Armenian premier explains his statement `Artsakh is Armenia` in 2019 

ArmInfo.  At the 7th Congress of the ruling Civil Contract Party, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan explained why he declared in 2019: "Artsakh is Armenia, period."

"I cannot forget that in 2019, I declared: "Artsakh is Armenia,  period." I have had reason to reflect on that statement, but I  consider it necessary to supplement it. So why did I, who today  experiences the joy of peace, make that statement in 2019? It must  have a very specific reason and explanation. I made that statement  for one simple reason - out of patriotism, because I was a patriot,"  he said.

Pashinyan wondered: "Am I not a patriot today?" "Of course I am a  patriot. No more and no less. I am still the same patriot. So how can  we resolve this dilemma? What is the cause of this glaring  contradiction?" "The reason lies in the model of patriotism, the  formula of patriotism, which I spoke about back in 2020," he  continued.

Pashinyan believes that he is now a patriot who adheres to a model of  patriotism "defined by Armenia's nurturing mothers."

"In 2019, I was a patriot who adhered to the only model of patriotism  available in Armenia at the time. But who defined this model of  patriotism, and how was it formed? This model was the model of  patriotism defined by the Soviet Empire, or more precisely, by its  leaders: Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. We didn't even notice that  before the emergence of a true Armenian ideology, the model of  patriotism that existed in Armenia was largely based on books, songs,  poems, works of art, and plays formed in the 1940s- 1980s." Our  classics, of course, without a doubt, put in a lot of effort and  formulated in these works many organic messages connected with the  true aspirations, emotions and feelings of our people, but all of  this, ultimately, whether we like it or not, whether we accept it or  not, was contained in the Glavlits of the Soviet Union," he pointed  out.

For the uninformed, Pashinyan explained, "Glavlit was an organization  that censored all speeches, all newspaper publications, all books,  paintings, films-all content-and everything that passed through this  Glavlit purgatory was not published."

"Therefore, all those works on which our model of patriotism was  formed, all these works and speeches, were formed under Glavlit  conditions and, therefore, at least to some extent, expressed the  empire's policies and were built around this axis.

That is why, in my address on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of  the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, I wrote the  following: "The model of patriotism that the Soviet Union formed for  us, Armenians, expressed the southwestern orientation of the  ambitions of the USSR, a state that had won World War II and entered  into conflict with the North Atlantic Alliance," he said. This model,  on the other hand, was intended to ensure the export of patriotic  ideas that existed in the Armenian SSR beyond the republic's borders,  preventing their local manifestation. This ideology was imposed for  decades through books, films, plays, and theatrical productions, and  it was precisely our social psychology, shaped in this way, that led  to the Karabakh movement, Pashinyan continued.

"All of us, starting from me and going forward, were bearers of this  social psychology. This social psychology, shaped by the USSR, was  passed on to the generations that formed in the Republic of Armenia  in the 1990s, and the deep, subconscious goal of this social  psychology was the strategic impossibility of the existence of an  independent state of Armenia, since a country in a conflict situation  cannot build genuine independence.

Isn't it clear that organic patriotic impulses naturally existed in  Armenia, and quite strong ones at that? The Soviet Union believed it  was possible to combine business with pleasure. They said: "You are a  patriot, very good, let's direct your patriotism outward, beyond the  borders of the Armenian SSR, to the east, west, north, south." That's  the whole story," the RA Prime Minister said.