“I'm not crying because I want you to feel sorry for me. I'm crying for my life,” 43-year-old Gegham Petrosyan said in tears.

He lives near the “hobo market” in a house made of pieces of tin (if it can be called a house).

His hearing is poor. He prepares a solution from various substances according to folk medicine, he says, heats it on the fire, and pours it into his ears. He said that he went to the doctor several years ago but as he was homeless, they didn't help him.

As Gegham from Artashat tells his story, he sold his house back during Soviet times and left forRussia. But he returned to his homeland soon after, due to certain circumstances, and lived inYerevanin a rented house.

“I married a girl five years older than me from Stepanakert several months later. I had a son one year after that. My wife worked in a dairy plant. We were to get apartment in the Davitashen district: I had paid a 3,000-ruble bribe. But theSoviet Unioncollapsed and I lost everything,” Gegham recalled.

“We lived in a basement in the Tokhmakh district for 11 years. One day I came home and there was nobody there. My wife's family had come and taken her and my child away,” he recounted, adding that he had made several unsuccessful attempts to rejoin the family.

 “I am a forgotten man, a man of a dark, sorrowful, lost, and lonely life,” Gegham said, blaming Gorbachev, “who eliminated the Soviet Union,” for everything.

“I was a human being in the Soviet state and I am the anti-human being of this state. This state destroyed 17 years of my life, it deprived me of health and family, destroyed my brilliant plans,” he said and stressed that he will leaveArmeniaat any price.

“If a man locks up himself in the same hole for many years when the sun rises, goes out at night to garbage and then from garbage back to his hole, it means that the man has reached the final stage of his degradation, does it not?” Gegham said. “This state turned me into a weapon to eliminate myself.”