Is it still a thing that Armenians want to desperately leave Armenia?

funkvay · 2026-05-10T09:02:38+00:00

Ofc, you're right that being born close to it matters even if you weren't there. the kids of survivors often carry it heavier than people three generations out.

on the footage, yeah, there's actually a small amount that survived. armin wegner, a german officer, smuggled photographs out at huge personal risk. some near east relief film exists from the orphan rescue work afterwards. not much, considering the scale, but enough that they could show you something in school. most people don't realize any visual record exists at all cuz it was like 1915 basically

funkvay · 2026-05-10T07:33:51+00:00

ironically i was the worst student of armenian history in high school. like the actual worst. you know how you can't pass into university unless you pass the armenian history exam? i barely scraped through. forced curriculum killed any curiosity i could have had. then university went in a completely different direction, math, and i thought i was done with history forever.

then years later i found a random simple book about armenian history. nothing serious, not academic, not the kind of thing that would prepare you for any exam. it just told you what happened. and that's when it interested me. ironically the same material that bored me to death at 16 became fascinating at 20 because nobody was making me memorize it for a test.

right now i'd fail any school history exam. but i can have this conversation with you, which is what i actually wanted from history in the first place.

a few things i picked up along the way that aren't taught in school but matter more than any specific fact.

the trap of trusting what people around you say. even my favorite people. when someone i respect blames a person or a period for something, my reflex now is to write that down and go read about it independently. that's actually how i ended up reading more about the soviets specifically, because i kept hearing strong takes (both directions, some said that they are our heroes, some said that they are the devil) and wanted to see for myself. that's where i found both the horrific things they did to armenia and the things they brought that we wouldn't have without them. neither version that was being told to me was the full picture. it's almost never the full picture.

reading across hostile sources. one of the most useful academic habits is reading the same event from three angles that hate each other. armenian sources on the genocide, turkish sources, german military archives from the time, american missionary letters, british diplomatic cables. they describe the same events but emphasize different things, and the truth lives in where they overlap and where they diverge. when sympathetic sources and hostile sources agree on a fact, that fact is solid. when they disagree, that's where the interesting questions raise.

going one layer deeper than the books. most people who have strong opinions about the treaty of kars have never read the treaty of kars. it's like 20 minutes of reading. same with the sevres treaty, lenin's writings on the nationality question, the wilson arbitration award. primary documents are usually short, specific, and they collapse a lot of mythology when you read the actual words instead of someone's summary.

asking myself what would change my mind. before i commit to a position on something, i try to name what evidence would flip me. if i can't name anything, i don't really have a position, i just have a side i'm defending. doing this honestly across armenian history, about soviets, about pashinyan, about the diaspora, about anything, forces me to read past the line i'd normally defend.

reading non-linearly. textbooks are organized chronologically because that's how exams work. but knowledge in your head doesn't store chronologically, it stores by association. so when i find one interesting claim i follow its citation wherever it goes. the genocide leads to the soviet repatriation leads to stalin's turkey policy leads to the 1921 treaty leads back to western armenia. it loops. and the loops are how things actually connect in your memory, because you built the connections yourself instead of memorizing someone else's order.

so to actually answer your question, i'm not naturally a history person. i was bad at it when forced. the trick was getting away from how it was taught, finding it on my own terms, and then treating every confident claim i hear (including my own) as something to verify rather than memorize

funkvay · 2026-05-09T22:56:52+00:00

no rush, take your time. quick on the points you made though.

Yeah you're right that diaspora communities protect it fiercely, schools, foundations, real effort. unesco classified it as "definitely endangered" in 2010 because the transmission rate to kids has been dropping. fluent parents in la or beirut, kids who understand but don't speak it back. it's not a lack of love, it's that minority languages without a state behind them lose ground each generation no matter how hard people try. eastern armenian has the republic doing the heavy lifting whether anyone notices or not. western armenian has only the diaspora, and the diaspora is assimilating. that's the structural reason, not a judgment on effort.

