The three-week-long occupation of Yerevan’s main avenue ended on a bitterly comical note, worthy of a William Saroyan short story. As riot police moved in, on 6 July 2015, to dismantle the trash-can barricades and evict the last remaining protesters, the Chief of Police was heard urging his troops to be careful, in avuncular tones: ‘Easy, easy, these are our brothers and sisters; they won their victory for all of us.’ With tv cameras recording the scene for the national news, such pleas might sound patronizing, if not downright cynical; but perhaps in the Armenian context this is not the whole story. In the early days of the protests, sparked by the government’s sudden hike in electricity prices, our colleague Petr Liakhov recorded a typical observation from an onlooker: ‘These kids look so full of romantic energy, just like myself back in 1988! I used to sit-in at the very same spot. Well, you know how it all ended . . .’footnote¹ It turned out he was a colonel in the Armenian Army. ‘How did I become what I am? A logical progression. First, in 1989, abandon graduate studies and join an “illegal armed formation”’—Soviet-era policespeak for the nationalist guerrillas—‘then, once your “illegal armed formation” wins the war, it becomes a legal national army in which, with a degree of diligence, you can rise through the ranks.’

The war was fought over the Armenian-populated enclave of Mountainous Karabagh, in Soviet times an autonomous province of Azerbaijan.footnote² Armenian forces still hold nearly a fifth of Azerbaijan’s territory, within a heavily fortified perimeter, including the unrecognized Karabagh Republic and the depopulated buffer zone around it; the whole area is now contiguous with Armenian territory. Meanwhile, oil-rich Azerbaijan—with thrice the population of Armenia and an economy eight times bigger—has trumpeted its rearmament, with weapons expenditure over the past decade exceeding Armenia’s entire national budget, while Baku reasserts its sovereign right to resume hostilities. During the perestroika period of the late 1980s, vast and impassioned mobilizations on the streets of Yerevan and Baku led to violent ethnic conflict between the two Soviet republics, both hitherto loyal to Moscow. The standard explanations of ‘ancient hatreds’, or a clash between Islam and Christianity, cannot explain the timing of the outbreaks of inter-ethnic violence in the Caucasus over the past century: 1905, 1917–20 and again between 1988 and 1994. Each time, contested political control and generalized uncertainty helped to bring to a tipping point existing structural and demographic tensions in agrarian markets, urban trades and professional strata; in a multi-ethnic setting, these tended to acquire sectarian dimensions. And in moments of historic transition, the impact of small peripheral events can be magnified in unpredictable ways: in the late 1980s, the gruesome pogroms in Azerbaijan and the emergence of Armenian fidayin guerrillas served to expose the impotence and disorientation of Gorbachev’s government, thus helping to precipitate the dissolution of the superpower.

Today, popular protests that reach state level in the former Soviet republics, as in Georgia or Ukraine, are inevitably cast in the context of renewed rivalry between Russia and the West. After becoming Boris Yeltsin’s surprise successor in 1999, Vladimir Putin sought to re-establish Russia’s position on the world stage. He never questioned the neoliberal economics underpinning the wealth of his crony-capitalist ruling caste; nor did he consider reviving the trappings of Leninist ideology. Putin’s neo-Sovietism was strictly geopolitical, and driven by unvarnished great-power nationalism. In the ‘near abroad’ of former Soviet republics, Moscow favoured kindred regimes of (de jure or de facto) presidents-for-life, mostly consisting of native ex-communist apparatchiks and their offspring. These ruling clans responded to the historical juncture of 1991 by opportunistically hijacking the key demands of the liberal intelligentsia. As in Yeltsin’s Russia itself, national sovereignty and competitive elections helped to reinstall the erstwhile provincial prefects at the head of diminished peripheral states. Their new official parties functioned much like Tammany Hall ‘political machines’, blending populism, corrupt patronage and sometimes outright gangsterism. Privatizations then transformed the relatives and clients of these presidents into supportive oligarchs. However, such chaotic transitions could also give rise to ferociously competitive oligarchic ‘clans’ whose feuds tended to escalate during elections, sometimes with explosive results. The Russian social theorist Dmitri Furman branded these regimes ‘imitation democracies’, with a democratic façade that allowed the West to largely ignore, with muted regrets, the imitational downside of its post-communist ‘partners’, as long as they compliantly accepted their place in the new world order.footnote³

