When I was a freshman at the university, well-known professor at the
Yerevan State University and one of the greatest intellectuals of our
time Mr. Levon Nersisyan was reading lectures to us on ancient
literature. In order to make the lecture clearer, he often drew
parallels between historical and contemporary events. One time, I don’t
remember on what occasion, he said that Stalin was a more sincere
dictator than his successors. Stalin simply accused and executed
people. By doing that, he spread fear and terror throughout the
country. “Then they came,” he used to say,” thinking that they had
eliminated his worshipping, as if they had put an end to his
dictatorship and claiming that Khruschov was more liberal than his
predecessors. What did Khruschov do? He built the famous “Khruschovian”
buildings. Those buildings are mainly seen in the Ajapnyak district of
Yerevan. The buildings built by him have extremely low ceilings.” At
that time, Levon Nersisyan was a very tall, broad-shouldered man and he
was living in one of the so-called “Khrushchovka” buildings in
Ajapnyak.
“Look at me,” he said, getting out of his seat, “look. Can you imagine
that I live at my home always bending down? Now do you understand why
Stalin was more sincere?”
Every time I sit in a taxi, I remember Levon Nersisyan’s story
and I begin to realize that I myself live bent down in my city and in
my home. I purposely do not stop the buses where there is no place to
sit, but believe me when I say that even that does not save me from
humiliation. You enter the omnibus and you want to sit somewhere. It
turns out that the driver has initiatively moved the seats so close
together that you can barely move your legs. He has done this so that
the “passenger” does not occupy someone else’s seat. You sit in some
awkward position and wait to see who the next “passenger” will be that
stands on your foot because he can not find anywhere to sit.
But the worst is yet to come. The worst is when you are sitting, better
yet-situated in the middle of two seats and there is a woman in front
of you. Going against all civilized norms, you are not able to offer
your seat to her. But this is not even the worst. To hell with manners.
The woman is standing in a strange position and hoping for the
“transition of the world”, but judging from her face you can tell that
if she lets go everything will collapse.
The woman is beautifully dressed and has a nice figure. Before leaving
her house, she has fanned her hair, bathed herself with sweet smelling
perfumes. The perfume could smell really nice in other places, but in
the bus with all the movement going on, you say to yourself if only she
had taken a shower. You say this because as a result of the mixture of
all the smells of someone sitting in the front, the back or right next
to you, instead of stopping at, for example, the outskirts of the city,
you prefer to get off at the republic square or somewhere.
It is safe to say that the bent-down crowd of humiliated people
that take the bus when they need to get somewhere is us, society. The
sympathetic and intelligent woman, who in front of you portrays a
surrealistic figure that could not even come close to Salvador Dali’s
imagination, stops the omnibus at the university and gets out. She is
probably a professor. She is hurrying to class, she is hurrying to give
her students knowledge and values. How much time is needed for that
woman to stand tall in front of her students? Perhaps nothing is
needed, perhaps everything is fine the way it is. After all, aren’t the
students also coming to the university with the omnibus and smelling
the same “perfume”? Each person in the university lecture halls tells
each other about the omnibus “world”. The bent down and humiliated
society does not transfer or receive knowledge, but rather, it makes it
seem like that. The conditionality, just like one’s dignity in the
omnibus “world”, goes down to the lowest level. Since the person going
to work wishes to have a lot of money so that he can go by taxi, he
asks for money from the student. Do you think that the student refuses
to give the money?-of course not. The student gives the money for one
simple reason: he or she has lost the most precious thing in the
omnibus-his dignity.
The governmental structures involved in fighting against corruption and
conducting seminars every other day may not understand this connection,
they might consider this fake-but that’s how it is. The people who have
lived in the Soviet Union remember that during Stalin’s time, there was
no bribery or corruption, as there is now. This once again proves Levon
Nersisyan’s comment on how sincere Stalin was. Where and why would
there be bribery, when the individual was sentenced and executed for
crimes he had not committed, who would dare commit a crime and have the
tyrant to sentence him? For the people living in the low-ceiling
houses, he let them take something home with them, added more to the
already high salary paid by the Soviet Union, let them bribe and take
bribes in order to make life a little more suitable.
Can the government solve this problem? Of course it can. Any
businessman doing business in a country where there are market
relations adjusts to the laws constituted by the state. We can also
constitute those laws by demanding and insisting that the omnibus
drivers not take advantage of the people’s dignity. Who doesn’t know
that you spend the same amount of money to get from point A to point B
despite the number of “passengers”?
If the state can do this, then why doesn’t it? The answer to this is
quite simple. It is difficult to be Stalin nowadays. The world has
changed, people live differently now and you have to make it seem like
you are true to those values. But who cares about governing a people
with no dignity, who will speak out about the people’s effort to
survive and raise that to a level of civil intelligence? The dignified
citizen wants to live a dignified life, but in order to reach that he
or she must draw some conclusions. So, Levon Nersisyan was
right-dictatorship is not good or bad, there are just different types.