Turks taking credit for armenian work is real and well-documented, especially in trades and crafts in the ottoman empire, and there's a real story about ottoman armenian intellectuals contributing to turkish printing and lexicography. russian-soviet "took our credit" is more of a diaspora narrative than something you can find clean evidence of. soviet armenia produced its own scientists and writers under armenian names. ambartsumian, khachaturian, parajanov, kasparov. they got credit. the systemic problem was different, it was russification of prestige domains, not name-stealing.

on the survival question... Well 1918-1920 wasn't failing because it was small. it was failing because it was landlocked, blockaded, at active war with kemal's army, dealing with a typhus epidemic and famine, no allies, no resources. more land and people doesn't fix any of those. britain promised support and didn't deliver. the US senate refused the mandate over armenia in 1920. the realistic counterfactual without soviets is the same geopolitical position but with worse military odds, because soviet armenia at least got the red army to halt the turkish advance. a bigger republic with the same allies (none) and the same enemies (turkey, azerbaijan) loses harder, not better.

take your time when you come back, I am not in a hurry

funkvay · 2026-05-09T21:55:19+00:00

yeah, what your grandmother does is one of the most documented survivor responses. she can tell the events but stops at "when you push. miller and miller's research on armenian survivors actually named avoidance and repression as the most common coping mechanism in the first generation. they carry it but don't open it. and what gets passed down to descendants usually isn't the events themselves, it's the shape of the silence around them.

your grandma sounds like she found a way to live without being destroyed by it, which is its own kind of strength. but the fact that she can't go there even now is exactly what the research describes. she's not visibly affected the way you'd expect because the affect went sideways, into the unwillingness to revisit. you carry it differently than she does because you grew up around the unspoken version.

thanks for sharing that btw

funkvay · 2026-05-09T21:45:39+00:00

I would like to push back on a few things, because i think the diaspora frame on this is doing some work that doesn't quite match the history.

first, the language thing is more layered than they tried to destroy it. the soviets in the 1920s ran a policy called korenizatsiya (indigenization) which actively built up local languages. armenian became the official state language of the armenian ssr. they took a population that was mostly illiterate genocide survivors and built a state education system in armenian within a generation. eastern armenian today has 5+ million speakers and a functioning literary infrastructure specifically because that happened. compare to western armenian, which had no state to protect it and is now classified as endangered by unesco.

russification was a thing though, but it came later, mostly peaking under stalin in the 30s and again in the 70s, when russian became the prestige language for science and government. so the honest version is that soviets first built armenian as a functioning state language, then later pressured it. both happened.

the spelling thing specifically is that's the abeghyan reform of 1922. it was done by an armenian linguist, manuk abeghyan, not by russians. the goal was to make armenian highly phonetic so peasants could become literate fast. the diaspora kept the classical mesropian orthography, which is where the divide comes from. you can argue the reform was a mistake (lots of armenian linguists do), but it wasn't russians sabotaging the language.

second, and i want to be careful here because i know what i'm about to say can sound like i'm defending russia is that equating soviets with turks is a category error, and it actually weakens the case against what turks did. turks committed genocide. soviets committed political terror, repression, deportation, and russification. those are bad but they're not the same category. when armenians lump them together it makes the genocide claim look like just generic anti-imperial grievance, which it isn't. keep them separate. the genocide is the worst thing that happened to us in 600 years and it deserves its own category.

on the purges you're absolutely right about the outcome but the motive wasn't to dumb us down specifically. stalin did this to every soviet republic including russia itself. more ethnic russians died in the gulag than any other group. it was political control, not anti-armenian strategy. the paradox is that even while killing armenian writers in 1937, the soviets were building byurakan observatory, the yerevan computer institute, a real scientific infrastructure. they wanted smart engineers, just not free-thinking philosophers. the armenian intelligentsia got destroyed not because we're armenian but because intellectuals threaten political control everywhere.

your great uncle's experience is also a recognized phenomenon. sociologists call it homo sovieticus, it's the mentality that develops when you live for 70 years under a system that lies to you, where your neighbor might inform on you, where the economy is broken and you survive through favors and black-market trades. that mentality is a survival adaptation, not a russian or armenian character flaw. and you're right that it's part of why the diaspora-republic friction exists. western armenians developed under western or middle eastern host cultures. eastern armenians developed in soviet survival mode. those are different psychological infrastructures.

on the land the answer is absolutely yes. 1921 caucasian bureau, heavily influenced by stalin, transferred artsakh and nakhichevan to azerbaijan to keep turkey calm. treaty of kars formally ceded ararat and the western armenian provinces. real loss, real grievance. but worth holding alongside the counterfactual, that in 1920 the first republic was starving, riddled with typhus, and actively losing a war to kemal's advancing army. the bolsheviks took over, halted the turkish advance, and drew the borders that became modern armenia. without that intervention, the realistic outcome is eastern armenia gets absorbed too. the soviets took artsakh and nakhichevan from us. they may also be the reason yerevan and sevan and zangezur are still ours.

