— The pages of our people’s history continue to fill with facts recording fate’s bitter irony. Again we stand on the road to Golgotha… No, we shall not be crucified; despite Judas, despite the malice and betrayal shaking the world’s foundations, we shall live and enjoy the sweet fruits of our just struggle.
The anxieties that have lately seized us often compel us all to converse, speak, say what for years we wished but were unable to express aloud.
And now it is your turn, Mr Matevossian. What are you thinking about these days?
— I shall begin a little deeper, because examining today’s situation requires it.
That offensive which circumstances brought from the Afghan side, when through the lure of inner Turkey the dark Russian force was invited south towards warm seas—it is quite possible that the offensive against poor Persia came in Islam’s hungry times, in its irritable and aggressive condition, when Islam seemed to want a counterblow, and that counterblow had to come from the East’s only living force, the Soviet Union. It seems to me they struck from Afghanistan to sever China’s connection with the Arab world; they had tempted them by saying it was only a matter of five days: from Afghanistan we shall go down south of the Caspian to Persia, and that is all.
Whether Persia won or lost, in any case the result was to be very advantageous to Azerbaijan’s leaders. The two Azerbaijans would unite, the borders disappear. That is how it is. A revealed desire. The facts betray themselves. Their Chingiz Huseynov spreads that idea in artistic form; their Moscow figures betray it in remarks; in the Turkish shepherd it manifests differently. It is simply the policy of Azerbaijan’s cherished statehood, which pervades all their cells, from shepherd to highest leaders.
Now that border has broken down. I do not think they will build it again. They will go on cherishing peaceful travel back and forth, the joining of economies: Azerbaijan must live united, but at whose expense? Frankly, it is something worthy of respect. Ultimately, what is called a border is dreadful. It is truly immoral. There is something good in dismantling it, if we are not excluded. We are excluded! And in the effort to save ourselves we may find ourselves in the military ranks of the most reactionary circles, demanding the border’s restoration. The heaviest forces here will be Russian chauvinism and bourgeois chauvinism. This may sound ridiculous: look at that poor Turkmen, their rotten, dried-up Aral, the canal drawn from the Amu Darya that caused the wretched ecological condition, the advertised Uzbek poverty, and still chauvinism? But chauvinism is not the monopoly of halls lit by crystal chandeliers, of generals and court ladies. It can possess the humblest shepherd too, who will gain nothing but can become such a unit. Those two chauvinisms exist. One is directly opposed to us by history and has eternally repelled us; speaking of alliance, negotiation or dialogue is unnecessary. Since that is so, our traditional friend remains beside us. They have not killed us in Russia. Always, in the hardest times, it has been a refuge for us. Of course, those who went disappeared, especially under socialism. Before that, over two or three centuries, assimilation barely wore at the community’s edges. Now, in these conditions of civilisation and dispossession, when you cannot initiate your own salvation, protect yourself and your child, there is accelerated assimilation. They have not killed us. Precisely considering this great difference, we may find ourselves in the world’s most reactionary military camp, and that would be a dreadful condition. We live in a world of terrible contradictions. On one side of the globe life flourishes under tolerance and civilisation, while we remain in the Middle Ages; the knife is still the main character, we are still slaves to plunder, robbery, murder, bloodshed and poverty. Two years ago I was reading Chamchian, and everything seemed a nightmare. I thought I did not understand his Classical Armenian well, thought the darkness arose from my imperfect understanding, did not believe it would be like this. Once with my father I said with irresponsible optimism, “War is so far away, Father.” He lay ill; he growled, groaned: “It’s war, war, man, war.” He said it with the profound wisdom of a peasant. He read no newspapers, watched no television, and even if he had, knew no Russian. He sensed today’s anxieties of the world from another, quite different place. Perhaps one year a neighbour took the mower without payment and went mowing, then this year saw he was old, could not even mow for himself, and thought: then what do you need a mower for? Malice rose within him: die, then, you no longer need a cow at your door, a smoking hearth, to exist. In that small act, that attitude, Father could see that we wished one another harm, and war had begun.
I am very sorry that our days’ difficulties, this unbearable condition, have fallen upon the shoulders of today’s fragile urban café youth. This should have happened ten or fifteen years ago, in my generation’s time, a more resilient generation that went on foot and could break through the mountains. Now, I repeat, the young have shouldered that burden, behind us in knowledge and ahead of us in aggression. In this case we cannot cherish hopes of victory. What victory is there in madness?
— Forgive me, but I cannot share your opinion here. Is it not that very café youth you speak of who have willingly become modern-day fedayis, climbed the mountains today to protect their unarmed native people, repel the pack of sacrilegious fanatics howling beneath the crescent flag?
— True, I spoke of experience. I would have wished it to fall upon my resilient generation, because alongside that readiness shown today one needs endurance, experience and patience. We would have been capable and resilient, like a hardened, beaten village horse.
