Yerevan: Noyan Tapan Publ., 2010, 172 p.

Doubt is already part of faith.

Daniel Harms

There is an era that has left a deep mark on the life of several generations of our country. It brings back the memory of my contemporaries, who never came to terms with the death and suffering of their relatives and are trying to comprehend that difficult and tragic time - the time of their childhood.

This is the talented work of Aram Sargsyan. As a young boy in the early 1950s, he was confronted with many strange but deeply wounded things. A tuberculosis patient, still a young father who can't even pet his child. His father's heart-rending attempts to seek rehabilitation for the unjust sentence that condemned him to years in the Gulag only serve to undermine his already poor health. The fear that due to illness, he will not have time to get a certificate, the issuance of which was always postponed for various bureaucratic reasons.

Rehabilitation certificate - an opportunity to lead a normal life for the whole family, and above all for the son. Without her, the doors of educational institutions will be closed to him, and without her, he and his mother are still formally members of the family of the enemy of the people. The book describes the terrible case of a boy who was not accepted into the Komsomol because his father was not officially rehabilitated after Stalin's death. The boy could not stand the shame and hanged himself. For Aram's father, trying to achieve rehabilitation is the last duty to the family, which he never managed to fulfill.

The era of the "effective manager" has gone through all the peoples of the USSR without exception. It is difficult to understand why some representatives of the current generations are still ready to glorify the regime that methodically destroyed its own citizens and broke the fate of millions of people. Can false ideas about power, deep resentment and disillusionment with the current situation lead us to look for an ideal among the executioners?

Aram Sargsyan's book is not only about the fate of one family that has experienced all the hardships of its time. In it, the author constantly returns to the questions that are fundamentally important for him, which he set for himself as an adult. His own life path showed a difficult comprehension of everything that happened to him personally and to the whole country. As a child, after witnessing the despair of his father, who spent many hours before the" Institution " in Tbilisi refused to rehabilitate him, he made a moral choice for life. "Today I can firmly say: a heightened sense of justice, not humility, alas, which is most often useless in life, was ingrained in me precisely on the "Waiting Day", when the countdown of a new time began in my growing up " (p. 47).

Aram Sargsyan worked as a correspondent for the Komsomolskaya Pravda and Pravda newspapers. Then he worked in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Armenia, eventually becoming the First Secretary of the Central Committee. He belonged to that generation of Communists who, while they considered the idea itself to be correct in principle, were acutely aware of the lack of justice, the need for change, getting rid of bureaucratic dominance, developing private initiative, renewing leadership and implementing reforms. It was these people who were preparing perestroika with all their activities, fighting stagnation and conservatism, but at the same time remaining part of the communist nomenklatura itself. Probably, his excellent knowledge of how this mechanism works, and perhaps a certain amount of naivety, led him to believe that the party, as an instrument of governance, could be effectively involved in the implementation of economic reforms, which should have been a priority for perestroika. Here lay his disappointment in the actions of Mikhail Gorbachev, who put glasnost in the first place, his desire to preserve the USSR, to contain the growth of nationalist sentiments and movements that engulfed national republics.

One of the factors that laid the foundation for this kind of sentiment in Armenia (it was obviously no exception) was the division into Russian and Armenian schools. According to A. G. Sargsyan, it provided a deep stratification between people, some of whom actually became bilingual, deeply knowing not only the national, but also Russian culture, and some remained within the Armenian framework. This stratification has left its mark on the relationships of people of the same generation and on their attitude to the ruling regime. "No less capable, and often more talented people who did not receive a Russian education, could count on career achievements, and sometimes in science and creativity in general, only within the borders of their national republics. And it is not surprising that some of them, offended by the system, did not like the system and the country as a whole. And, like the energy of an undisturbed volcano, they accumulated a critical mass in anticipation of a devastating eruption..." (p.117).

The formation of new elites and their entry into the political arena, their use of ethno-nationalism as a tool for mobilization, dealt a powerful blow to the Soviet Union and, as a result, to the national republics, many of which were involved in conflicts and had great difficulty coping with the burden of independence. The origins of the tragic collapse for millions of people should still be sought in the politics of the totalitarian regime, which was absolutely ruthless towards its citizens, and in the later period of the 1960s and 1970s, when the new communist leaders did not dare to make a radical break with the past.

Awareness of one's past, willingness to answer uncomfortable questions, and thinking about the future-all this together became the main content of A. Sargsyan's unusual book. "I know, and therefore I know, determine and act - the lot of the chosen ones, equally unhappy from reading the future, who have dropped themselves into a world of constant doubt, searching for answers to all the 'whys '" (p.33).

A. Sargsyan's book is addressed to his contemporaries. It is about the life of a family scorched by the era, a tribute to deep gratitude to parents, and at the same time about the time and people who surround us, about dignity, meanness, doubts that make our life more difficult, but without which a thinking person cannot exist and believe.

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