Epress.am News from Armenia
Before my work trip to Ukraine, I tried to get from my brother contact details of our mutual friends and acquaintances —people I had met during my visit in 2014.
video in Russian with Armenian subtitles
Grisha lived in Poltava for half his life. Even more. He was born in Baku. They didn’t leave right after the pogroms. He had his chance to call out his teenage friends for the looting. They would get apologetic, saying that nobody from the hood had broken into the homes of the Armenians.
Yerevan was foreign to him, it took more to stay optimistic. Unfamiliar slang, a different Armenian, the dorm and the Russian-speak, against the background of privatisation and a surge of national awakening. I remember meeting my brother at the kamvolni. His face streaked with blood, one eye swollen, clothes torn. We went home. Grisha unplugged the leg of the TV-set and went back out. Around 4 in the morning, four beaten-up men- one with a jaw fracture) barged into our room, accompanied by the cool boys of the neighborhood. My father sat them all on chairs and beds, and asked me and my sister to leave the room.
A year later, Grisha was drafted into the army, we eventually learned it was illegal. The war was still going on. He was taken to the border. One day he walked into the house, grabbed the bottle of sunflower oil, and drank straight from it without saying a word. In the morning, he tore a strip of a bedsheet and left. The fighting and assaults had started already at the Charbakh drafting station. In the military units near the border they weren’t getting food and survived on forest berries. Some soldiers were allowed to go home in exchange for money; others were forced to stand watch at positions for months. The commanders beat my brother severely for complaining out loud. He survived. After being discharged from the hospital, he attacked one of the commanders and the regiment’s lookout with a belt buckle. They took their revenge from Grisha and threw him off a bridge to clear all traces. He survived that, too. He was taken to the psychiatric clinic, where the orderlies walked around with metal sticks.
Gisha left for Samara, and later for Ukraine, where he stayed for 20 years. He did shoemaking, worked in Crimea during the high season, and when he had no gigs, he was a cook at a barbeque stand.
I went to Poltava from Kiev after the Maidan.nGrisha and his wife did not share my enthusiasm, “Yura, nothing is so one-sided. Look at what things were like in our neighborhood- almost every building entrance had a Right Sector outpost, with drunken teens hanging around.
Two years after that, we had a big fight over Skype. When Azerbaijan was attacking Karabakh for four days in April. I was saying that the truth is neither Armenian nor Azerbaijani, that the poor are getting slaughtered and tortured. Grisha asked me to put my hand on my heart and answer him:Who is guilty? Who started it? You know we are on the right side, don’t you? Maybe it doesn’t fit you to say it straight, but you do remember where our home was left, why we are in a dorm now, who drove us out, how our mom died.
Grisha and his family couldn’t take it in Poltava any longer and decided to leave. The final straw was his daughter’s issues in the fee-paying school. A classmate was bullying her. The mother tried to sort things out, but the headmaster said that the boy bullied everyone, only they were the ones complaining. The father of the “naughty” boy worked at the municipality and the wife of my brother should not forget that they were living in a free, independent, orthodox and slavic country.
They moved to Armenia. Olya liked it here. It was safe and the kids were treated kindly. There were no jobs, and my brother never learned the local ways of doing business. “..for this wages, and I’m expected to overwork and get sniffed at, I will kick his ass. This place isn’t for me.
After the Armenian Maidan — the Velvet Revolution — Grisha and his family moved to another orthodox, slavic country: Irkutsk.
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— Yur, please listen to me. Just understand the main point, even though I’m not speaking in hidden meanings or anything.
The issue is not about your work — that’s already secondary. When I found out you were going there, I got excited.
You know, I have a friend there, with his family. No one is against you meeting or calling people.
I’m talking about personal matters. I’m saying this about Medved specifically: you want to take his number, to contact him.
He knows nothing about our relationship, he has no idea that we tend to get in touch once a year, and talk. That you don’t know my matters, and I don’t know yours.
Do you understand? He acted like a total jerk toward me. I’m not choosing my words here.
I just want you to understand me as clearly as possible. To understand that this person acted very ugly.
That’s it. You want to call him, talk, or meet. I would prefer that you go and see Maf.
Also my money is there, and so on and so forth. And you would hear not a professional Ukrainian, but a completely ordinary person,
who lives, works, raises kids there and so on. But unfortunately, that topic gets left out.
Do you get it? And you’re telling me… I understand you, but is it really impossible to do that without that specific person, who in any case…
I’m the one who introduced him to you, right? And I’m not on good terms with him. I don’t even know how to explain this to you.
You can call him, yeah, on the phone, and ask questions. He will invite you over, treat you, have a chat with you and all that.
But how will all that look against the background of my relationship with him, and everyone’s? Maf will find out that Yura came and hung out with that jerk,
While Maf and I had arguments because of him. About how he badmouths me, and so on.
I just don’t get it. Don’t you see? I don’t know. I’ll say it again: your work is nothing to me; I don’t care what you are after, what information or material you want to put together.
You can as well take a parrot, talk to the parrot — it will tell you whatever you want. It will be the same with him, 99%.
No one will tell you the truth — the truth they know or suspect but are afraid to say.
Again, I’m repeating myself: this is secondary to me. Not that I don’t care at all, but it’s secondary.
In this context, you ask me for that person’s contacts… you make me repeat myself. I don’t understand.