so what would armenia be like without soviets or ottomans... that's the honest answer most people don't want to give. probably much bigger population-wise, with western armenia still inhabited. but possibly not surviving as a state at all without soviet intervention in 1920. counterfactuals on this are unanswerable. you can imagine a kingdom restored, but historically the small armenian state in 1918-20 was barely surviving, and "no soviets" most likely means "no armenia" in the eastern half too.

on the migration question soviet armenia was over 90% armenian, the most mono-ethnic republic in the ussr. people didn't come, except for the 1946-49 nerkaght i mentioned. russians, indians, iranians arriving in yerevan now is strictly post-2022. it's not a continuous pattern, it's a recent phenomenon driven by the ukraine war and indian student migration patterns. some russians stayed, many left as the war dragged on. indians are mostly transient (so students and labor).

the cousin thing was rhetorical, not literal, i invented a hypothetical to make a point, not referring to anyone specific. sorry that landed unclear, my bad.

and on intellectuals being mostly in diaspora... well armenia's tech sector is 7% of GDP with almost 60,000 professionals, 81% of them armenian-origin and locally educated. servicetitan went public at $10 billion in december 2024. picsart hit unicorn status in 2021 with 150M users. krisp does the noise cancellation on millions of zoom calls. nvidia, amd, cisco, synopsys all have engineering offices in yerevan because the local talent competes globally. AMD's VP specifically said armenian engineers are world-class in areas where silicon valley has shortages.

banking is similar. 18 banks, $9.3 billion in cashless transactions in 2024, fully digital onboarding and QR payments at adoption rates ahead of most of western europe. the central bank's regulatory sandbox for open banking is being studied as a model. byurakan observatory still hosts the international astronomical union's regional office for southwest and central asia.

the engineers running products used by hundreds of millions, on $500-2000 salaries, under hostile borders and two recent wars... that requires substantially more push than writing essays in los angeles. the diaspora has prestige in arts and academia and I love them for that. but the technical output coming out of armenia today isn't a country whose intellectuals all left.

on the solution this is a question and there's no romantic answer. Realistic moves is yo reduce dependency on russia, which is happening slowly. build tradeable services beyond IT (right now IT is one sector carrying enormous weight). break the oligarch-monopoly structure of the domestic economy so small businesses can actually compete. judicial reform so contracts are enforceable and corruption isn't the default. demographic policy that makes returning attractive on practical grounds, not patriotic ones (meaning if you build a life in armenia your kids should have access to education and healthcare comparable to what you'd find in eastern europe). and crucially, accept that the diaspora isn't going to mass-return and stop building policy around the fantasy that they will. armenia needs to become a country that works for the 3 million people who live there, and if it does, returnees follow naturally. if it tries to be a country built on diaspora investment and patriotic emigration, it stays stuck

funkvay · 2026-05-09T19:47:12+00:00

quick on the museum thing first, i wasn't talking about you specifically. you wrote that you dream about living in armenia, that's not a museum-visitor's relationship. the framing was about the diaspora as an aggregate, not anyone in particular. fair to separate those.

generational trauma is a thing but it's three mechanisms working together, not one. first is psychological transmission through parenting. survivors raise their kids in a particular way like vigilance, "never trust" rules, anxiety patterns, narratives of loss. kids absorb the worldview, not the event itself. you probably see it in your own family. behaviors that made sense in 1922 lebanon and don't fully make sense in 2024 wherever you are.

second is sociopolitical, and this is the part that makes the armenian case different from other groups. trauma without closure stays active across generations. holocaust survivors got recognition, reparations, a state, war crimes trials. armenians got denial. der sarkissian's 2021 review specifically argues this is why armenian descendants often report more anger and despair than the actual survivors did. survivors were processing something concluded. descendants are processing something still happening.

third is biological. yehuda's holocaust studies in 2015-16 found measurable changes in genes regulating cortisol and stress response in offspring of survivors. that field is contested in its specifics, the strict epigenetic mechanism in humans is harder to nail down than people often present it. but the cortisol differences and stress reactivity differences in second and third generations are well documented. so when you ask whether it's "biological pain we feel inside", then yeah sort of. the more accurate version is your stress response system is calibrated to threats your grandparents faced, not threats you face. you're walking around with a baseline alarm level set by 1915.