— Perhaps the elders are to blame that today’s young grew up in such fragile skin, as you say, did not learn to anticipate difficulties and find real ways to face them. Perhaps we truly did not raise them properly?
— That phrase devised by the Russians’ government we repeat each time like parrots: we have not educated them, have not done this or that. But the fact is that absolutely nothing was in our hands. After the November revolution initiative was taken from people’s hands, the totalitarian system took everything into its own. Under socialist orthodoxy, what education can be spoken of? Wrong, not wrong… Of course they were badly educated, as badly as the first Christians treated ancient culture savagely and supposedly forged a new human being on faith’s anvil, narrow-minded, obsessed, religiously crazed. Our grandfathers’ generation had those religious fanatics too, who consumed all our intellectual capacity in 1937. The remaining unthinking but moral mass, the peasantry, that splendid people tempered through centuries who shouldered the war, twenty-eight and a half million, they took away and devoured. The purest people, a people creating oxen, strength and bread, taken away, while the war’s victory was attributed to military leaders, Stalin, Zhukov and whoever else, when in reality the war’s hero was the country’s resources.
During the war the Armenian people lost as many lives as the United States on the European front: three hundred and fifty thousand. The whole mass was sent to be crushed, to stop the tanks’ mouths. Of a people of two million, three hundred and fifty thousand were taken away and slaughtered. If I do not say taken away, what shall I say? America of two hundred million suffered as many casualties as my small people of two million.
For a long time my eastern mind could not accommodate that expression in Reagan’s speech on Roosevelt’s hundredth birthday, that war is too serious a matter to leave to military men. And here is his judgement of Roosevelt: “Thanks to his efforts, millions of lives were saved in the enemy’s army and ours.” Among us, those who killed a great many enemies have been made heroes.
Whatever the case, my race, my nation, which has suffered so many deprivations, has passed the test of living both in Armenia and abroad, in a country of high civilisation, creating around itself an environment of humanism, respect, kindness and prosperous living. And today’s ruined Armenia must also become precisely such a country. The foundations exist.
— Mr Matevossian, lately in Azerbaijan the cynicism not only of the Popular Front but also of the intelligentsia, if one may call the “educated” mob that, has reached its peak. The red colour of Christian blood has filled even the neighbouring republic’s “leading” stratum, writers and artists, with a craving for the bullfight; they use every platform and the television screen to drive their people to the basest acts of savagery against Armenians.
Yes, every writer carries and expresses his nation’s high morality and ideas. Thus it would be pointless and naive to be surprised at such manifestations. Nevertheless, as a writer, how do you perceive the behaviour of your fellow writers, a thousand apologies? What is your position in such a situation?
— I have studied Kemal’s activities and biography, and can say one thing with certainty: the secret of his stature is his being a nationalist in the purest form. Turkish nationalism has not collapsed; through the consistent, from their own standpoint “wise and intelligent,” policy of the sultan and Turkish statesmen, they have done the same thing: excluded Armenian statehood within the Ottoman Empire’s borders. Azerbaijani intellectual leaders, as faithful heirs, easily began from the very first days to be guided by Kemal Atatürk’s propositions on the country’s indivisibility, excluding the other element, and so on. They knew: it was tested in history, no one would stand up for the victims. With that same “wonderful,” “brilliant,” “successful” script in hand they came from then and continue so. It is something to weep over, of course, but also ridiculous: as an advance of thought, its triumph, this is plagiarism, taken from there.
They use platforms… It is complete immorality: cursing in your own house, before your children and grandchildren. You speak—to whom? At least say it from a helicopter, from a height over the whole Caucasus, so that your words, your curses, fall into your enemy’s home. Instead you curse among your children, your school and pupils. Hatred gives no strength either, do not believe it… We shall remain the Caucasus’s leading people.
Vahabzade… the zades… Who are they? Beys, people entirely severed from their own people, to whom dirtying and sacrificing people means nothing. They know no one from their family will die, and send their people to be slaughtered. It is the thinking of beys and aghas: let us send so many cattle to slaughter.
— And how do you regard ordinary Azerbaijani people? What moral character do they have today?
— A people can be turned into a herd, and each person can be separated from that herd, that crowd, made master of a home, have capacities for work discovered within him. I do not know; I cannot fill myself with hatred towards what is called a people. By people I see the village worker, a tiller with a shovel, a little girl following a cow, bent women working in the fields. I feel disgust for those clattering backgammon in teahouses.
— And whom do you see in the Popular Front?
— All the scum. The idle people of Baku, of large rural towns and small villages. It is terrible that our answering wave of revenge may not find its corresponding wave in them, and that the cow owner, the little girl, may be the ones to die. But more terrible still is the moral destruction of the human being, for them and for us, which is inevitable if this condition continues long.
— Perhaps I know what you will answer, but still want to ask: what is Nagorno-Karabakh to you?
