TOWARDS THE "WINTER" FOOTBALL

The Republican stadium is preparing to the game Armenia-Andorra, which will take place on Saturday. The international bookmakers highly appreciate the chances of our combined team.

THE CULTURE-YES BUT
THE REGIME-NO

The RA President Kocharian writes on the occasion of the RF President's visit and the year of Russia: "The Armenians treat the Russian art with special love and wait for meetings with the cultural workers." And that is true; the Russian culture from Pushkin to Dovlatov and Okujava / it is interesting that the last two persons have Armenian origin/, from Glinka to Stravinsky constitutes the spiritual world of every intellectual man. The majority of the Armenian intellectuals also live by those values.
It is absolutely another thing that how those civil, free values connect with nowadays Russia, which isn't differ from the Soviet Union at all where the independent TV Companies are closed and the non-pocket oligarchs are persecuted. Let's notice that the RF President creates his regime consciously. In contrast to Gorbachev and Eltzin Putin doesn't think that he must give freedom to his people, to allow them to create good things, he doesn't believe that European free values / elections, separation of the authorities, independent courts, free press/ are usable in the Russian land. Putin is also sure that the enormous country like Russia can only be an empire, superpower. I don't think that such way of thinking is profitable for us. Perhaps we'll feel calmer if Russia was a free, democratic country like Germany or France, certainly influential and friendly.
But there are other intentions in the Russian society. And Putin also expresses those traditional, conservative intentions. Russian people have never loved the reformers; it isn't accidental that both the tsar's court and the "various strata of society" hated the Emperor Alexander the Second who gave freedom to the slaves. In the same way they hated Gorbachov. Those repeated historical tendencies allow us to suppose that those people want to remain slaves and they don't need in freedom. But perhaps the same can be said about the inhabitant of Armenia. Or as the mentioned Russian talented writer has written, "бессмысленная чернь изменчива, мятежна, суеверна, легко пустой надежде предана, мгновенному внушению послушна, и баснями питается она".

Aram Abrahamian