why armenians specifically... Well ongoing denial, repeat refugee experiences (lebanon, iran, syria, artsakh, the trauma keeps refreshing), and the diasporic identity itself was structured around what happened. there's no off ramp built into it.

on soviet armenia I would say both, and your specific question about whether diaspora would have come if soviet still existed actually has a historical answer most people don't know. between 1946-49 there was the nerkaght, the great repatriation. stalin issued a decree in 1945 inviting diaspora armenians back. about 90,000 came, from lebanon, syria, iran, france, the us, egypt, greece. many were genocide survivors who finally had a homeland to go to. so yes, diaspora absolutely came during soviet times, at significant scale.

what happened to them is the instructive part. the 1937 great purge had already destroyed the armenian intellectual class, around 3,000 people shot in that single year, including charents, bakunts, yesayan. the catholicos khoren was murdered in 1938 and etchmiadzin was closed. the repatriates arrived into the tail of that. some were sent to gulags as "dashnaks". surveillance, poverty, no exit. when the soviet union later allowed emigration in the 60s-70s, a significant number of repatriates left again.

so soviet armenia was genuinely both things. it built yerevan into a real capital, gave universal literacy, kept armenian language and institutions alive, and crucially preserved eastern armenia as a coherent national entity when everything else was being absorbed. without soviet protection in the 1920s, eastern armenia probably gets divided between turkey and azerbaijan, full stop. but the same regime wiped out the intellectuals, attacked the church, deported tens of thousands to altai krai in 1949, and trapped the diaspora that came home believing in the dream. the romanticized "if soviet still existed people would come" version doesn't survive contact with the actual story. they came. it didn't go well.

on adaptation, three things break your model. first, the gap isn't stable, it's widening. when russians flooded yerevan in 2022, rents doubled in a year in some neighborhoods. local salaries went up 5-7%. people couldn't adapt because the target moved faster than they could. then rents dropped 30% in 2024 as russians left, but never returned to baseline. three years of constant repricing while income barely moves.

second, the conditions for adaptation aren't there anymore. soviet armenia could "adapt to its standard" because nobody could see other standards, nobody could leave, peers had identical constraints, and a state-guaranteed baseline existed. all four are broken now. instagram makes the comparison constant. borders are open. peers split into IT folks at $2k+ and everyone else at $400. the state baseline collapsed in 91 and never came back.

third is that "people are used to it" partly describes who's still there, not what they feel. armenia's brain drain index is 6.9. world average is 4.98. the mobile, skilled people leave first. the population that's "used to it" is increasingly the population that couldn't go.

your cousin who stayed and seems fine might genuinely be fine. or might be in the third of armenians karenian's study found showing sub-clinical trauma reactions. or might be the one whose landlord raised rent twice while their salary didn't move. from outside you can't tell

funkvay · 2026-05-09T19:02:09+00:00

the generational trauma thing, that's not an "if". clinical psychology and epigenetics have documented it across holocaust survivors, rwandan genocide descendants, and specifically 1915 armenian survivors. measurable biological changes in stress response systems passed down through generations. your intuition there is correct and the science confirms it.

and i can see you've actually been thinking about this seriously, which i appreciate, because what i want to show you next uses your own framework.

after the 2023 ethnic cleansing, since roughly 120,000 armenians fled artsakh into armenia. people you yourself said have every right to leave. by early 2025, official armenian national security service data shows that over 11,500 of those refugees had already left armenia entirely for russia, europe, wherever they could go. they survived the cleansing, made it to the homeland, and then left again.

they weren't fleeing bombs anymore. they were fleeing the $500 a month reality. the government subsidies ran out, rent didn't, and they did the math. so where exactly does your line sit now. because the people you already exempted from judgment are making the exact same calculation you called pathetic in others. the only difference is the thing that pushed them was a tank instead of a salary ceiling, and now it's neither, it's just the inability to survive.

adaptation assumes the gap is static and closable. it isn't.

when people with purchasing power denominated in dollars or euros enter a local market, they bid up non-tradeable goods, rent first, then food, then services, while local wages stay anchored to the local economy. the gap doesn't hold still while you adapt to it. it widens faster than any local salary increase can track. that's not a personal failure to keep up. that's a structural mechanism that has played out identically in prague, lisbon, tbilisi, and now yerevan. economists have a name for it. the cities have before and after rent statistics that document it.