— It is my home, and I shall always stand beside it. Even the Turk will consider me a traitor if I abandon it. This is in my people’s consciousness too. We shall be utter fools if we leave Karabakh. Karabakh’s area is as large as that flourishing Israel, four and a half thousand square kilometres, which made its present fertile land from desert. But Karabakh… We need not create new fertile soil: it exists, it is ours, and has yet to flourish and become a resting place for us all.
Armenia is not an orphanage or shelter where those forcibly expelled from Baku should come and want to settle only in Yerevan. There, that fertile paradise: let them go and live there. Where else should they go, gather America’s rubbish again? Never!
— A person determines his own destiny. As time shows, this expression often deviates, undergoes profound distortion. We Armenians feel it especially today. And involuntarily the first question arises: why does fate punish us so cruelly? Is it because we are too humane? But let us pause a moment and look where tomorrow’s humanist, the human being, the individual, draws nourishment. Wherever we go, wherever we turn our questioning eyes, we shall begin with education, seek every question’s roots in school. What do you think of our school today, which we want to make national in face and substance?
— A profound reform of school is needed. It should begin with the school building. No school should have grounds smaller than a hectare. Children must have room to breathe; after sitting forty-five minutes they faint. There should be no more than ten or twelve pupils in a class. That is that. The school’s more important task is not to cut children off from life. The Uzbeks have begun a campaign today asking why their children are taken to gather cotton. What should they do? Attack the past: why were children beside shepherds? Attack America: why do children work from fourteen to manage to buy a car at sixteen? We should not cherish the idea of excessive attention to what was lost in the past. Armenian history, Classical Armenian, religion… I fear that by making their importance absolute we shall now fall into an extreme in this way. Armenian history severed from world history makes you narrow-minded: you do not understand that the globe is round, do not know what history unfolded in the world alongside yours. Until now they have presented Russia’s history instead of the whole Union’s. Now we have awoken and want to teach only Armenia’s history. In this condition of justified hurt I again fear Russian may suddenly be driven out, a language offering boundless opportunity for contact with world culture. Languages in general should be brought to the forefront of education. There are scarcely any of us who read the Turkish press today. The importance of knowing the enemy’s language is especially felt now.
The types of school must change. No good school should become an example for another. None should repeat another. As many capable, learned teachers, as many kinds of school. We boast: we had a school at Tatev, at Amaras… Empty words. Say we restore Amaras, put up the walls, plaster them, even appoint a guard with a candle seller. Then what? School must be given life, children’s breath and warmth. Teaching must be the greatest profession. Armenian national talent must go to nourish the teacher’s work. That is possible only in one case: most state funds must be directed there. Where you throw gold, energy will go. Let us throw gold into school: Armenian thought’s capacity, flexibility, initiative and competence will rush there, and school will awaken. For now it is dead.
The country needs learning, professionalism, good political thinkers. At the top an enormous army of half-articulate, half-educated people has arisen. It comes from having no good school. We have called it humanistic, yet from his very first day at school the child sees nothing but preaching and energy wasted to no purpose.
In summer, on America’s roads, I saw a splendid sight: bright fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls and boys sped at the wheels of open cars, as though in a parade. The car was not a goal they had achieved and were happy for that reason. I understood that they were independent people already ready to enter life. One day we were at a Fresno priest’s home. He called his schoolboy son: “Come home for your break; we have guests from the homeland.” The child came for a few minutes and quickly went back to work. He worked four hours a day; next year he would buy a car. If I accused America’s educational system of a lack of humanity, I would commit a crime. The great Faulkner was born there, the great Saroyan arose there. Here Saroyans become merely Sarmens or Matevossians, angry with everyone, narrow-minded. I saw Armenian schools there where children are given life’s alphabet: English and Armenian on their tongues, they can drive, know computers and trade. If the alphabet satisfies some, good; others become splendid people, specialists, scholars and political thinkers.
The American school gave me the impression of a superb calf house. The minimum received under conditions of maximum provision, feed and so on, suffices for an independent, secure life and even a position in governing bodies.
School will have a national character when genuine specialists useful to the nation are educated and grow there. Whether that school is in Yerevan or elsewhere, in the church of Amaras, Sanahin or Tatev, it must be linked to life, not a school of formulas and meaningless preaching.
— Is teaching the history of religion as a subject necessary in that school today?
— The question of religion is for me first of all a question of culture: singing, history, culture. Teaching religion in school is as necessary as the Mesropian alphabet for knowing the language. Knowledge of religion will open for the child the doors leading to world culture. The Gospel is humanity’s greatest literary monument. To deprive a child of contact with that work means cutting him off from the heritage of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Narekatsi too.
Fear is born of darkness, darkness of incomplete education. Then why not make a child’s education complete by teaching the history of religion, the alphabet of humanity’s two-thousand-year culture? Through it he will become braver, more fearless. For today’s generation that is an especially important quality, because we still have a long road of struggle ahead.
Interview conducted by Vardanush TOROSYAN
Dprutyun, 13 February 1990.