The Status of Artists and Intellectuals in Soviet Armenia, 1988
Dickran Kouymjian

    Artist and intellectuals in Armenia are respected among the populace far beyond their counterparts in the Armenian Diaspora. Though there seems always to have been a certain deference toward thinkers and creators among Armenians, it is hard to imagine a moment in history when respect for them was higher. In the common imagination there are no greater figures than Yeghishe Charentz (poet), Victor Hampartzumian (scientist), Aram Khachatourian (composer), Sergei Paradjanov (filmmaker) and William Saroyan (writer), no statesman or official ever accumulated the respect and popularity of these men. In part this phenomenon must be attributed to the general tenor of Soviet society with its seriousness and earnestness. Ideas are still passionately debated much like they were in archetypal Russian novels of the late nineteenth century; metaphysical questions are still in vogue. Chess and discussion are national pastimes. Emphasis on thought and reflection in Armenia springs from the historical tradition, which emphasizes the cultural splendors of the past, whether the glorious figures of the fifth century or the art and architectural of a later period, easily accessible to all citizens in Armenia. Then, too, recent Armenian history has left a number of unresolved problems focused around such serious and complex questions as genocide, exile, and self-determination.

A Cultural Overview
    Some will argue that in a society deprived of the plethora of amusements so readily available to its advanced western counterparts, the Armenian like his Soviet cousins, is forced to seek amusement and relaxation in social conversation, concert hall and theater, or reading books. We lack any convincing data on the utilization of leisure time in Soviet Armenia in recent years, or at any time for that matter, and it maybe that today a trend away from cultural diversions and toward television and popular amusements may be developing. The quality of Soviet television has improved in the past few years and moved more toward popular entertainment; even more, many homes now have video recorders and pirated western films circulated freely and en masse. Jazz and pop music are prevalent; rock on tape, disc and video are the rage. Pornographic material, whether imported or locally produced, is readily, though privately, available. Certain habits of the television age have also caught on among the middle-class. It is common, like in many American homes, for the TV set to be left on all the time, whether people are dining or have visitors, whether anyone is watching or not. Certain constraints control the abusive practices we find in America. Following the examples of France and other European countries, radio and television in Armenia, in parallel with the general Soviet pattern, limit broadcasting to the late afternoon and evening. TV programming is closer in its content to the U.S. Public Broadcasting System (PBS), with emphasis on cultural and informational material. For instance, very popular is an hour and a half monthly literary program, Nork Handes, centered around new books and writers, and like its weekly French counterpart, Apostroph, it has a very high rating. The Armenian state television studio has its own film section and documentaries and fiction films of high quality are regularly produced. Films are plentiful in Erevan and other cities and very cheap. The variety is both less and more than in the United States. American films are rarely shown, but there is a good selection of Italian (Fellini, Antonioni, but with explicit sex excised), French, East European, and Third World cinema in addition to films from the Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and other republics' studios. Popular romances are common fair for a sector of the audience, but the violence, sex, and poor B picture is not made and does not clutter the screens. Like Russian language films, the Armenian films produced by the HyeFilm Studio are usually serious and often national in content. The Second World War remains a popular theme. In general films are serious and thought provoking, in fact intellectual. Issues, sometimes from the past, sometimes current, serve as subject matter as does ethnography, that is films which uncover or document tradition. In this respect, the works of Paradjanov are instructive. Each of his four feature films has describe a different ethnic groups: The Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (Carpathians), Color of Pomegranates or Sayat Nova (Armenians), Secret of Sourami Fortress (Georgians), Ashik Kerib (Azerbaijanis). Major feature films, like their Russian counterparts, are often based on literary classics or recent successes: Bebo, Namous, Mkhitar Sparapet, We Are Our Mountains, Nahapet, The Lonely Walnut Tree, Kikor, A Piece of Sky. HyeFilm also has an entire section with its own director devoted exclusively to documentary films. Its annual budget is nearly equal to that of the feature film section and it is far superior to the third and smallest component of the studio devoted to animated films. The other arts -- music (including orchestral, vocal, operatic, and folk), painting and sculpture, theater, dance -- are all organized and subsidized with special facilities available to each of them. Every one of the arts is reinforced by its own schools, conservatories, and institutes. Quality is at times mediocre, for instance the ballet of the opera lacks a well trained corps de ballet to support some rather good soloists. A wide selection of opera is presented in the splendid Opera House, the center of recent demonstrations, but