We have two celebrations on May 9: the WWII victory day and the Shushi victory day. This celebration is different in Russia. Of course, they state slogans about the victory of the Soviet brother nations (there are also at least one Armenian, Georgian or Uzbek actors in their films), but these are just slogans, just words. In fact Russians celebrate their victory, but attack Armenians or citizens of Caucasus in metro stations. As for the Russian police, they don’t take such cases into consideration in a duly manner because in fact they are “patriot” too and advocate the slogan saying “Russia for Russians” too.
Of course such attacks are not organized by the government. The government implements this policy in another way. For instance it applies embargo on Georgian wine products, doesn’t make money transfers from Russia to Georgia, etc. The war victory doesn’t place any role; after all, the general commander of the army was a native of Georgia. That’s just how the Russian policy is. Although the Geneva convention prohibits keeping hostages, all citizens of Caucasus living in Russia are their hostages-all these countries receive huge financial help and transfers from Russia and depend on it. Even more, now the CIS countries are not independent, and as soon as Georgia tried to get a little independent, it was punished.
This will not happen to Armenia in the nearest future, we are behaving ourselves now. But in any case Russia is on our side and applies economical expansion. It does its best to keep us depended on the country politically and economically. In order to not let us get independent, they need us to have some problems with legitimacy, so as not to take their military troops out of our territories and not to pay for them. Of course the reason is not that they don’t like Armenians, the reason is only their interests. As for us, we don’t want to see and notice that these interests are out of our own interests. Let’s bring the example of May 9 celebration (as we have two celebrations that day, we may compare). It has been more than twelve years that Azerbaijan says that we won the war because Russia backed us. We understand that: they lost the war and have to find justifications. So why don’t we argue? Why do we agree with that? Why do the soldiers that took part in the war smile and say nothing? In fact, Russians only took part in the Shahumyan war, when Armenians were being forced out of that region. Besides that it is a fact that Karabagh was given to Azerbaijan by the Russian authorities. What’s more, today Russia announces that Azerbaijan is a key partner for them in Southern Caucasus.
Besides the victory in the Karabagh war, Armenia could have one more benefit if it were a little more democratic than Azerbaijan. It is very surprising that the Russians are not interested in it either. As for us, instead of fighting against this we are fighting against the West, meanwhile we don’t see that it has been a long time since we are looking at the West through the windows of Russia.