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Soviets Having talked with Armenians who grew up during the regime, its seems that much of Western criticism was absolutely justified. Armenian artists and intellectuals were exterminated. Parents were afraid of their children because their kids could turn them into the government for anti-communist thoughts whether valid or not. People were afraid of each other. Churches were turned into stores and professing a belief in God landed you and your family in the Gulag. People were told where they would work, the thoughts they would think. Text books in the schools were little more than propaganda with little regard for historical truth. Freedom of speech was non-existent. Yet most people I've talked to in Armenia would return to the "Evil Empire" in a heartbeat. Today, it's cold and there is no heat. I'm sitting at my kitchen table wearing long johns, jeans, a dress, wool socks and good shoes, a hat and gloves from REI, and I'm shivering. It's November 20th, and February is Armenia's coldest month. Most people in Gyumri are without quality clothing. They live in shacks and burn whatever they can find to keep warm. The air is so polluted with smoke that our Peace Corps carbon monoxide detectors go off when we take them outside. As an American, my situation will improve. Theirs will only get more difficult. I don't blame them for wanting Soviet heat. Gyumri has one of the last remaining statues of Lenin in the former Soviet bloc. He stands behind locked gates next to an old, abandoned factory--a fitting symbol of what was lost in the late 1980s. The people lost their livelihood and don't know how to get it back. Now, a man's home is not only not a castle, it's hardly a nest. I spoke with an Armenian woman who said she felt "freer" under Soviet control. Warmer I could understand, but freer? Previously, she could travel to Moscow and all over Russia. The Soviets were one people. Now, she can travel to Russia, but she's looked down upon because she's Armenian. Freedom--the thing she longs for again--is exactly what we thought she didn't have. From her perspective, the freedom she had is all the freedom she has known. And now, her life is bondage: to a job that literally doesn't pay and a house with no heat and no possibility of REI clothes or care packages from home. What it comes down to is a question of freedom verses comfort, and the answer depends on how cold you are and how much you have to say. Most people, even in the Land of Milk and Honey, choose comfort over philosophy. Sadly, such is the nature of things. |