the opera going public in Erevan is very small; often a classic production of Tigranian's Anoush or the ballet Antouni based on Gomidas's music will perform to an empty house. Theater thrives. There are a number of major repertory companies, Soundoukian, Dramatikakan, and the Baronian being the most famous among a dozen or so groups, including a couple of avant garde troupes, which dominate stage life in Armenia. Productions vary regularly and include the European classics, modern imports from Moscow and Leningrad, Armenian favorites, both traditional works and new creations, and Shakespeare. The average theater goer in Armenia sees more Shakespeare performed in two or three seasons than the diasporan Armenian sees in a lifetime. Contemporary theatrical groups from the rest of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe also tour the country. Several Armenian diaspora companies mostly from Lebanon, but also from France and America, have staged productions in Armenia. Theaters are full every night, tickets are hard to get for hit shows. The recent hits are divided between comedies, upbeat musicals, and historical subjects. Even the comedies are content oriented, usually preoccupied with a current problem like discipline in schools. Saroyan revivals are frequent. But the greatest cultural preoccupation is of course reading. This has always been a perplexing question for western intellectuals. Do the Armenians, for instance, read the books they so aggressively buy? Or are books investment objects in a society where there seems to be little to purchase of value? Editions of 20,000 are commonplace, those of 100,000 are not unknown. As an example the first three volumes of a projected four volume anthology of the works of William Saroyan have been issued in editions of 50,000 entirely by subscription. It is virtually impossible to buy a copy in a book store. Like most other works of literature, it went out of print within the week of its release. It frequently happens that a popular author's work will be entirely sold on the day it is released. Remember, we are talking of a small country of three and a half million, and to see the average poet's new collection published in 5000 copies or the poems of Yeghishe Charentz, Shiraz, Kevork Emin, or Sylva Gapoutikian in editions of 50,000, has virtually no parallel in the west. Those who buy these literary works read them. Poetry remains as popular as it was in earlier, traditional times. This is attested to by the large number of people who regularly and upon request recite the works of major poets learned by heart.

The Artist and the State
    Artists are organized differently than intellectuals in the Soviet Union. The latter are usually affiliated with universities, institutes, museums, or the Academy of Sciences. In this respect they different little in their employment from western intellectuals, especially "European counterparts. The U.S. has no comparable system of research institutes, nor an academy that itself employs so many researchers in its various branches Large numbers of private Armenian foundations and research organizations, however, closely approximate in a much reduced manner the system used in Armenia and throughout the Soviet Union. Unlike any comparable system in either America or Europe, the USSR early in its history organized everyone working in the arts or culture as it did all other works, namely into unions. With those unfamiliar with the Soviet system as it works in Armenia and the other republics, it is almost impossible to give an adequate description its nuances, for it is so different than anything tried elsewhere. A person's identity in the great country of socialism, the workers republic, is defined by membership in a union. Everyone is a worker; everyone is a union member; everyone is a state employee. Thus, writers and poets, artists, actors, musicians and composers, filmmakers, architects are all members of the union appropriate to their craft. Each of the arts has only one union. The unions are visibly very powerful forces in everyday life. Membership does not guarantee success in one's artistic profession, but it is a source of basic privileges. Membership does not guarantee employment either, though apparently membership provides a minimum monthly reimbursement to those without other means. There is some overlapping with the academia; a university professor in literature may also be a writer and, thereby, a member of the Writers' Union. The pervasiveness of organized unions is directly related to the intentional structuring of the Soviet Union. Distribution of the major privileges of the Soviet system are made through the unions. The assignment of apartments, their exchange for larger or newer ones, is done through the unions. Each union receives an allotment from the state; apartments are distributed to members on the basis of need and family size, but also as rewards for popular success. The ability to purchase a new car is also a prerogative of the union affiliation. Annually, each union is given a quota of cars, members place their names on lists and wait their turn. A new car cannot be purchased except through a union. Used car, however, have their own private market. Recently, Soviet Armenian artists and intellectuals have profited from a plan to distribute plots of land for dachas in the countryside. Small chalet-type cottages, usually of stone construction, have sprung up in the smaller villages and on mountain slopes to the northeast of Erevan. These lands are distributed through the unions. Construction of the summer dwelling is totally at the expense of the individual, who hires weekend or moonlight contractors.
