The 2014 Sochi Oympics in Russia are due to start just a week from this Friday. Yet, when I was in Yerevan recently, I was somewhat surprised to see a total absence of discussion on the upcoming games. After all, Yerevan is located only 500 miles away from Sochi. Would not the Armenians stand to…
On the last day of 2013, I would like to raise my glass to a few groups of people, comrades sans arms, who cross the borders of the South Caucasus to facilitate an invaluable, irreplaceable process: peace dialogue. Open dialogue, built of open minds, is essential to any peace process; after the peace process —…
The Hoover Institution at Stanford University, founded in 1959 on Herbert Hoover’s ideas on American government and enterprise, is a remarkable resource for giddy scholars everywhere. Besides enabling research in the social sciences, the Institution also has a rich archive, the gem of which (to me!) is a collection of more than one hundred thousand…
“Heavy Metal Motherland.” Historian Nina Tumarkin coined this term in The Living and the Dead to describe the woman-as-nation statues that rose across Soviet republics during and after World War II. Best known and often recalled are Kiev’s “Mother Motherland” (1981) and Volgograd’s “Motherland Calls” (1967), two gargantuan figures crowning memorial centers to the Great…
by Sergey Sargsyan Well, this is my first article here and I’m very excited as I write about geopolitics – a word that I have learned at a relatively late age, so please don’t judge too harshly. The focus of my piece will be the ongoing tug-of-war between Russia and the European Union over the…
40 years ago today in 1973, history was made in Armenian soccer/football. On that day, in the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, the Armenian football team Ararat smashed one of the strongest teams in the entire USSR – Dynamo Kiev from Ukraine. Levon Ishtoyan kicked two goals and Armenia won the Soviet Cup 2:1. The monumental…
“Making people laugh, even if it’s just a little, is a psychological need for comedians. I seek to satisfy this need.” When speaking about civil society, it is important to mention the people who help forge this environment in Armenia today. One such individual is Sergey Sargsyan, co-host of the ArmComedy Project (the Armenian version of…
Within the past year, I have come across several Soviet Armenian political posters online. They seem unique and possess a sort of style all their own, reflecting the distinct culture and atmosphere of Armenia and the region in agitprop art. These are fascinating pieces of history that shed light on life inside the Soviet Armenian…
Here’s an interesting piece of Soviet Armenian history from my personal archive: an official NEP-era map of the Armenian SSR (then part of the Transcaucasian SFSR) from 1924, as printed on a Soviet-produced postcard: Some notes: 1) In this map, the Armenian SSR is comprised of nine raioni (or districts), some of which are so…
The Abovyan Group (Աբովյան խումբ) 