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Abstract: In April and early May 2018, a rapid mass movement, known as the "velvet revolution," took place in Armenia, leading to the resignation of the prime minister and the election of a new "people's candidate." In the context of independent Armenia, which had seen a stream of falsified elections and failed mass protests, the success of this revolution was a surprise for most of the populace and remains a riddle for analysts. We attempt to show how revolution might have come about in this authoritarian former Soviet regime, looking at how it differed from earlier mass protest movements, who carried it out, and what technologies they used. Our analysis is based primarily on anthropological fieldwork conducted during the revolution: participant observation, short individual and group interviews, and monitoring media and Internet framings of the events. As the revolution was spatially dispersed, the two authors could not cover all the events and protest actions; protesters' livestreams and digital broadcasts therefore filled the gaps.
To understand what happened in Armenia during the five revolutionary weeks in April and early May 2018, we need to appreciate what Armenia represented by this time and against what the protests were directed.
The social construct destroyed by the revolution, explains macrosociologist Georgi Derluguian, "was a provincial-Komsomol restoration. They managed to construct something out of the post-Soviet planks."1 Before independence, second president of Armenia Robert Kocharyan and third president Serzh Sargsyan, who presided over this restoration, had been Communist Party functionaries in Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous oblast, Kocharyan the Party secretary of a factory and Sargsyan a Komsomol leader.
This history evidently influenced the two men's behavior as president. Robert Kocharyan used Soviet-style methods of giving orders, especially at the beginning of his presidential career, and tough methods of suppression throughout his presidency. Allegedly, it was he who was responsible for the death of ten people during protest rallies in 2008 (in July 2018, he was arrested for interrogation in relation to that crime).
For his part, Serzh Sargsyan seems to fit Derluguian's definition even better. His ten-year presidency bore the hallmarks of Brezhnev-era stagnation, due not only to his communist revanchism, but also to his capitalist self-enrichment: his brother became a wealthy businessman renowned for his ability to racketeer any business...