Such an organization of the arts virtually eliminates the notion of the "starving artist." Painters and sculptors, once they are admitted to the Artists' Union are guaranteed a living wage, like professors and other intellectuals, a minimum of between 120 and 180 rubles or about $200 to $300 a month with the current official exchange rate of $1.60 for a ruble. Figures in rubles should not be compared to other currencies, because rents, for instance, are about ten rubles a month, public transport five kopeks or eight cents a ride, meat roughly one ruble a pound in the state stores and three rubles in the open market. But a new car costs 10,000 rubles, five years' wages. Yet in addition to a guaranteed wage, artists are also given studios, most of them modest to be sure, though a few for the "chosen" are lavish even by western standards. The painter Hagop Hagopian occupies (deservedly perhaps) the entire top floor of a new twelve storey apartment building with a 360¡ degree panoramic view of all of Erevan and the surrounding country side. Martiros Saryan had his own vast house-museum in his lifetime. The artist's concern is to create. Most musicians, writers, painters are prolific, primarily because they are paid additionally for publishing, to some extent by quantity, whether literature or music, while artists can sell their creations. In such a socialized and rationalized system, those who are not productive or lack talent or especially connections, live a with difficulty on a monthly salary that can barely support a single person. Most artistic unions provide an added bonus to their members to induce productivity just like workers in skilled trades. Each union owns or has access to a resort-like facility outside the Erevan, usually in a scenic and tranquil rural setting. For instance the Black Sea coast on its northeastern shores harbors an endless series of luxury hotels for unions from all Republics. In Armenia the three most impressive union retreats or resorts are those of the Cinematographic Union and the Composers Union in Dilijan and and the home of the Writers Union in Tsaghgatzor. Facilities are arranged either within a single building, as with the Writers Union, or a compound of individual units like the film union's retreat. These complexes are staffed year around with managers, cleaning and maintenance staff, cooks, and servants. When a writer, composer or filmmaker goes off to his retreat, everything is done for him. It is like vacationing at first-class hotel. In theory the isolated environment, free of daily duties, allows the creators to write the novel, compose the symphony, prepare the scenario of the next film. Each year, each union member is entitled to three weeks to a month at the retreat at no charge. Family members may accompany him at a nominal fee. Throughout the year any member can go for supplementary days, if space is available, at his own cost, usually a small sum. Many writers take advantage of their retreat, located in the only major ski resort in Armenia. Some actually produce a volume there. Such is the case of poet and university professor Henrig Edoyan, who openly admits to literary productivity under palatial confinement. These centers are also used for conferences and colloquia; the Composers House in Dilijan with its Beethoven concert hall is a major performing center in the Caucasus. Yet, many members seem not to use their annual retreat rights, either because they don't like the company of their colleagues, or simply because they have nothing to create or just cannot bother. The situation is analogous to certain American universities with faculty members who do not apply for sabbatical leaves due to them because they are not able to work up a research proposal.

