Memory Politics Of The Republic Of Armenia

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Over the years, the ever-expanding studies of memory have repeatedly recorded how the remembering [Connerton, 1989; Assmann, 2006, Alexander, 2004, 2012; Eyerman 2004] and silencing/forgetting [Ankersmit, 2003; Connerton, 2009; Assmann, 2019; Эппле, 2020] policies have influenced the construction and transformation of national identities. These issues especially actualize at times of abrupt political upheavals and lead to processing the past. Thus, the collapse of the Soviet System left the newly independent republics to deal not only with the issue of constructing their future but also with the issue of constructing their past. Memory politics and memory landscape in Armenia were largely based on the processes proceeding and leading to Armenia’s independence, as well as the political ideology and rhetoric of consequent ruling parties, with their respective implications for identity construction and nation-building. While both bottom-up and top-down processes have fed the politics, the paper is structured mainly around top-down practices. Generally, memory politics of the Republic of Armenia in 1991-2021 had the following features:

• Largely shaped by nation-state building based on national discourses and narratives put forward during the Karabakh Movement, and further molded by the developments around Karabakh conflict, it evolved around a single-perspective national narrative leaving little space for alternative memory.

• Genocide memory, re-shaped and woven into Karabakh conflict (Marutyan, 2009), has generally prevailed memory politics and memory landscape from monuments, memorials to education and beyond. Silenced in early Soviet period, Genocide memory survived as a latent memory, and since 1965, has been transformed into Collective and even Cultural Trauma (Eyerman, 2004, Alexander, 2004; Шагоян, 2021). After the USSR collapse, it unfolded into Master narrative (cf. Alexander, 2004: 12-15) and influenced other memorial practices, and now it still is in the stage of routinizing/institutionalizing memory (Alexander, 2012).

• Relevant legislation and policies, including official Holiday Calendar, toponymy, monument and memorials, education curriculum, have been effectively utilized to impose the official narrative.
• Despite all these, there were grassroots initiatives that had some success in opposing
official approach as well as creating alternative narratives.