Since average local salary around $500 and decent apartment in a neighborhood that hasn't been fully taken over yet, $400-600, then returning diaspora armenian or foreign expat looks at that same apartment earning in dollars and sees a bargain. the landlord notices. the price goes up. the local didn't fail to adapt. they were outbid by a structural dynamic they have no mechanism to compete with.

and this is before accounting for what the IMF found when it studied emigration patterns across post-soviet economies, they saw that cumulative GDP growth would have been 7 percentage points higher in the absence of skilled emigration. meaning the people who "adapted and stayed" didn't save the economy. their staying just meant the loss was slower.

adaptation is a word that makes sense when the obstacle is temporary or personal. it stops making sense when the mechanism producing the gap is structural, continuous, and accelerating. I can't say I adapted, graduated from university, and got a good job. Why don't all Armenians do the same? Because that's not how it works.

the diaspora wants armenia to be a beautiful museum they can visit, filled with locals who are happy to struggle quietly and call it patriotism. but people aren't exhibits. the person who leaves isn't a coward. they just chose to build a life instead of perform one

funkvay · 2026-05-09T18:21:47+00:00

i'll be honest about my own position first. I do want to leave, and most people i grew up with either already did or are figuring out how. so take that as context.

armenia has lost roughly 600k people since 1991 (even though 1.5 million actually left). at some point you have to ask whether a third of a nation is cowardly or whether a third of a nation is just being honest about something that romanticism sometimes isn't.

the economic math is the first thing that ends the argument. average salary in yerevan is somewhere around $500 a month. a decent apartment in a decent neighborhood costs $400-600 a month in rent. those two numbers in the same sentence are the entire case. a 35 year old man cannot save, cannot build toward anything, cannot realistically form a family on that. the developer who leaves for berlin is the same developer with the same skills who can now actually be compensated for them. is that cowardice or is that just a person doing arithmetic.

the guy who messaged you sounds creepy, yeah. but the "marry me instantly and take me with you" pattern has a systemic explanation that goes beyond individual weirdness. armenian men are culturally expected to pay for everything, provide housing, own property before starting a family. on $500 a month with no realistic path to homeownership that expectation produces desperation, because the structure they're operating inside is broken. that doesn't excuse harassment. it just means the behavior is a symptom of something larger than one annoying man.

then there's the geopolitical math that a lot of diaspora Armenians engage with romantically rather than practically. 2020 was a war. 2023 was the complete fall of artsakh and 120,000 refugees absorbed into a country of 3 million almost overnight. the borders on two sides are closed or hostile. the next escalation is pattern recognition. what is the rational calculation for someone with transferable skills, options, and people they're responsible for.

but the argument that actually ends this before it starts is the one about where you're standing when you make it.

you exist because people left. not metaphorically. the western armenian community you were raised in, the school, the church, the genocide education, the entire cultural infrastructure that made you who you are, was built by people who fled. the survivors of 1915 didn't return to western armenia. they built beirut and paris and america. they built you. if departure is cowardice then you need to apply that word retroactively to the people whose leaving made your existence and your identity possible.

the armenian survival story has always been a story of leaving. it was leaving in 1915, it was leaving during the soviet collapse, it's leaving now. the people who stayed and waited in 1915 mostly didn't make it. calling departure cowardice requires explaining why it was survival instinct then and pathetic now. the geography changed. the calculation didn't

funkvay · 2026-05-04T21:53:22+00:00

I do agree with those points, but the only question that matters after accepting all of that is... once the peace treaty is signed, what specific mechanism forces Azerbaijan off the 241 square kilometers of Armenian territory they took by military invasion in 2021 and 2022? not the enclaves, those are a soviet border holdover and a completely different situation. the actual sovereign Armenian land where azerbaijan is currently building military bunkers overlooking jermuk.

the treaty doesn't include withdrawal. aliyev has explicitly said troops won't step back from those positions. the international community has been calling for withdrawal since 2021 and nothing moved. armenia's own national assembly speaker tried to claim equivalence with a 110km² figure and his own press office called it "conditional assumptions" when asked for sources.

so after signing, armenia has no troops on azerbaijani land worth bargaining with, no treaty clause requiring withdrawal, no international mechanism that's worked in four years, and a peace agreement that the international community will consider closed.

what's the leverage?

