(Davit Abrahamyan/PAN Photo via AP)
Early on Saturday, June 27, 2015, dancing and singing demonstrators protesting a hike in electricity prices blocked the Armenian capital’s main avenue Friday for a fifth straight day. (Davit Abrahamyan/PAN Photo via AP)
Armenia, a small traditionally pro-Russian former Soviet republic, has just experienced a spectacular eruption of mass protests. On the surface, it was against a fairly minor increase in electricity rates. In Moscow, however, conservative journalists sounded alarms, alleging that America was attempting another “regime change” in Russia’s underbelly.
Sociology might offer a less conspiratorial explanation. Big protest movements often appear to be so sudden and spontaneous because they build upon citizens’ prior “micro-mobilizations” around local issues, which took place below the mainstream media’s radar screen. The events in Armenia followed this dynamic.
On June 17, the Armenian government approved a 16.9 percent increase in electricity prices. The next day, a few hundred young people staged a sit-in near Yerevan’s opera house, the traditional site of popular protests since the days of perestroika in the late 1980s. It was widely rumored that the price increase was only to cover up waste and corruption. Their slogan was as emotional as it was vague: No to Robbery!
The original protest seemed easily ignored, so in the evening of June 22, the protesters occupied Marshal Baghramyan Avenue, Yerevan’s main thoroughfare, where both the parliament and presidential palace are located. Monumental traffic jams ensured that Yerevan’s citizens felt this immediately. Curiously, a majority of Yerevantsis did not seem to mind the inconvenience.
Early on June 23, the Armenian police — claiming that they were clearing the obstacles to city traffic — dispersed the demonstrators with water cannons and briefly detained 237 of them.
At this news, Yerevan seemed to explode. Much as had happened in Kiev’s Euromaidan in November 2013, police action provoked a blowback. Now thousands flocked into Baghramyan, including the local media and sports celebrities merrily posing for pictures and taking selfies. Only a couple months earlier, and virtually on the same spot, the Armenian American pop personality Kim Kardashian had been picturing herself during her tour of the ancestral homeland to commemorate the victims of the 1915 Turkish genocide.
The Armenian history of victimhood matters in the classical sense of Durkheimian theory: External conflict fosters cohesion within social groups. Extraordinary conflict, like the memories of genocidal extermination, fosters extraordinary cohesion. This helps explain why, after the first clash had backfired so badly, Armenian authorities carefully avoided using force against fellow Armenians. The protest movement thus obtained its window of political opportunity.
In the following weeks, the protesters stayed behind the barricades of chained trashcans while the police patiently stood in phalanx behind their shields a few paces away. To relieve the psychological tension and plain boredom of protracted face-off, the crowd kept on dancing, waving Armenian flags, making impromptu speeches almost round the clock. All this was broadcast live by Web-based TV channels. For the duration, the safety and fun reigning on Baghramyan Avenue seemed to make it less a protest rally than a popular destination for Yerevantsis’ evening promenades.