Three Decades after the Armenian Earthquake, 20 Percent of Spitak Residents Still Live in Temporary Housing

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 10 – When a horrific earthquake hit Armenia in early December 1988 and claimed more than 25,000 lives, Moscow and the international community responded with a remarkable outpouring of assistance; but all too quickly, most turned away as this humanitarian disaster was eclipsed by the political developments of the next three years.

            Now, 31 years later, Gagik Saakyan, the mayor of Spitak says, 20 percent of the survivors in his city which came to symbolize earthquake the earthquake and its consequences, still live in temporary housing with few prospects that their situation or even that of their children will change anytime soon (forum-msk.org/material/news/16118843.html).

            In reporting his remarks, Anatoly Baranov of the pro-communist portal Forum-MSK, says that the amount of money Yerevan has budgeted for next year to help the recovery of those still suffering from the 1988 earthquake – 6.6 million US dollars – would not build a single apartment building in Moscow. It certainly won’t bring housing to the people of Spitak.

            Many still refer to the Armenian earthquake as the Spitak earthquake, not because it had the most victims – Gyumri did – or because it was at the epicenter – that “honor” belongs to the village of Nalband – but Spitak suffered more immediately obvious destruction than Gyumri but nonetheless had survivors. In Nalband, everyone was killed.

            The tragedy was so great that the world responded. Mikhail Gorbachev sent enormous sums from the Soviet budget and even asked the West for help, something no Soviet leader had done for almost half a century.  The world responded. For the history of that response, see Pierre Verluise’s Armenia in Crisis: The 1988 Earthquake (Detroit, 1995). 

            Moscow and the international community celebrated how much they did. But after only a few months, both looked away, distracted by other calamities and by the political developments in Armenia and its conflict with Azerbaijan that were shaking the USSR to its foundations and ultimately sending it to the dustbin of history.

            As a result, more than three decades after the earthquake, one in every five residents of Spitak live in temporary housing in a place where, as Baranov notes, the winters are very cold. And an entire generation has grown up in what might best be described as a refugee camp not far away from their homes but rather right next where their homes used to stand.