By Markar Melkonian 

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

--Charles Darwin

A commenter on a previous posting did not like the fact that yours truly - “someone who [he doubts] ever visited Soviet Armenia, let alone lived through the miserable years of Soviet rule” - would dare to suggest that for most of our compatriots life in Armenia was better thirty years ago than it is now.

This claim, it seems, is an example of what the commenter, felicitously, called “lunatic Marxist crap.” (The comment, dated June 14, was a response to my article “Women in Armenia Are Less Free Today than 30 Years Ago”, which appeared in Hetq on June 12, 2015)

With all of the free-market fairytales in the air, not to mention the racial theories of history and the nutty conspiracy theories, our commentator reserves his objection for “lunatic Marxist crap.” For a much larger dose of lunatic Marxist crap, he is invited to listen to the young people on the streets in Greece, Japan, and Ecuador or perhaps to pick up a devastating bestseller by Thomas Piketty. 

It might come as a surprise, moreover, to learn that none other than the U.S. State Department does its best to recruit Marxist analysts. The free-market fairytales might be useful when it comes to propaganda aimed at willfully ignorant people, but even policy planners in Washington D.C. know that every now and then they need a REALISTIC analysis of what’s going on.

After twenty-five years of capitalist rule, some of us still talk as if everybody agrees that Armenia is much better off today than it was thirty years ago. But public opinion surveys register a very different reality. 

A study by the Washington-based International Foundation for Election Systems in August 2000 concluded that “…a majority (54%) would prefer the ‘economic security we had in Soviet times’ over the freedoms of today.”  (Thomas Carson and Gevork Pogosian, “Public Attitudes toward Political Life:  Electoral Experience, Confidence in Leadership and Civic Participation in Armenia,” IFES, August, 2000.) The IFES cannot fairly be accused of pro-Soviet bias:  it is funded in part by USAID, the U.S. Dept. of Education, and the U.S. State Department.

According to the IFES report, “Many Armenians speak of the height of their position during the last days of the communist (sic.) system. They speak of these days as something taken from them. Many would reverse the vote for independence in the early 1990s if they could have foreseen their current position from that time.”  (IFES, p. 3)

A more recent Gallup survey in eleven former Soviet Republics, including Armenia and Russia, concludes that: “Overall, residents of these former Soviet republics are more than twice as likely to say the breakup hurt (51%) than benefited their countries (24%).” (“Former Soviet Countries See More Harm From Breakup:  Residents More than Twice as Likely to say Collapse Hurt Their Country,” Dec. 19, 2013.) 

Other surveys have registered similar results, even in such post-Soviet “success stories” as the Czech Republic and Poland.

More than a decade after John Paul II blessed the restoration of capitalism in Poland, for example, a public opinion survey in 2002 by the Public Opinion Research Centre found that 56% of Poles said their lives were “better” under the 1970s regime of Edward Gierek than they were twelve years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Since these opinions, as well as the IFES findings, were expressed years before the onset of the Great Recession, it is doubtful that the majority view has changed in the intervening years. 

Coming full circle, a more recent Pope this month described free market ideology as “the dung of the devil.” 

So what will it be, lunatic Marxist crap or the dung of the devil?

The point is not that these survey results are unknown or even that they are surprising. The point, rather, is that, DESPITE THESE FINDINGS, many Armenians, especially in the diaspora, continue to denigrate the genuine achievements of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic.

To listen to them, one would think that there is a solid consensus that capitalist rule has served the country better than the Soviet system.  It is as if the street-level perspective of ordinary Armenians counts for nothing compared to the slogans and catchphrases propagated by Radio Liberty.

But who are the majority respondents to these polls, and why is it that we so rarely hear from them? 

The Gallup report goes on to make a common claim:  “Older residents in all 11 countries whose safety nets, such as guaranteed pensions and free healthcare, largely disappeared when the union dissolved are more likely to say the breakup harmed their countries.”  There is statistical support for this common observation:  our older compatriots, it seems, have a disproportionately higher opinion of the Soviet years, and a correspondingly lower opinion of the years of capitalist rule. 

If this is right, then in Armenia and elsewhere, those who lived longest under the Soviet order are the most sympathetic to it. But these are the very respondents who are likely to be most familiar with the two alternative systems, and thus they would appear to be in the best position to compare them. 

