During the years of the Soviet Union, the village of Lernagog in Ararat used to bustle like a city.  It had been founded to provide a home for the workers of the local industrial enterprises and the few large pig farms nearby.

The villagers, naturally, did not own the land or pigs.  In that sense, nothing much has changed, except that the people of Lernagog are now working for the millionaires of our times.  But, in contrast to those years, they are now being brutally exploited, and barely making enough to eke out an existence.

Lernagog, 65 kilometers west of the capital, is one of the few villages in Armenia where no land was distributed among the villagers after independence, neither for farming, nor for rearing animals.

"The village has no land - rather, it's all rocky. Therefore, villagers cannot cultivate it or rear animals on their own," said deputy village head Argam Makaryan, "Moreover, in 1995, Lernagog was deprived of water, completely preventing the villagers from providing water to their animals or watering their land."

The residents of Lernagog have purchased water for years - 40 liters cost 150 drams. This year, the company Nor Akunk finally installed a new water pipeline in the village, with the help of a credit program through the German KFW bank.  Nevertheless, many of the residents of Lernagog continue to buy cisterns of water from Talin, saying, "This water tastes better."  Having irrigation water in the village continues to be a distant dream.

Lernagog was founded in 1977.  The residents settled here from different parts of Armenia, though most were from Talin.  They worked in the village in what was once the largest mill and fodder unit in the Caucasus, a filling unit, pig farms, steel and concrete units as well as asphalt and stonecutting units.  After the Soviet Union collapsed, all these factories shut down.

"People were simply deprived of their means of making a living.  The majority of the population was forced to leave - many went to Russia, while some went to their ancestral villages," noted Koryun Makaryan, principal of the Lernagog secondary school, "Some people did not leave, in order to raise their children here.  One-third of our school graduates are admitted to university without anybody else's help.  We have always had this impressive performance."

According to the principal, the main reason behind this was not that the school had very good teachers, but rather that the children had nothing else to do. "Unfortunately, most of those who get into university don't come back from the city," continued Makaryan and said that three of his four children remained in Yerevan and completing their university education, while the fourth was still a student.

The village had 4,500 residents in the early 1990s.  This figure has been halved since then.  The birth rate has declined even more sharply.  The school which once boasted 750 students now teaches only 234 children.

According to the principal, however, the emigration rate from the village has dropped in the past two or three years, while the birth rate has begun to rise.

"That is thanks to the new job opportunities.  The businessman Samvel Alexanyan reopened the mill.  Although it's not functioning at full capacity, it has still provided 80 people from our village with employment.  Besides that, some businessmen like Ernekyan, Yervand Zakharyan. and Heroyan [Of these, only Argentinian-Armenian Eduardo Ernekyan is a businessman - Yervand Zakharyan is the Mayor of Yerevan, while Albert Heroyan is the former governor of Armavir - A. D.] have bought huge plots of land in the neighboring villages and take 100-120 of our villagers by bus during the season to work there.  It's true, it is very hard work, but people even queue up to get those jobs, because they have no other way to make a living," explained Makaryan.

According to the people of Lernagog, the main thing that they can do in that area besides agricultural work is meloratsiya, or the clearing of rocks.

"Looking at that land, you wouldn't believe that it would be possible to clear it of rocks even using technological equipment.  But they pile the villagers into buses and use them instead of bulldozers to turn the land into parks," said Mkrtich Sukiasyan, a resident of Lernagog, "In that heat, they oversee them like slaves on a plantation, and make them work from 9 in the morning until the evening.  They only pay 2,000 drams a day.  And just let anyone try to complain about anything.  He'd be chucked aside in a second and be replaced by someone else."

Sukiasyan, who has third-degree disabled status, was a freedom fighter and fought in a suicide regiment.  He is unemployed today and supports his family on a pension of 27,000 drams.

"Everything that we need to buy during the month is clearly laid out.  If we bought even one thing extra, we would have to go hungry," he said.

The state of affairs is quite sad at the mill owned by MP Alexanyan as well.  Angela Hovhannisyan said that her son worked as a laborer at a factory from 9 am to 9 pm, for which he was paid only 55,000 drams a month.

"That's how things are now.  What can we do?" asked Hovhannisyan and added, "And we have to do what they say.  They force us to vote for their candidate from election to election.  If you don't obey, your relative will be fired and you'll be deprived even of the two bits that you have today."

"It's very difficult - there are no good jobs, and the rich don't have a conscience," said freedom fighter Sukiasyan and added, "It's wrong to deprive someone of their self-esteem this way.  It might have been better under foreign rule."

One should note that the Millennium Challenges Armenia program (MCA program) plans a new irrigation pipeline for Lernagog that should become reality in 2010.  There is a huge installation plan for water pipelines under the MCA for the whole Baghramyan area in general.  Here, the oligarchs of Armenia as well as current and former state officials have land covering more than 100 hectares, which they've bought from the villagers themselves.  Thus, the millions of dollars that will be invested on pipelines will actually have an indirect and much weaker influence on the lives of the villagers than expected.  Instead, it will actually boost the business of the rich even further.