By Markar Melkonian 

Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Mikhail Gorbachev are to be thanked for bringing freedom to the former “Captive Nations.”Armenians now live in an era of post-Soviet freedom. 

Or do we?   Well, it all depends on who “we” are—and on what one means by freedom.  If, as the song says, “freedom is just another word for nothing less to lose,” then the ruling oligarchs are NOT free—they have grabbed up a lot, and so they have a LOT to lose.  But most Armenians have considerably less to lose than they had twenty-five years ago:  thanks to the efforts of Armenia’s anti-communist heroes, the population has been impoverished, disenfranchised, demoralized, and diminished by at least one million inhabitants.  Thus, by the “nothing-less-to-lose” definition, most Armenians are indeed freer today than they were in the bad old days of the Soviet Union. 

But there are other definitions of freedom.  The influential American pragmatist thinker John Dewey defined liberty as “the effective power to do specific things.”  Taking this definition in hand, what are we to say about freedom in post-Soviet Armenia?

Thanks to the efforts of our anti-communist heroes over the past twenty-five years, theconditions, status, and life prospects of women in Armenia has plummeted from deplorable to abominable.Overall unemployment rates have soared, but it has impacted women especially severely.  Cutbacks in state-subsidized health services have translated into a lack of access to prenatal care and contraception, higher rates of infant mortality, and shorter life expectancies for both sexes.Women and children have born the burden of the dismantlement of public schools, clinics, health education, childcare programs, and the social safety net.The number of women in the most prestigious professions has plummeted, and teachers’ salaries are dismal.  Birth rates and marriage rates have declined, abortion rates have soared, spousal abandonment has reached epidemic proportions, prostitution has grown into an export industry, and prenatal sex selection has skewed the demographics of the country.  In the years after the destruction of Soviet Armenia, suicide rates across the population rose dramatically, but suicide numbers for women exploded to almost three times those for males.

A quick online search will abundantly confirm these sad developments.  (Example:  Hetq recently reported that, in its 16^th annual report, The State of the World’s Mothers, the international NGO Save the Children used the latest data on women’s health, children’s health, educational attainment, economic well-being, and female participation, to rank 179 countries, showing where mothers and children fare best and where they face the greatest hardships.  The report ranked the Republic of Azerbaijan in 90^th place, and Armenia 103^rd.)  A further search will also confirm that these trends have appeared everywhere in the former Warsaw Pact countries and far beyond, from Prague to Kabul. 

Writing in 1919, the revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin noted, with reference to Russia, that:

In the course of two years, Soviet power in one of the most backward countries of Europe did more to emancipate women and to make their status equal to that of the “strong” sex than all the advanced, enlightened, “democratic” republics of the world did in the course of 130 years.

Lenin was right. Soviet power in Armenia, as in Russia, brought with it immediate and dramatic improvements in the status, security, and life prospects of women and girls. The women of Soviet Armenia had the right to vote two years before the women of the United States did.  In a country decimated by war, starvation, economic embargo, and foreign military invasion, Soviet Armenia somehow was able to secure the borders, feed the people, educate women, and promote them to the highest offices. Although later conservative Soviet leaders turned back many of the early revolutionary gains, ordinary women and girls in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic enjoyed much greater security, social status, and legal protections than they do today. 

Take for instance political representation. In 1985, 344 of the 975 deputies elected to the Supreme Soviet of the ASSR—that is to say, 35%--were women.  That year the total All-Union figure of those elected to local Soviets was 2,304,703, with men comprising 49.7 %.  In other words, the majority of elected deputies in the Soviet Union were women.  But those were the bad old days, the days of “unfreedom.”  As soon as the anti-communists dealt the last blow to Soviet power in Armenia and the new National Assembly was elected in 1991, the number of female parliamentarians dropped to eight.  As a result of the May 1999 elections, that number decreased to four—some 3.6% of the members of the National Assembly.  (Women Status Report, Impact of Transition, UN Armenia, 1999, a report by the Women’s Republican Council, cite by Victoria Khurshudyan, Women and Politics:  Full Citizenship and Representation:  Is this a Myth?  Unpublished paper from:  Intersecting Social and Political Changes in Russia and the NIS, Conference in Omsk, Russia, April 10-12, 2003, p. 8.)

If women are denied even formal representation in the national legislature; if they are denied even minimal legal protections against domestic abuse; if life options for women are systematically thwarted; if their social status has been diminished; if their effective power to walk down the street without being assaulted is abridged by the impunity of misogynists—then it would seem that “freedom” is reserved for males, not women and girls.

Some of Armenia’s anti-communists like to tell fairy tales about ancient queens and goddesses, and they love to pitch sentimental piffle about mothers as the Keepers of the Hearth. But those who propagate the myth of post-Soviet freedom thereby demonstrate that in their minds the well being of Armenian women and girls does not count for much at all.The notion of post-Soviet freedom is, among other things, a male supremacist notion. 

Immediately after a gang of drunken men tore down the statue of Lenin in Yerevan, their leaders stripped Armenian women of their “effective power to do specific things,” and pushed half of Armenia’s population into darkness. Armenian anti-communists impoverished a previously well-off country; they set the stage for the decimation of the countryside and the villages; they created the economic conditions that led to abandonment of families and the land, and they embraced an ideology of rampant consumerism and “free enterprise” that turned mothers into procurers and daughters into “entrepreneurs” ready to rent their bodies to any man with the money. From Yerevan to Qandahar and the rape camps of Bosnia, the anti-communist cause has been the cause of unbridled misogyny. 

Since women and girls constitute half of the population of Armenia, and since the impoverished majority of ordinary men, too, have gained precious little in the way of any sort of freedom that makes any sort of difference to ordinary residents, Armenia is less free today than it was thirty years ago. We have Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, and “our own” anti-communists to thank for this.

Markar Melkonian is a philosophy instructor and an author.  His books include Richard Rorty’s Politics:  Liberalism at the End of the American Century (1999), Marxism: A Post-Cold War Primer (Westview Press, 1996), and My Brother’s Road (2005).