Over time, the benign neglect accorded to the post-Soviet periphery ran into mounting problems. Instead of gradually evolving into something more authentically Western, the state institutions of the imitation democracies tended to erode while their base narrowed inexorably with each round of ‘musical chairs’ among the insecure denizens of the inner circle. The trend pointed towards the emergence of sultanesque dictatorships, liable to future collapse amid the inevitable succession squabbles, and potentially opening the door to more effective outbursts of popular anger. Faced with such instability across the vast region between China, Russia, the Middle East and the eu, and mainly preoccupied elsewhere, Western policymakers chose to intervene selectively—that is, on the cheap, relatively speaking—by cultivating winning factions in the wave of ‘colour revolutions’ that marked the opening decade of the century. These factions were usually composed of aggrieved junior oligarchs, a smattering of ideologues from the 1989 intelligentsia, exiles and diaspora nationalists, all of whom had their hopes vested in Western aid, for both political and (pressing) economic reasons. The winners of ‘colour revolutions’ in countries like Ukraine (orange) and Georgia (rose) sought to bolster their case for admission to the nato or eu club, playing up the threat from imperial Russia. Moscow, in truth, would be quite happy to foster an informal empire in its underbelly on behalf of the ‘international community’. Long before Putin’s accession to power, leading lights of Russian neoliberalism had declared that a regional empire of this kind was inevitable, and would be a real service to the new world order. But the us hegemon and its eu partners had no place for the ambitions of post-communist Russia in their plans; hence the renewed Cold War flaring up on the battlefields of Georgia in 2008 and, on a much greater scale, in eastern Ukraine today.

This June, as news spread of the barricades going up in central Yerevan, just a few paces from the Armenian parliament and presidential palace, political vigilantes among Moscow’s journalists and security experts immediately discerned the spectre of another Ukrainian-style Euromaidan, and called for a forceful response. The Russian blogosphere was saturated with lurid tales of mysterious boxes being unloaded at the us embassy in Yerevan, and lavash—the local flatbread—wraps laced with narcotics being fed to the naive protesters. But this chorus ended almost as soon as it had begun, indicating that this time the Kremlin had chosen not to aggravate the situation.

From a more sober perspective, important parallels between Ukraine and Armenia do exist. Both are impoverished post-Soviet republics with patently corrupt officials; both have large, well-organized diasporas and recent experience of major political mobilizations; and both are imitation democracies, vulnerable to pressure from disaffected oligarchs and nationalist intellectuals. This kind of opposition need only wait for the chance to exploit a sizeable outburst of popular anger. In Kiev, the latest revolution was triggered in November 2013 by the sudden reluctance of Yanukovich to sign a treaty with the eu, widely interpreted as a refusal to impose more civilized norms on police and state officials—all apparently at the insistence of Moscow. In Yerevan, the spark was struck in June 2015 by a fairly small rise in the price of electricity, which was nevertheless perceived by many as an intolerable attempt to cover up for waste and corruption, while also slavishly serving Russian economic interests which had come to control important sectors of Armenia’s economy through the privatization of public assets to pay off government debts—not unlike the plight of Greece. But in Yerevan, unlike Kiev, the authorities, police and protestors all showed considerable self-restraint, mercifully sparing Armenia an appearance in the world headlines. The—assiduously maintained—peaceful character of the protests warrants an explanation. More importantly, it indicates that new social forces seem to be emerging across the post-Soviet zone, bringing youthful energy and innovative tactics to bear as they face daunting choices, both political and organizational.

The Armenians pride themselves on the antiquity and resilience of their nation, which has borne its name since the fifth century bc. The multi-spoke swastika, the ancient Sun-chariot symbol, has been common here since the Bronze Age and still survives in folk ornaments and carpet designs. The language forms a separate branch in the Indo-European family tree, alongside Greek, Celtic, Albanian or Persian. In ad 301 Armenia became the first officially Christian kingdom, some eighty years before the Roman Empire; its church still stands distinct from both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. The thirty-eight-letter Armenian alphabet has changed little since its invention in ad 405 by the monk Mesrop Mashtots. Recently, when a local stone mason came to do some repairs for us, he noticed a collection of ancient coins on a writing desk: Roman sestertii from ad 164, triumphantly proclaiming Marcus Aurelius as ‘Augustus Armeniacus’ for his victory in the latest border war with the Parthians. To this Khachik, the dwarf-like master carver, spat out grimly: ‘He tried to dominate us too, did he? Tell me, where’s your Marcus Aurelius now? And we’re still here, cutting stone.’