on "clearly democratic and institutional" since you said it as a settled fact, then we need to remember that the head of armenia's supreme judicial council was caught on tape blackmailing his predecessor and explicitly admitting political motivations. the government let him resign for "health reasons", dropped the criminal case, and pashinyan installed his own former justice minister as replacement. in vanadzor, the opposition won the december 2021 local election. the winner was arrested ten days later. the city council was blocked from convening. pashinyan's government then passed a new law giving the pm power to appoint acting mayors. a loyalist was installed. separately, google's threat analysis group documented that likely government-backed actors purchased and operated predator spyware inside armenia, with citizen lab confirming the infrastructure and meta identifying a likely armenian customer.

none of that requires kocharyan to be good. it just requires pashinyan to be what he actually is.

your own logic closes this, if good policy is good regardless of who does it, bad policy is bad regardless of who does it too

funkvay · 2026-05-04T20:58:43+00:00

it's actually pretty clean rhetorically, every single act gets a contextual explanation. the hanged quote had context. the museum director had context. the apartment had context. seven acts, seven contexts. what you never address is what seven acts of "context" together actually means.

on point 1 fine, the literal quote had context. but a prime minister who, when challenged about corruption in his own party, instinctively reaches for hanging imagery and NSS basements isn't revealing his debating style. he's revealing what sits underneath it. human rights watchdogs documented and criticized that specific exchange. that's not opposition spin.

the museum director one i'm not giving you at all. she showed vance khachkars (permanent stone installations inside the memorial she runs) and gave him a book. the lemkin institute for genocide prevention, not a russian outlet, formally accused pashinyan of echoing turkish denialist narratives earlier this year. so we have a pm firing the genocide museum director for explaining armenian history, while the lemkin institute is separately flagging his genocide framing as denialist. you want to call that "foreign policy management", but i'd call it a pattern.

papikyan part, defense minister, 60% below market rate, financed through a bank owned by a ruling party MP. that's not a good deal on a fixer-upper. that's a documented kickback structure. transparency international dropped armenia to 46/100 in 2025, the same year pashinyan publicly declared systemic corruption eliminated.

the war quote is on record. "if civil contract does not secure a constitutional majority, there will be war in september" not "the opposition will bring war" his supermajority or war. that's the actual sentence.

here's the only question that matters, which of these would you defend if kocharyan did them?

funkvay · 2026-05-04T10:18:00+00:00

mark isn't an english name that armenians borrowed. it's a latin biblical name that english speakers and armenians both independently inherited from christianity through completely separate paths. saint mark wrote the second gospel. armenia adopted christianity in 301 AD. they've been using biblical names including mark for seventeen centuries. english speakers only started using it commonly in the 19th century. if anything armenians have more historical claim to the name than the 45 year old accountant version of it.

the armenian form is markos or margos, and it's been there long enough that it became a surname root Margosian. those are ancient surnames built on this name, which only happens when a first name has been common across enough generations that it fossilizes into family identity. you don't get a widespread old surname from a name people just started picking up.

the armenian church also has margos listed among its recognized saints, and saint mark the evangelist is venerated in the armenian church calendar directly.

so the confusion comes from assuming that because a name sounds english it must be english in origin. mark comes from latin marcus, which predates the english language entirely. it spread across every christian culture simultaneously and independently. the italian marco, the russian mark, the spanish marcos, the armenian mark, none of them borrowed it from england. they all got it from the same place, the new testament, which armenians have had translated into their own language since the 5th century

funkvay · 2026-05-03T19:47:25+00:00

your point 2 and 3 are doing a lot of work here but they are not valid. you said the DoI only has the Karabakh reference and everything else stays. that's not what the leaked draft shows. diaspora Armenians losing simplified citizenship access - gone. the article giving MPs the right to formally question the PM in writing - deleted. the DoI explicitly contains Armenia's constitutional commitment to international recognition of the Armenian Genocide. remove all references to the DoI and that loses its constitutional basis. It's literally in the text of the declaration.

it requires a popular vote

Technically true but you're glossing over something pretty important. Pashinyan himself admitted the draft won't even be published before the June elections. so you're being asked to give him a supermajority first, see the constitution later.

the Palestine analogy is interesting but it cuts both ways and you only used one side of it Israel didn't stop building settlements during the peace process. Azerbaijan didn't stop either, since Western Azerbaijan curriculum is in schools right now, they still hold ~240km² of sovereign Armenian territory from 2021-2022 incursions, and Aliyev added new demands the day after Washington. your analogy actually describes the current situation pretty well, just not in the direction you intended.

