Not one citizen of Armenia knows the reason or the need for changing the Armenian national anthem. Nothing has really changed in Armenia besides the decline of the dollar, or as the Armenian authorities like to call it, the devaluation of the dollar and this doesn’t serve as a basis for changing one of the country’s main symbols. On the contrary, after the decline of the dollar, there’s a need to get the original lyrics written by writer Nalbandyan back. I mean to say the words “tshvar, anter” (miserable, ungoverned).
Since there really is no reason for this change, people are of the opinion that the Armenian authorities are trying to imitate Russian president Vladimir Putin, who brought back the former USSR national anthem music.
Did Putin have the right to change Russia’s anthem? Many people have written different things about this and this has been a widespread topic in Russia. This is the Russians’ problem. I don’t know if there was a reason or not, but there had always been the desire and the strive to change the Soviet anthem back in the days of the Soviet Union.
Perhaps this was Putin’s mentality. When has Russia ever been an influential territory with a 1/6 territory- reaching from Eastern Europe all the way to Asia, from Asia to Africa, from Africa to the Caribbean?-of course, during the Soviet Union, especially after WWII. And it was days before the USSR won WWII that the national anthem was written.
So, Putin was trying to at least bring back the once glorious past of Russia through the means of the national anthem music despite the many criticisms. Of course, you can’t bring that era back physically, but you can mentally and spiritually.
But what are Armenians bringing back? We’re bringing back one part of Putin’s dream, will never become a reality. In other words, we’re taking Armenia and putting it back in the Soviet Union. Whereas Putin’s wish is to have a strong empire, Armenia’s wish is to become the southern province in the outskirts. So, what we want is to become a part of Putin’s unreal dream.
The average Russian will feel the presence of fifteen republics while listening to the former USSR anthem, including the European Union. What are we Armenians going to feel while listening to our new anthem? We’re going to feel like a 29.8 square meter province, without Nagorno Karabakh. However, we didn’t have Karabakh while listening to the anthem written by composer Aram Khachatryan. The two primary figures of Armenia used to wake up and go to sleep listening to the anthem of Soviet Azerbaijan. Of course, they would like to listen to the tunes of the anthem written by Aram Khachatryan, But the empire, that we strive to be part of, tore apart that piece of land from Armenia and put it in Azerbaijan. What was Karabakh for a huge empire like that? For the USSR, Armenia and the Soviet Armenian anthem was nothing if we look at the “one nation” slogan.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and maybe even until now, strangers didn’t know who the Armenians were and where Armenia was on the map. In order to make it clear, you would simply say Soviet Union. “Ohh, Russian” was the response because Armenia wasn’t considered a separate country and Armenians weren’t a separate people. When, let’s say, Tigran Petrosyan became a world champion or Yurik Vartanyan hit the record, whose flag did they raise and whose anthem was heard?-The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and not Soviet Armenia. Now Armenians are trying to take advantage of Aram Khachatryan’s name, which probably in his days, was useless.
Aram Khachatryan has hundreds of compositions. The average Armenian only knows some of those compositions. Better yet, he can only mention Aram Khachatryan’s name when hearing the “Sword Dance”. Let this national anthem be considered one of the masterpieces of the composer, so that the authorities and some people’s wish to change the past doesn’t become a reality for the sake of art.
The national anthem is much more serious than just taste of music and I don’t think that the former authorities stuck with the “Mer Hayrenik” (Our Homeland) national anthem just because they didn’t have taste. They chose “Mer Hayrenik” not so that we Armenians could feel that we are a country that separated from the Soviet Union as a result of the collapse, rather because we had the opportunity to make our dream a reality.