Apologists for capitalist rule ignore the opinions of our compatriots, or they dismiss them as unimportant.  The rhetorical trick here is to wave the evidence away with the word “nostalgia.”  We are supposed to believe that our older compatriots, inexplicably, have a sentimental attachment to those “miserable years of Soviet rule.” 

Imagine that you spent years of your life fighting against Hitler’s invading Wehrmacht, and that well over 20 million of your compatriots died in this effort before you achieved victory, against all odds.  Imagine then that you worked for decades in the belief that you were building a country where your grandchildren and your great grandchildren would be safe, healthy, and educated; where workers would not have to be ashamed of being workers, and elderly people on fixed income could live out their days in dignity and honor. 

And then imagine that one day several of the privileged beneficiaries of the system you worked to build stride up the steps at Yerevan’s Opera Square and announce that all of your sacrifice, sweat, and hopes were worthless; that every value you stood for was a lie; that every friend you thought you had was an enemy, and every enemy was a friend.  Now, years later, reduced to a ward of foreign-sponsored soup kitchens, you watch as those who ruined your country describe your indignation as “nostalgia.” 

This is called adding insult to injury. 

The counter-revolutionaries with the bullhorns shouted and shamed their elders into silence, and shunted them away to die poor and voiceless.  Thanks in part to their efforts, Soviet Armenia is gone, and—unfortunately for most of us—it will never come back. 

And yet the counterrevolutionaries continue to malign Soviet Armenia.  Their target these days, it seems, are young people.  The whole point of the propagandists today is to make sure that young people never imagine that workers could rule in Armenia, instead of just capitalists.

But this only goes to show that at Nairit, on Baghramyan Avenue, and in hundreds other locales, the class struggle continues.

Here is a bit more lunatic Marxist crap to consider:  Thirty years ago, children did not pick through garbage dumps in Armenia; one-legged veterans were not begging at stop lights; families did not dig holes in the ground to live in, and Armenian prostitutes did not fill the brothels of Istanbul.  

And for now, one last item of lunatic Marxist crap: In 1989, the population of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic was 3.3 million, having almost quadrupled from 880,000 in 1926. This population increase took place despite the enormous loss of 300,000 Armenians in the war to defeat the Nazi iinvaders. Compare this to the post-Soviet record: thirty years ago Armenia had one million more inhabitantsthan it does today, and there were almost twice as many Armenians in the southern Caucasus as there are today. In 2005, United Nations experts predicted that Armenia’s population would drop by another half a million inhabitants by 2050. Let us hope that this forecast is inaccurate.

The apologists for capitalism have few achievements of their own to point to, and so they continue to denigrate the achievements of Soviet Armenia. But as it becomes clearer and clearer that Armenia’s return to capitalist rule has brought ruin to the majority, the propagandists must constantly ramp up the horror stories about the “miserable years of Soviet rule” and invent new crimes to foist on their Soviet predecessors.

Many of our compatriots, for example, still believe that Armenia’s terrible 1989 earthquake was deliberately triggered by a Soviet atomic bomb.  And then there are the tales about death tolls:  today we hear about “100 million victims of Communism,” but stay tuned:  if things get worse under capitalism in the coming years, we will be hearing about 200 million victims of Communism.  (The former President of the Republic of Cuba once wryly observed that the Soviet Union was the one unique state in human history that had no enemies, but only had victims.)  We have even been told that communists engineer famines and, naturally, “eat babies” (as the disgraced former Italian Prime Minister publicly claimed during an election cycle).

The worse life gets under capitalism, the wilder and more preposterous the horror stories get.  L.A. Times staff writer Annie Jacobsen informs us in her recent book Area 51:  An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base (2011) that in 1947 Joseph Stalin attempted to enlist Nazi physician Joseph Mengele in a sinister plot to produce a race of “grotesquely deformed” miniaturized pilots to terrorize America by flying around in UFO’s. (In a May 15, 2011 review of the book, Janet Maslin wrote that it “is noteworthy for its author’s dogged devotion to her research.”) So now we can add the flying saucer crew of Area 51 to the growing list of “victims of communism.” 

Radio Liberty programmers must make sure that a generation raised under capitalist domination will not be able to measure the depth that Armenia has fallen in the past quarter-century, and will not be able to imagine a fundamentally different alternative. 

This observation goes a long way to explain why there is plenty of lunatic ANTI-Marxist crap to go around.

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).