Interview with my grandfather - Israel Ter-Pogosyan

While I prepare my tape recorder my seventy-five year old grandfather, Israel Ter-Pogosyan sits across the table waiting to start the interview. He smiles at me, because he is happy that he is about to tell me about his life back in his homeland. Israel was born in Yerevan, Armenia in 1930. Armenia was a small part of the Soviet Union at the time; Israel lived there until 1992 when he moved to America. Back in Armenia Israel was a successful tailor; even today Israel is sewing and making clothes for his relatives and close friends. According to Israel, the Soviet Union was a very repressive and corrupt republic. However, it wasn’t like this because of the government and its laws, but because of the people who corrupted the government and failed to enforce the laws.

How was my life in the Soviet Union ? I’ll tell you now, when we lived in the Soviet Union it was closed country. No one was allowed to come in and no one was allowed to leave.

What kind of country was the Soviet Union ? The Soviet Union was a very rich and big country. It stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. The country had close to about a 300,000 population, about a hundred to a hundred-twenty nationalities living there. There were a lot of mines, oil, gas, and forests. Uh…It was a country of the socialistic system. It was a communist country. It was a union of combined Soviet and socialist republics. There were fifteen Soviet republics, which of Russia was the largest one, and the rest seemed to be gathered around Russia. It was a socialist system country ruled by a communist party.

The Soviet Union government had a centralized government. The chairman of the Supreme Soviet ruled the whole country, you can say the chairman was like the president such as in America, but the communist party ruled the Supreme Soviet. AS long as that country was communist, all the administrators were to be communist. Basically…uh…the general secretary of the communist party was the chairman of the Supreme Soviet. The country was ruled by the chairman of the Supreme Soviet and was centralized from the tope to the bottom. For example the decisions were made in Moscow, they brought it down from Moscow to the republics.

In the socialism system time there was no individual ownership. Everything belongs to the government. They used to say the soil is the farmer’s and the factory is the worker’s.

The workers work in the factory and the government tell them that this is your factory, but you can’t do anything here or change anything or decide anything, everything is decided by the government. IT was like an order in the air, an order with no base. Everything in the factory, what they’re going to manufacture, how they are supposed to work, how many workers are supposed to work, how long they have to work, what their salary should be, all of that is decided by the government.

In that country there was only one political party, the communist party. If anyone tried to establish another party he would be arrested and go to jail. The people elected the chairman of the Supreme Soviet. Not only the chairman, but also any position beginning with the director or chief of the section had to be communist. The people were not interested during elections, because it didn’t matter for them. Whatever they voted, it was going to be a communist party again and the general secretary was going to be the chairman of the Supreme Soviet. That was the system; you can say it was fake.

In the Soviet Union, it was a centralized system and they had a State Planning Committee. The State Planning Committee planned for everyone on a national scale. For the entire country, for what should be manufactured, for how much should be manufactured, where it should be manufactured. All of that was decided in Moscow. If something new was to be manufactured then a new factory had to be build so, the government controlled everything.

In the Soviet Union the wages were low. They were low…uh…because when the Soviet Union became socialist in 1917, the country had an undeveloped, damaged economy. They had just begun to rebuild the country when World War Two started. Salaries, mainly, were enough for food, clothes, and if you wanted to buy household appliances you had to save up, like you had to save up from your low salary so you can buy other things. Not everyone could have a car in the Soviet; a car was a dream. Someone could buy a car if they worked their entire lives and saved up their money their whole life. That didn’t mean that there weren’t any cars in the country or that everyone lived bad. I am mainly talking about the working class and middle class who lived on their salaries. Their wages were hardly enough to get by on.

If we did strike, they would arrest us and accuse us of being an enemy of the country. WE had no right. If you wanted to have a meeting you had to ask the government leaders so they will know what is happening and who is going to gather and what it is for, so they would allow it. If people wanted to gather in a meeting, they would arrest everybody as an enemy and send them to jail.

Whatever had to do with workers and workers’ jobs already had a union, but the government made that union. The leaders of that union were all Communist. It was like, the Communists ruled the union and the factories, it all seemed like it was for show. The union wasn’t by the workers to protect the interests of the workers. The union was for show; just something that the authorities could say that we have unions to protect the interest of the worker. But everything that the government decided on, the union agreed on. The union could never go against the government. If they ever tried to go against the government or say that they were going to raise the salary, everybody would get fired. They would hire other people. It was all for show fake and up in the air.

The government published newspapers. Everything that was printed in the newspapers had to be good things about socialism and the communist party. TV programs also belonged to the government just like the newspapers. For example, the government censored the TV’s, it had to be reviewed, edited and censored in advance so there wouldn’t be any anti-Soviet things in it.

By law, every person has freedom of speech and can say whatever they want, but in reality, it wasn’t like that. If you said something that was anti-Soviet or anti-governmental, you had a big problem. Or if you said something against the leader of the country you had a very big problem because it was forbidden, most of the time you could even go to jail for it.

In the Soviet Union, there was no religion. There’s no God, they even printed in a journal “We don’t have a God.” Only after WWII, a few churches were opened, but then the Communists stood at the doors to see who would go to church so that nobody would go to church and people were afraid to go. Religion did not exist in the Soviet Union.

I will always think of Armenia as my home no matter what life was like there. However I do hope that you and your children will have a better home with a better government in the future.

Interviewed by Tomas Grigorian