«Կուժե մարդը» - Կարեն ԱՂԵԿՅԱՆ

Karen Aghekyan's article "The Jug Man" is devoted to the fundamental distinction between an imperial and a national state, and to how this distinction is reflected in the status of culture, elites, and public consciousness in post-Soviet Armenia.

Introduction and Methodology

The author's point of departure is a polemic with Gayane Margaryan's article "Quo Vadis? The National and the Supranational in Culture," published in the journal "National Idea." Aghekyan proceeds from the premise that it is difficult for most contemporaries to grasp the difference between imperial power, which a nation does not generate and cannot influence, and a national state, which, in his metaphor, is the "spine" of the nation — an organic continuation of its own body.

Key Proposition

The article's central argument rests on several interconnected theses:

power in a national state is a personified expression of mass consciousness and cannot substantially differ from the society that generates it;
empire, by contrast, is an artificial formation possessing self-sufficient repressive and distributive power, needing no organic legitimacy;
since empire has no natural legitimacy, it is compelled to constantly sustain an ideological lie about its own "special mission," and it is precisely culture that is called upon to service this lie and render it "digestible."

Culture as an Instrument of Empire

Special attention is devoted to the mechanism by which the nation and its elite are separated under imperial conditions: the creative intelligentsia is drawn toward the capital and the system of privileges (writers' and composers' unions, the hierarchy of honorary titles), thereby becoming a conduit for imperial self-awareness among the masses. The author emphasizes that even talented artists of the Soviet era — from Tarkovsky and Okudzhava to Matevosyan and Babajanyan — objectively functioned within the rules of a game alien to national interests, which does not diminish their personal merits but demands a sober assessment of the function of art within the imperial system.

Critique of Nostalgia for Soviet Cultural Policy

Aghekyan sharply objects to Margaryan's attempts to present the Soviet state as a model of the "total implantation of culture," pointing out that such nostalgia ignores the fundamental difference between imperial and national organization and fails to account for the tragic experience of the "devouring" of the diaspora Armenian communities of Tbilisi and Baku — a process that was itself built into the imperial construction.

The Problem of Post-Soviet Elites

A separate section is devoted to the fate of the Armenian Soviet intelligentsia after the collapse of the USSR: unable to accept the realities of a sovereign state and adapt to its scale, it preferred to chronically blame the new authorities for their inability to reproduce Soviet standards of consumption, rather than fulfill the function of "educated laborers" in nation-building.

Conclusion

The article's key conclusion is that the status of culture and the quality of elites in a national state are inevitably lower than under empire, precisely because the state no longer needs to lie about its own mission, and the elite ceases to be artificially severed from the people by the privileges of the Center — and this condition should be perceived not as degradation, but as an honest reflection of the nation's actual level of development.