My family participated in the movement. The formation of my personality was probably 99 percent my father's handiwork, and then I started to do some transformations and corrections. I grew up in an anti-Soviet family. There were many repressed people from my mother's side, my father also knew the history of Armenians, as well as all the nuances of the Soviet Union, and he raised us rooted in reality. There were few such children. There were probably none in my class, and in our class of 36, I was probably one of two who actually grew up in reality. The other girl's father was a dissident, mine was just the family of a researcher with an anti-Soviet inclination. I knew everything that existed in this country. And I kept it in me for ten years. I listened to everything from the age of seven. I listened to the "Voice of America" radio station with my father from the age of five, I knew the names of all the journalists, and even said them out loud. My father once heard me saying those names in the yard and asked me to be a little careful.
The first election frauds in Armenia were the first big slap for me, the first big disappointment, the first impossible pain. And now, when I look at these events from the distance of my age, the problem was not so much that the candidate I chose was a miracle, he was definitely good, while the other one was definitely bad. The phenomenon (of fraud) was already violating all our youthful dreams. It was a violation of dreams, this phenomenon that we have to fake, cheat, crush, beat, break, and move forward. That was one of the biggest disappointments.
We are in a very clinical state, we are even in a state in need of treatment, because we have no desire for anything at all - to do anything, to change anything. I don't know, maybe I don't have that energy at my age, but I don't see it in people who are younger than me, so that something changes. It is a society that has suffered a great blow and has been struck by lightning.
We went through a war, and in the First [Karabagh] War, my very dear friends took part, my very dear, close friends were killed, whose loss was so heavy for me that I was drowning, that I asked myself the question: Did you not understand in 1988 that there will be a war? No, I didn't understand. I imagined everything, but war did not cross my mind. After those losses, I was able to want something more for Armenia, to fight, I did whatever I could, I believed that it should be done, it should be changed, but now I don't see it.
It's really my first life, if it was the third, maybe I would understand what they do in such cases. But as a person who can tell based on human relations, judging from life, I think that there needs to be a very big happy thing for people to sober up, not for some government to change... the government must change, that's not what we're talking about, I'm not saying it in a political context. Something huge and joyous should happen for people to want to be well again, because a person does not want to be well when it is a long, continuous clinical condition. There should be a great thing for people to want to be well again.
The beginning of 1988 had psychological layers more than it was a political project. It wasn't specifically anti-Soviet and about independence, but what we were doing, there was a rebellion against the Soviet Union, because we were formed and grew up in a country where there was a line between "allowed" and "not allowed". Generations older than us suffered much more: oppressed, shot, generation of Genocide, their descendants. Everyone had their own complaint. When 1988 began, of course, we said "Karabakh" and only "Karabakh", but I realized in retrospect that everyone had an inherited grievance against the country coming from their family history.
At the age of 18, it was very difficult to imagine what kind of a state would be after the collapse of an empire, and even if I'm very honest, I wasn't particularly interested in what it would be, because for an 18-year-old who was very obsessed with an idea, specifics were not important. What mattered was the process. It was very shocking for us that the state, which seemed endless, gigantic, was a monster, was not present. Its destruction was impossible, and we were in it, we were a part of it, we were the witnesses. No, we did not imagine what kind of state there would be, we only imagined that we were no longer under Moscow's control. The rest, I don't think even those older than me could imagine.
Imagine an 18-year-old, educated, raised and formed in the Soviet Union, a pioneer, communist student standing in front of the Russian soldiers who stood on the perimeter with machine guns and surrounded the Opera House. We stood there, looked them in the eyes and said: “Get out of our country” and some other ugly things. It was unbelievable in the Soviet Union. And we screamed at them while crying, it was not an order like it was during the Soviet years, but a scream with all our heart, suffering in pain, we screamed “Out of our city.” We were fearless, we were free, and maybe a little crazy.
Yes, we were very free, but then it disappeared. In the 1990s, during the tough times during the rule of the Armenian National Movement [The first ruling party of independent Armenia], we were no longer so brave... I don't know why, I can't say why. Because maybe a person is brave and doesn't think about being beaten, doesn't have fear when there is joy in that movement and we are together, we are together and happy. But in the nineties there was no joy anymore, there was war, there were elements of violence in the city.
Lusine Hovhannisyan was born on May 22, 1970 in Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia, in the family of a chemist-engineer and a linguist. She studied in Krupskaya school, now the school No. 19 named after Nikol Aghbalyan. Her father was a holder of anti-Soviet views, mother lived in Baku, the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan until the age of twenty-three. Both parents were from the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region, which is now the internationally unrecognized Republic of Artsakh. Lusine spent a significant part of her childhood in Nagorno Karabakh. In 1987, she was admitted to the Faculty of Philology of Yerevan State University. In February 1988, the Karabakh movement began. From the first days, she was an active participant of the movement together with her father.
In 1990, the Declaration of Independence of Armenia was adopted; on September 21, 1991, Armenia held a referendum and declared itself an independent state. In December of the same year, the USSR disintegrated and officially ceased to exist.
After graduating from the university, Lusine got a job at the weekly newspaper “Ankakhutyun” (Eng. Independence), which started its activity in the Soviet years, under underground conditions. “Independence” was the first independent periodical created in Soviet Armenia. Later, she worked at “Hay Zinvor”, “AR”, “Shrjan”, “Ayjm” TV news stations, and was a correspondent for “Yerkir”, Zham.am, Medialab and “Hetq” news outlets. Currently, she is a columnist for CivilNet online news outlet and a well-known public speaker in Armenia.
In 2018, Lusine Hovhannisyan’s memoir “The year has a lot of seasons” about her ancestral village in Nagorno Karabakh was published, and in 2022, the book “Yereva, Yereva, Yerevan’ [ed. Memoirs about Yerevan]’ was published. Lusine has translated, edited, compiled the diary of Hovsep Yuzbashyan, an engineer born in the city of Shushi, about the life of the city.