Abuses
    Because artistic unions like other unions in Armenia have accumulated, through the formal mechanism of the state enormous power, they are natural vehicles for abuse by union leaders. The union hierarchy, in principle democratically elected by the members, once in office controls the disbursement of apartments, cars, vacations and much more. Union presidents seldom relinquish their posts; until recently they usually got their jobs through the will or good offices of the First Secretary of the Communist Party. For instance, Vartkes Petrossian, President of the Writers Union until last year (summer of 1987), was a good friend of First Secretary Karen Demirjian; Petrossian had the wisdom of leaving his post as he saw mounting opposition to his own leadership and the rapid decline of his patron. Demirjian battled to the end, until May 1988, when Gorbachev finally found an excuse to remove him. The Union President and his "secretaries," themselves his friends, not only have the power to decide who gets what of the annual perks, a way of getting union members to be solicitous and friendly in order to guarantee their own access to the system's rewards, but additionally, they establish a strong patronage system. Their notoriety as President of one of these prestigious unions guarantees that the public will pay special attention to their individual creative activity. People will buy their books when published, guarantying a large printing and, therefore, a larger royalty than normal members. Or, as in the case of the Composers' Union, the union chiefs know that they will receive commissions, and works already composed will be regularly performed. As an example, in the last decade, Vartkes Petrossian has published a number of long novels; his plays are regularly performed and very popular. His last novel, The Bloody Shirt, (before it cost him his job, because it suggested that Armenians should begin a dialogue with the Turks, a most unpopular notion in Armenia even before the Karabagh issue), was not only a best seller, but an agreement had been reach between him and the new head of the Hye Film Studio, Frounze Dovlatian, to make a major feature film of it and another agreement made with the President of the Theatrical Union, Hrachia Khaplanian, to prepare a stage play. This arbitrary power of patronage has a more insidious effect on the arts. For instance the power brokers of the Composer Union, President Edward Mirzoian and Alexandre Haroutunian, decide which composers works will have their works performed. Within the quota of concerts and the availability of major public concert halls, after programming their own works, they decide who else will be the favored. Getting one's compositions on record, also presents the same kind of problem with the "annual plan" which is the vehicle for obtaining the yearly budget. To get the chance to record on the national labels -- there is no recording studio in Erevan -- one has to be booked into Tiflis or Leningrad or Moscow, usually through the one's union. Many actively creating composers have not had their works performed in concert or recorded for more than a decade. As the composer Armen Bayamian, a twenty year veteran of the union, explained to me in 1987, he has abandoned hope of ever having his works performed publicly. He, like many of the younger composers, gets his monthly stipend, but is otherwise ignored. The newer talents are disliked or dismissed by the union heads and they in turn have little respect for those who are supposed to be their own artistic leaders. Bayamian came to Armenia in the 1950s from Beirut; he left for Los Angeles last year (1987-8). He is an extremely talented composer. Within this system, the middle generation waits 20 to 25 years until the older generation -- the Mirzoians, Haroutunians, Babajanians -- retire or die and then they get power and repeat the cycle as older men. The very young avant garde composers are not even in the system, carrying on dynamic, highly promising experiments outside the formal state structure in improvised surroundings; they are trying to bring Armenia into the sphere of contemporary music. Composers such as Dikran Mansourian, also originally from Beirut, who are not part of the union leadership, but nevertheless are highly successful because they have made close ties with the theater and cinema (though privately critical of the leadership and talent of the unions' hierarchy), seem unwilling to publicly attack the system or its leadership. The abuse of the system in Armenia is often laid squarely on the corruption and cronyism of the Brezhnev period and its Armenian epigone, Karen Demirjian. This epoch was already considered a time of stagnation in Armenia before the term was made popular by Mikhael Gorbachev. In the mid-1980s a general malaise had set in in all the arts. Theater, ballet, opera, literature, music, and the film industry had all displayed a stagnation and mediocrity uncharacteristic of Armenian cultural life, and everyone knew it. Unions were run like the mafia and indeed, the term mafiosi for union chiefs and their acolytes was very commonly used by the sensitive public of Erevan.2 The worse abuse of mafia chiefs of culture unions was probably that of the total power Hrachia Khaplanian had on theater in Soviet Armenia. He was director of the most important theater in the country, the Soundoukian, while at the same time President of the Theatrical Union. His actress wife, though well beyond her prime, was often feature as lead actress. His daughter, of only average talent as an actress, was also regularly given top billing. The latter's husband, Khaplanian's son-in-law, was made director of the Dramatikakan Theater, Erevan's second most important dramatic establishment. Until his untimely death this year his power was absolute not just in theater but in various other domains. He was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Armenia as well as a member of the Supreme Soviet. As other union chiefs he had a chauffeur-driven car, a home of lavish proportions, access to the special stores for the nomenklatura, free tickets for rewarding and cultivating the necessary people, and a royal box with food service for his friends and visiting guests. Furthermore, as a true mafia capo, he also engaged in other businesses. It was public information that he owned privately a very successful textile factory in the parallel sector and was many times over a millionaire.
