Even in the blessed Brezhnev decades, the Moscow philistine, ignorant of our historical fate and unwilling to know it, saw our nationalism in our homogeneity, while the Moscow bureaucrat made unsuccessful attempts at a policy of breaking that homogeneity apart. During the events of 1988, we were threatened here too: do not boast of your homogeneity; we can and will create other peoples from your very flesh and blood. Rulers know well how armies united in purpose disintegrate under the pressure of hardship, that the destructive moth exists within every army without exception. We must now overcome our party, personal and class egotism, rise above ourselves; otherwise we will cast to the winds our people’s very present, which is called Armenian statehood.
In Levon Ter-Petrosyan himself and the most orthodox members of the Armenian National Movement, in Dashnaktsutyun and the other opposition forces, especially those who have made opposition for opposition’s sake their business — in all, all of us I see the capacity to tolerate one another, to hold until tomorrow, by a superhuman effort, the cry that presses against our chests today. To understand that in many, many cases we fill the space with words that are not our own, occupy the square with games that are not our own, that we are toys in the hands of other, unfriendly forces. Every hero of the parliamentary stage and rally square must understand that once he has become a hero, he is already a sick man: he has drunk the salt water of fame. He must remain silent for months, cleanse himself, shake the noise of fame from his ears, wipe the admiration of seas of people from his eyes, and return to sobriety, rediscover the measure of his true abilities. Otherwise his destruction is also the destruction of entire multitudes.
Before the sight of a devastated country, a great national catastrophe — a displaced people, a people of refugees — we must cry the same cry, find one face, one word. We must be blind and deaf to one another’s flaws and failings for at least a few months…
Catholics and followers of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Dashnaks and Ramgavars, Armenian-speakers and Turkish-speakers, bourgeois and poor: amid the great terror, on the roads of the great exodus, we were together, licking one another’s wounds. What, did we heal and restore one another only to gnaw at one another’s throats again, snatch shares of imaginary glory and bread from one another, tear apart our own wholeness and thus the strength of the homeland yet to be established? Will history not call people like us fools?
We will get out of this hardship all the same. Only as an entire nation.
Fate has thrown down a gauntlet to us, and instead of picking it up like men, we have turned away and are occupied with entirely different things. Let our conduct today be such that tomorrow, when the air has cleared and our Armenian sky is open, we can look one another straight in the eye.
Let us not divide the indivisible: today and tomorrow alike, we belong to one another.