Krikor Vartanian is a happily married 66 year old man, of Armenian heritage. He was born, raised and educated in the Middle East. He immigrated to the United States during the late sixties where he continued his education in science and technology. He is a formal Rockwell International employee specializing in technology development. Having an interest in politics and international affairs, he traveled frequently to Europe, Asia and several former Communist countries. He witnessed the political progress before and after the collapse of communism and the spread of democracy. Mr. Vartanian remembers the years between 1989 through 1991 in which democracy started to sweep through many European and some Asian countries. In his opinion, this was a spectacular event and although he was expecting it, he didn’t think it will come so soon and so peacefully.
For the last 40-50 years I haven’t seen a more drastic change in the universe than the collapse of the communism and the spread of democracy in most of the prior communist countries, such as the collapse of East and West Germany and then the collapse of the Soviet Republic into individual nations. Reading about and traveling to different countries gave me some ideas about the living conditions of people in those countries before and after communism. During communism people had more social welfare, without any freedom of expressing their political opinions. That kept the people in a “box”, without having their ideas expressed freely and without enjoying the life as the West had it. In those years they enjoyed social assistance from the government because the government was helping them as long as they obeyed the law, without getting into politics. However, after the collapse of communism, people had more involvement in politics, multiple political parties were created, and personal freedom was encouraged. Freedom - whether it is freedom of religion, speech, participating in parties, assembly, or travel - is an important part of life. The sudden collapse of communism gave the new government a challenge to improve the economy from the communistic system to the capitalistic, which lets them work harder, produce more products that are unique and more desirable than before.
Now, living standards keep changing in the former Soviet Union republics towards upwards. Everyone has the right to own a house, the right to vote, to open a business, to have a car and so forth.
There is a certain percentage of people still dreaming of the Soviet Era because their benefits are now gone. People have to produce instead of getting welfare. The goods which they use to produce before in the Soviet Era are not sellable, because of the poor quality. Now their products have to have good quality because they are competing with imported high quality goods.
As you know, unemployment is a big issue right now because the countries were not ready to gradually change from communism to a democratic nation. I mean, everything collapsed over a few days, not even few weeks. Because of the sudden collapse it takes not just ten years, but maybe more than that to establish a strong economic system.
In terms of the old generation, I think they have a problem adapting to the new system, but over the years these problems will be diminished. I always said that communism may be good but it’s hard to apply because no one could adapt to the system. Even the creators of communism were living like kings; they could not apply the concept of communism into the working class. I mean, the working classes at some point were slaves rather than members of society, and obviously it didn’t work. I believed that communism will collapse and it did collapse.
In the near future, I think democracy will eventually get into existing communist countries such as China, North Korea, Cuba, etc., and dictatorship will go away because the nature of the universe is democracy and freedom. In those existing communist countries we are seeing an economic revolution towards improving their standard of living, and communication. World-wide communication let people to listen [to radio], to [watch] TV and to read. Communism is not able to stop their people from having to be isolated; rather people have ways of hearing the advancement in capitalistic countries or social capitalistic countries like that of Europe. Even the Asian countries, did not adapt to communism. Although some countries in the Middle East or Asia tried to understand communism and tried to apply some concept but they did not go forward to full communism. Eventually those remainder communist countries will collapse and will come along with the world towards the freedom and democracy.
One of the biggest positive changes that the new democratic countries - such as Russia, Armenia, Germany, etc. - had was joining the United Nations. I think this is the biggest event because every nation now had its own flag, its own chair and participation in world wide effort for peace and freedom. Now I tell you what, although the break down of those countries created some regional problems here and there, because, as you know, the political issues between the nations within the communist countries were resolved by force. Now that force is gone, some nations have a problem with each other in terms of territorial integrity, oil, resources and political influences. However, I believe that all of these issues will be resolved and settled down.
Ten years has passed since the collapse [of communism] and probably in another 10-20 years those republics will have sufficient resources and people will be open-minded because by that time they’ll have more economical understanding and will be utilizing their freedom towards the positive direction. Hopefully by that time everyone will be employed and everyone will enjoy their life.
Interviewed by Arsham Hayrikian