Few states have elevated the artist, and also the intellectual, to such a high social position as has the Soviet Union. The arts in Armenia should be thriving; they are not. Fortunately and miraculously, they remain active, despite the stranglehold of union leaders, only because young writers and musicians have worked outside the establishment. They seek their rewards from the esteem of their peers, rather than the fawning of the traditional party hacks and their sycophants. But instead of moving forward in the seventies and eighties, the arts in Armenia have, unfortunately and unbeknownst to most Armenians, especially in the Diaspora, qualitatively regressed. It is one of the great ironies of modern Armenian life that an edifice willfully designed to make sure that artists and intellectual are honored and rewarded has been allowed to be manipulated by men of second-rate talent, often of mean disposition. The profile presented above was valid until this year (1988). The transformation of Armenian life engendered by the events surrounding the Karabagh issue, which began in February 1988, will probably have a salutary effect in changing for the better the inherited assumptions of union leaders. In this respect the ideals eschewed by Gorbachev's slogans of transparency in daily life and restructuring of institutions is and will continue to be a major factor in the renewal of intellectual and artistic life. All of the major unions mentioned above except one (the Composers' Union) have had a radical change at the top. These changes had already occurred before the explosion of Karabagh.

New Leadership
    Frounze Dovlatian was elected head of the ArmenFilm Studio in early 1987, replacing Henrig Malian. Dovlatian is liked and respected by almost all members of the film establishment in Armenia. At the same time, the film employees union voted in a new President, the industrious cameraman and director, Sergei Israelian. Arayik Shiraz, the son of the poet and a talented sculptor, was named head of Artists Union in the spring of the same year. Young and intellectual by inclination, he seems to have the support of his comrades. Vartkes Petrossian was almost removed from his post by the vote of the membership as the first ripples of perestroika came to Armenia in the same spring of 1987, but no vote was held and in the fall, after Gorbachev publicly denounced Demirjian for incompetency, he wisely resigned keeping his post on the Central Committee and the Supreme Soviet.3 In his place Hrachia Hovannessian, a powerful member of the older generation, editor of the Armenian monthly Soviet Literature, was finally chosen in a hotly contested election early in 1988. Though the old power base has been broken, few creative members of the Union see Hovannesian as someone who will change the old crony system. It looks more like the replacing of one set of bosses with another. Finally, the death of Hrachia Khaplanian leaves open the directorship of the important theater union. Any change ought to revive spirits among actors and playwrights. The old guard is still, unfortunately, in firm control of the Composers Union. These changes may prove to be meaningless. The Karabagh Committee, the birth of popular democracy in Armenia, has sent shock waves throughout the intellectual and artistic establishment. Large numbers of the most popular intellectuals and artists have been discredited in the eyes of the people. Those who did not have the conviction or the courage to be present at the demonstrations before the Opera House, to proclaim a clear expression of support for the Karabagh movement, have been disavowed by a people, who refuse to be fooled. The most dramatic case is perhaps that of the poet Sylva Gaboudikian, who in the early stages of the movement became a national hero (she was already a national poet with a great following), when she managed to bring Armenia's position directly to First Secretary Gorbachev, but fell out of favor as events moved too fast for her ideas which quickly appeared conservative and establishment oriented. She was booed and prevented from speaking in June and July. This is not the time (October 1988) to discuss the motivating forces or the dynamics of the Karabagh movement and its effect on the institutions of the country. It is a movement led by intellectuals and university students. It was the students of the philological faculty -- the humanities in our system -- who refused to abandon the Opera House square and who, contrary to all