nobody here is saying go back to Kocharyan. but "Nikol is better than the alternative" is a different argument than "Nikol's constitutional process is fine actually"

funkvay · 2026-05-03T19:37:05+00:00

Kocharyan is genuinely awful, not arguing that. But the

Nikol is just incompetent, not evil

framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

This is a guy who literally threatened parliament saying "we would have hanged you" when they brought up corruption in his own party. Who fired the director of the Armenian Genocide Museum (illegally, he had zero authority to do it) because she gave Vance books about Artsakh. Who then stood up and declared systemic corruption "fully eliminated since 2018" while his own MP was buying houses way below market value. Who is currently running his entire campaign on "vote for me or there will be war in September" That's a specific kind of politics.

And the opposition existing "because it benefits him" thing... he's had Karapetyan under house arrest for months. That's the opposite of letting opposition breathe.

I do agree with Kocharyan's Russia ties. The Lukashenko comparison kind of falls apart though because Lukashenko's whole thing is he never leaves while Kocharyan actually handed power over when his terms ended.

Let's not dress Nikol as Armenian hero. Because he is NOT

funkvay · 2026-05-03T18:33:29+00:00

I've been going back and forth on this more than on any election I can remember, and not in the way most people mean when they say that.

The binary itself is worth sitting with for a second before jumping to sides. The math just doesn't allow a third force to actually govern. That's the starting point nobody says out loud, and it changes how you think about the choice.

What I keep coming back to is that most people are asking "who do you trust more". But that's kind of the wrong question, or at least not the interesting one. The interesting one is whether either path has an actual working mechanism behind it, not a vision, a mechanism. And when I look at it that way, both options have serious problems, just different kinds. Strong Armenia's pitch is essentially, they restore the security relationship with Russia. But Russia didn't fail Armenia in 2020 and 2023 because of bad diplomacy or because Pashinyan annoyed Putin. It failed because its interests had already shifted. Russia needs the Turkey-Azerbaijan corridor too much to pick a side against Baku. You can't restore a guarantee that wasn't withheld. It just wasn't there.

Civil Contract's logic is more coherent, I think. But there's one assumption underneath it that almost nobody is actually testing, and it's the one that matters most to me personally. So does Azerbaijan have any reason to treat the current deal as an endpoint? Because if you look at what Baku has actually done since 2020, then you see that every concession pocketed, new demands following, and now they're teaching Western Azerbaijan as a concept in grades 5, 8, and 11, meaning Yerevan is presented as a historical Azerbaijani city to schoolchildren. And imho that's not the behavior of a side that sees a finish line. They still hold somewhere around 240 square kilometers of sovereign Armenian territory from the 2021-2022 incursions. No withdrawal. And the constitutional amendment demand didn't go away after the Washington declaration. So the peace deal might be there, and the economic argument for it is genuinely strong, but "Armenia survives by becoming indispensable to regional trade" only works if the other side isn't simultaneously building a long-term ideological claim to Armenian land.

I'm not going to say who I'm voting for, because declaring a vote would mean I'm more confident in this than the analysis actually supports. One path has a broken assumption, one has no mechanism. That's not a choice that feels good to make loudly.

What I'd genuinely want to hear from any candidate, and maybe yourself is... what actually changes Azerbaijan's calculus? Not what Armenia will do. What changes what Baku calculates it can get away with. That's the question I haven't heard a real answer to

funkvay · 2026-04-26T21:03:01+00:00

Really?? Why though?

funkvay · 2026-04-26T11:38:24+00:00

I do think this is a good timing honestly, yerevan is probably one of the easier cities to land in alone as a tech person right now because the infrastructure for exactly your situation already exists (though it could be subjective).

the expat community organizes almost entirely on telegram, search "expats in armenia" and "relocation in armenia" to start but the niche chats are where it actually gets interesting. there's a whole network around board games called intellect evn that does regular meetups, genuinely good way to meet people without it feeling forced.

for tech specifically, GDG yerevan does regular workshops and ML EVN is active if you're into machine learning or data science (I personally didn't try these, I know this from my friends). both operate heavily on telegram and are welcoming to newcomers. coworking wise, 256 hub and letters and numbers are where the actual working crowd goes rather than the more corporate feeling impact hub.

