Recently, I had the opportunity to be present at a debate about education reform among workers at the Yerevan State University.  The occasion was the introduction of the credit system, the latest stage in the reforms.  The main argument was that "the Soviet education system was the best in the world and there was no reason to change it."

There are many facts that can be used to cast that argument in doubt.  After all, was the education system not a factor contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union?  Why do those who hold the fate of the education system in their hands - themselves products of that "best" Soviet system - not have their own ideas regarding reform and cannot produce anything but bad imitations of Western models?

Does Armenia today have the means to ensure an education of Soviet standards for free like it did then?  On the other hand, education systems do not remain the same anywhere in the world, they change, and one of the biggest manifestations of change in the whole world is the advancing commercialization of education, as seen through the credit system. Today, to speak of the Soviet educational system as being ideal means ignoring many other facts, including those radical changes being introduced in the system bringing with them an invasion of information and communication technology.

It is understandable that many things remain from the Soviet Union, both superficially and deep down, even if we do not see them.  (This is not just true for Armenia. Research has shown it is the case even for the "new Europeans" of the Baltic States).  What is worrying is the non-mediated attitude towards the recent past, the inability to accurately assess history, the failure to introduce fine lines and a gradation between the two times.  This would allow one to look at the present not as something totally new and different, but having established a relationship between these times and the past, allowing for a continuity of sorts.

Establishing trends and making decisions, making comparison and clarifying priorities in the face of globalization is only possible once the Soviet project of modernization is reassessed.  That is our past, which connects us in a way to the earlier stages in global transformation.  Such a dialogue with our Soviet past would also allow us to seriously think about rebuilding our Armenian identity and especially about the real possibility for Armenian identity politics.

The so-called "socialist environment", including socialist urban spaces have been emphasized by researchers as the postulate in Marxist theory that the material conditions of one's existence determine the interrelationships which form between people as well as between an individual and social consciousness.  This means that by changing the material conditions or creating new ones, one can create new individuals or form new an individual and collective consciousness.  This "environmental determinism" dictated the centrality of the socialization of space for creating a new society.

On the other hand, the fact that land was national property in socialist countries gave the authorities the chance to saturate spaces of all sorts with ideology - from homes and workplaces to public squares and streets.

How does the meaning of our surrounding environment change, what new significance is added, what is slowly wiped out, who is interested in those changes in meaning and who wants to preserve it, who is fighting for an alternative meaning and how…  There are three main dimensions in this process of change - the continuous Soviet and Soviet-Armenian as well as the opposing tendencies of the nationalization of space and commercialization.

During the first years of independence, a tendency to remove the unwanted traces of the Soviet past and the remnants of colonization was characteristic of the first stage in building a new state.  The renaming of squares, streets, buildings and other places was an attempt to reflect the historic past of the nation - in the form of our glorious ancestors and events - on the body of the city.  This was how the city's history had to change and nationalize the city itself.  The removal of Soviet statues was meant to dispute the durability of the ideas that they embodied.

The end of the 1990s was characterized by the desperate commercialization of urban space - firstly by the abundance of commercial billboards and then by the formation of an entertainment and leisure industry.  The rebuilding of material space in the city is continuing today in the form of the mass reconstruction in the city center.  Is this the continuing nationalization of the city in the guise of modernization or a new stage in commercialization? What are the forces pushing this widespread reconstruction ahead?  I am not going to attempt to answer these questions now.  Let me just note that, in this process, the historical dimension of the city's landscape is being diminished, because the pre-Soviet parts of the city are disappearing.  The reality of Yerevan being an old city is becoming pure rhetoric communicated in books or through guided tours and perhaps during festivals (such as Erebuni-Yerevan or the City's Festival).

The continuing work at changing the symbolism and significance associated with what was then Lenin Square and is now Republic Square hints at the difficulties that such a task entails.  Removing Lenin's statue and then the pedestal was just the beginning.  Putting something else in its place - a Christian cross and then a commercial billboard - was also a temporary solution.  We now know that the tender for a new statue did not attract any interesting proposals.  The organization of concerts and other leisure events as well as the renovation of the fountains at the square are a continuation of those attempts.  But the statues of Stepan Shahumyan and Alexander Miasnikyan are also on the same level, but have remained immune, but they can only serve to transform Yerevan into a truly Armenian city with a degree of reservation.

This in itself suggests the unavoidable significance of the Soviet experience.  When nationalism tries to avoid taking into account its Soviet past what results is similar to the writing etched under one of the newer statues in the city (Marshal Hovhannes Baghramyan's) - we are left to guess which country's and which army's marshal the honorable commander had been (one should note that the ability to guess will continually diminish as time passes).

Of course, Hovhannes Baghramyan is one of the few heroes decorating the streets of Armenia's capital.  Yerevan's urban spaces (streets, squares and statues) bear witness more to a cultural identity, rather than a national or political one.  The lack of political and national activists is tangible.  But the attempt to fill this void with this through Stepan Shahumyan, Admiral Isakov and others causes other problems and hints at hidden aspects.

The reconstruction of space and review of national values of the Soviet period was most obvious with the demolishing of one of the samples of modern Armenian architecture - the Youth Palace.  It seemed that that structure would always be a symbol of modern Yerevan and national progress, but it vanished, giving way to different sources of pressure.  The most important reason behind this was that it signified rather than embodied modern architecture and was more a symbol rather than a residential building with simple facilities. This is yet another fact that suggests the need for dialogue with the Soviet past.

Two structures looming over the city are in my sights for future study - Mother Armenia (along with Victory Park) and the monument to 50 years of Soviet Armenia (along with the whole territory of the Cascade).  Let me just note for now that these are two spaces which have had different fates.  The former remains mostly connected to the Soviet past, embodying the confused and unclear relationship of the present with that past.  The latter is a result of one of the clearest interventions to westernize Yerevan where Soviet monumentalism is "peacefully cohabiting" with elements of national architecture and samples of modern Western culture.