Larisa Alaverdyan Լարիսա Ալավերդյանի

I was raising the problem, for example, of Northern Avenue, where we are sitting now. I didn't say why you are demolishing [the old houses], I said why don't you compensate fairly for those areas. Why do you give someone three times as much money for the same thing, and give someone less? It means that the money goes somewhere. It cannot happen that you simply love them. In other words, the injustice around property rights. It is a shrine of sanctity for the protection of human rights, especially in Europe. I raised that issue. Before that, I succeeded in advocating for all political arrests. I said this is what you do with this one, let this one go, etc.

The states that lived in the totalitarian system can at maximum become authoritarian states after collapsing. With varying softness. For example, the Republic of Armenia in the 1990s and 2000s, during the time of the second president, was characterized as a soft authoritarian regime.

I consider (1995-1996 elections) a disaster for Armenian statehood. It was a disaster and I'm glad the younger generation didn't see it. In the 1995 elections we saw such frauds and falsifications done in front of everyone's eyes... I still feel ashamed when I remember it. At that time there were already observers, particularly from Britain. As an NGO, we dealt with hostages, POWs, kidnapped people, and Amnesty International helped us a lot in this matter. In those years, without them, we would not be able to return many people, including those who were given a death sentence. So, when they came to Armenia as observers for the first time in 1995, they already knew me, many of them knew Russian, and the 1995 elections left a terrible impression. The same thing happened again in 1996, and that stigma will not be erased either from the Armenian National Movement’s face nor the face of the Armenian nation. It was a worldwide disgrace.

-The approach, which many Western researchers showed, has very little to do with reality. -What approach? -The opinion that when the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state, collapses, fifteen democratic republics emerge from it.

Eastern Europe has gone through a more normal development at a different pace. They had time to settle down. We didn't have that time, and they convinced us that there was just one step for us to turn from a totalitarian into a democratic republic.

I did not depend on what the minister or the president would say. I had a well-established image. I should not suddenly deviate from that image. (As an ombudsperson), I had such a guarantee of independence that no one else afterwards had.

There were political murders. At that time they were not political in our opinion, but in the 90s, the Armenian National Movement came, and we clearly defined most of the murders as political. What was horrible was that the popular movement, - and now such a movement cannot even exist, 2018 cannot be compared to those years,- the horror that in fact that popular movement was used for purposes unknown to us at that time, it was a cold shower for us.

The emigration that started in 1992 is not accidental. They say that it was because of the war, in fact it was because of political murders that the 1992 emigration started. We are a very close-knit society, and one case is echoed a hundredfold. It becomes a factor. Emigration reached terrible proportions. I consider 1995-1999 the most difficult part of our history. The romanticism that possessed us and many intelligent people in 1980-s was met with a cynicism that I doubt existed in other countries.

When we saw those strangely dressed people in Yerevan, whose clothes resembled the clothes of cosmonauts, we understood that this is not a game, this is very serious. At the end of 1988, the members of the Karabakh Committee were arrested. But it did not bring us caution. In the nineties, we were already going all in. There was no turning back.

When we came to Armenia, Yerevan, I was surprised that they consider us more Azerbaijani than Armenian. They always said that we were Rusified, we didn't even know Armenian, we learned Armenian only here.

It is no coincidence that in the 1980s, the number of students in Russian schools in Armenia was greater than that of Armenian schools. This disease was not unique to Baku. In other words, in all the Soviet republics, the parents worked so that the child would receive a Russian education.

We came to Armenia in 1967, as I said. We were immediately hired on the basis of speaking Russian. The main scientific research institutes (and I started there and continued to work) were always related to Moscow, and speaking the Russian language was (considered) a very good quality.

For me, Baku is a Russian-speaking city. Very few of my contemporaries spoke Armenian. We all spoke Russian. In other words, purely scientific and to some extent creative life was Russian, but as to the cultural life, theater, concerts, Armenian culture was active in the sixties. Being multiracial did not hinder us, children. On the contrary, we seemed to be in some kind of harmony. Everything changed in the sixties, even near the end of the fifties. Let's understand what those years were. Apparently, after Stalin's death, I was in the seventh grade. I was sent to Artek sports camp as a good student, an athlete, and for the first time at the station where the train would leave, I heard the very cute Azerbaijani woman reading the list being very surprised. She said, “Allahverdova Larisa is an Armenian?” At that time, before getting a passport, in the birth certificate, as a rule, the -yan ending was changed to -ova. Later, I had the wits to change it. I received my diploma already written as Allahverdyan. It was a latent, underground policy. But in my memory, my childhood was a pretty good childhood. I practiced sports at the school, I was very active, I felt very comfortable, and we didn't even understand the multi-ethnicity, because we all equally spoke Russian.