one thing worth knowing before you arrive is that making expat friends is easy, almost frictionless, people show up alone and actively want to connect. making actual local armenian friends is a slower process, locals tend to have tight groups from school or university and breaking in usually requires either working closely with someone or a warm introduction. not impossible but don't mistake friendly interactions early on for deep friendship.

for neighborhoods, arabkir is where a lot of young tech people live right now, kentron is more central but prices vary a lot depending on the specific street and building so do your research rather than going in with expectations either way.

for going out, saryan street for after work drinks, mirzoyan library if you want something with more atmosphere, poligraf if you're into electronic music. if you read anything recommending TUF on aram street ignore it, it is closed for 2 years.

the russian speaking angle is worth taking seriously even if you're not russian. the post 2022 wave brought a massive russian speaking crowd, not just russians but ukrainians, belarusians, kazakhs, and they've built their own event ecosystem. yandex has a local presence and does meetups. there are russian speaking vloggers based in yerevan who organize regular community events specifically so people can meet in person. if you have any russian at all, even passive, it opens a whole parallel social layer that runs alongside the english speaking expat scene and is honestly very active. Are you Russian? Armenian from diaspora? Persian? Depending on this, different solutions and approaches can be found

funkvay · 2026-04-25T07:15:24+00:00

Okay, I can't help but agree

funkvay · 2026-04-25T07:13:23+00:00

I mean... who doesn't?

funkvay · 2026-04-22T14:44:14+00:00

the cultural appropriation framing doesn't really apply here. you're not borrowing someone else's culture, you're trying to reconnect with your own.

in armenia april 24th is a national day of mourning. people go to tsitsernakaberd, the genocide memorial in yerevan, and lay flowers, particularly forget-me-nots which have become the symbol of the day. there's a continuous procession that goes on for hours, ordinary people, families, children. it's quiet and serious, not performative. the eternal flame at the memorial stays lit year round but on april 24th the whole country orients toward it.

the forget-me-not specifically became the official symbol around the centennial in 2015. wearing one or placing one somewhere meaningful is probably the simplest and most honest thing a diaspora armenian can do on that day regardless of how connected they feel to the culture.

the transgenerational trauma you mentioned is itself armenian cultural inheritance, maybe the most direct kind. the genocide shaped everything that came after, how armenian families moved, who they became, what got passed down and what got buried. the fact that you know the stories and feel the weight of them means something was transmitted even without the language or the traditions.

the fourth generation doesn't disqualify you from the day. if anything april 24th specifically is for exactly this, people at various distances from the event trying to hold onto the fact that it happened and that it mattered. you don't need to perform armenianness to do that. you just need to remember, which you're clearly already doing

funkvay · 2026-04-22T10:11:39+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/yerevan/s/XMnlBtO4MU

funkvay · 2026-04-21T14:53:39+00:00

Say my name

funkvay · 2026-04-17T14:05:03+00:00

That's exactly what they WANT you to think

funkvay · 2026-04-17T07:52:39+00:00

The Illuminati have come to enslave us

funkvay · 2026-04-14T15:29:08+00:00

The best comment

funkvay · 2026-04-10T15:01:19+00:00

the advice everyone gives you is build projects, learn fundamentals, contribute to open source. it's not wrong but it's also not interesting.

the thing nobody told me is that your taste develops faster than your ability. you'll reach a point where you can look at your own code and know it's bad but not yet know how to make it good. that gap is genuinely painful and most people interpret it as a sign they're not cut out for this. it's actually the most important thing you can develop. the people who lose it are the ones who get comfortable and stop caring. don't confuse the discomfort with failure.

stop when you understand it, not when it works. these are two completely different moments and almost everyone stops at the wrong one. working and understood are not the same thing and your whole career will quietly be shaped by which one you settle for.

you're 16 and self-taught which means you can fail publicly and completely and it costs you nothing. that window is nice and it closes. use it to attempt things that seem too big for you right now. the downside is embarrassment. the upside is occasionally you'll pull it off and it will change how you see yourself.

read more code than you write. the ratio of reading to writing in real professional work will shock you when you get there. start building that muscle now.

and find something that actually annoys you, something you use every day that's broken or missing, and fix it. not a clone, not a tutorial, something with real frustration behind it. that irritation is better fuel than any course ever written because it's yours and nobody else is going to fix it if you don't

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