expectation, initiated and carried out a serious hunger strike, which ultimately reanimated the movement. The officially illegal Karabagh Committee includes a number of university professors, researchers, and academicians. In the unprecedented debated between First Secretary Gorbachev and members of the Armenian delegation during the Supreme Soviet meeting in June, the most heated exchanges with Gorbachev were conducted not by professional Armenian politicians, but by Victor Hambartzoumian, President of the Armenian Academy of Sciences, Sergei Hampartzoumian, Rector of Erevan University, and Vartkes Petrossian. After the tragedy of Sumga•t, it was the Writers Union that set up a logistical headquarters to record the testimony of survivors and refugees from that city and to establish an accurate list of those killed or wounded. More recently one of the three most famous Armenian actors, Sos Sarkissian, himself an intellectual, has spearheaded the move for aid to Armenians in the Karabagh. Whatever may happen in the coming months and years, thanks to the struggle to rejoin Artzakh (Karabagh) to Armenia, intellectually and culturally the country will never be the same. The reawakened conscience of the people has given them the power to correctly separate artists and intellectuals of integrity and character from the lackeys who have been cultural life in Soviet Armenia in recent years.

1     I have left the paper as read at the October 1988 conference because I believe it reflects a set of circumstances valid for Armenia until the earthquake of December 7, 1988 and its aftermath. After that tragedy everything changed. In order to receive aid from external agencies, including foreign governments, the discredited government and official bureaus, regained power and creditability, especially among Armenians abroad, lost to the Karabagh Committee. During President Gorbachev's visit to Armenia on the 10th and 11th of December, the eleven members of the Karabagh Committee were hunted down and eventually illegally arrested. They were kept in prison in Moscow during the Spring 1989 elections and were therefore robbed of elected offices which they would have surely won had they been allowed to present themselves properly as candidates. Due to internal and especially international pressures, the most effective and persistent originating from France, the members of the Karabagh Committee were released in the late spring of 1989. The Armenian government reached a modus vivendi with the movement and allowed them observer status on various levels of Armenian government. Government leaders and internal organizism like the Committee for Cultural Relations with Armenians Abroad that had been previously discredited, were ironically re-enfranchised by earthquake and aid of Armenians abroad. To the credit of the establishment, the nomenklatura as well as the union bosses who are the subject of this paper, they have been eager to do the biding of the Karabagh Committee and allow themselves to at times be co-opted by the force of the popular movement. Since the vicious Azerbaijani menace to the everyday life of Armenian in Armenia and the Karabagh through the strikes and boycotts which stopped 80% of all commodities used Armenians from entering the country, the state leadership has adopted the rhetoric of the Karabagh Committee which they earlier condemned. The situation changes now so rapidly that it is impossible to generalize accurately about the Soviet system in Armenia or the country as a whole and foolish to predict what will happen.

2     At the conference itself, some people were surprised and offended that I used this term in reference to some of the most distinguished personalities of Soviet Armenia. In an Associated Press dispatch from Moscow on October 8, 1989, John-Thor Dahlburg in describing a march by thousands of Soviet citizens in support of Boris Yeltsin quotes on of the marchers, Valery Kazakov, a retiree from Rostov-on-Don as follows: "The Communist Part is a mafia -- the first mafia in the history of the world to take power;" The Fresno Bee, October 8, 1989, A6.

3     Petrossian has since been made Chairman of the Armenian Cultural Fund, established in 1987 in each of the 15 Soviet Republics with Raissa Gorbachev as its titular head. Petrossian replaced Sen Arevshatian, Director of the Matenadaran, under circumstances not completely clear. The position restores some of his power and prestige and gives him many important perks like travel abroad.