The Post-Soviet Revolution in Armenia: Victory, Defeat, and Possible Future

This chapter analyses the 2018 Revolution in Armenia, which had both features of a liberal color revolution and profound specific national features. The authors consider its historical background, causes, course, and consequences. Derluguian and Hovhannisyan try to answer the question: Why did the post-communist restoration in Armenia end so suddenly and non-violently? The answer to this question operates in both the historical longue durée and the shortest time of political conjuncture. Geopolitics primarily explains the peculiar form of Armenian Christianity which had bounded an ethnic nation long before modern nationalism. The same geopolitics at the fault lines between the major empires of Western Asia led to the destruction of Armenia’s warrior nobility, reducing Armenia’s social structure to the proverbial nation of ‘priests and cobblers’. Above all, the Young Turk genocide unleashed in 1915 fostered extraordinary solidarity within the globally-dispersed Armenian nation preventing the use of state force against fellow Armenians. Coupled with the political ‘missteps’ structurally inherent in the post-Soviet patrimonial presidencies, all this made possible the amazingly swift and sweeping victory of the national protest movement. The authors conclude that the overdetermined defeat in the 2020 Karabagh war crashed the naively liberal revolution. Yet the double-shocks of revolution and lost war may yet produce a developmental state as the sole remaining road to national survival.