait murders in 1988, and tsarist Russia even opened the way
for the genocide in 1915 by pulling its own army back and allowing Turkey free
rein.
Indeed, Khzmalyan says, the Russian
Empire acted in much the same way during World War I in Turkey as the USSR did
in World War II in Poland “when the Red Army for weeks stopped” short of the
Polish capital and thus did not prevent the mass murder of Poles in Warsaw by
German forces.
Armenia’s intelligence
service is “completely subordinate to Russia’s FSB,” he writes, as shown by the
recent case when Yerevan provided documentation for wealthy Russians close to
the Kremlin so that they could get into Europe despite personal sanctions
against them. That wouldn’t have happened except at Moscow’s order or Yerevan’s
anticipation of such an order.
That incident is horrific enough,
but it doesn’t exhaust the ways in which Moscow and the FSB are exploiting
their control of Yerevan.
On the one
hand, Khzmalyan writes, this arrangement allows Moscow via Yerevan to penetrate
Western organizations in Armenia, all of whose staff require “the sanction of
Russian-Armenian special services.
And on the other, Moscow is
quite pleased to use its Armenian front to penetrate the West with people who
supposedly are “independent” of Russia and Putinism but who in fact are totally
controlled by them and who can be deployed as Moscow wants “against the West”
in various ways.
Khzmalyan argues that “nowhere
in world history can one find another example of such clever and false
propaganda as a result of which the Bolsheviks and Chekists have succeeded in
fixing in the heads of the Armenian people a feeling of fear mixed with
gratitude by the victims to the executioner.”
This propaganda is the public face of “a
cynical tactic” which “works today,” as can be seen by the responses of
Armenians to the threats Russian politicians continue to make concerning their
country, attacks “from Zhirinovsky and Dugin to Rogozin and Markov,” the
Yerevan analyst says.
Moscow continues to provide
arms to Azerbaijan even as it promotes itself as the defender of Armenia, and
that is “why Armenian society is so paralyzed and helpless” now, a development
that would have seemed inconceivable to those who “recall the democratic
uprising of 1988-1991 and the presence of an influential diaspora in the West.”
