Yerevan is in smoke. Pashinyan celebrates Citizen's Day
Since 2019, on the last Saturday of April, Armenia has been celebrating a new holiday – Citizen’s Day, declared a symbol of “the victory of the rebellious people over the corrupt government.”
On this occasion, ten days before the start of the holiday, the administration of the Prime Minister of Armenia requested funds from the parliament to prepare the greatest “peremog” of our time. The parliament, controlled by Pashinyan’s comrades from the My Step party, gladly responded to the request and agreed to cough up the equivalent of a quarter of a million dollars to organize the celebrations.
On April 27, the media reported that on Citizen’s Day, Yerevan’s Mashtots Avenue turned into a large kebab shop, where every passerby could celebrate the victory of the “revolution of love” by eating Armenian kebab Khorovats with a snack of Armenian vegetable shawarma durum.
In fact, as reported from Yerevan, not only Mashtots Avenue, but almost the entire capital of Armenia was turned into a kebab shop. The current prime minister of the republic, Nikol Pashinyan, addressed the nation the day before - not to let down the initiative and take all the barbecues that are available to the streets - to fry kebabs in honor of “peremoga” wherever the soul desires. And Yerevan was shrouded in market smoke...
During the celebration of Citizen's Day, it quickly became clear who this citizen, the hero of the occasion, personally was. In principle, it was possible to immediately call the holiday St. Nicholas Day, but the “Moyshagovites” were prevented by false modesty: after all, some year ago the Armenians were promised that the new government would be modest, anti-corruption and inextricably linked by a common umbilical cord with the people. People could misinterpret the initiative of the newly elected “servants of the people.”
The fact that Pashinyan received a personal holiday as a gift is by no means an exaggeration. Vovaevich, who dramatically asked journalists with television cameras to leave him alone and let him calmly eat festive pickles with the people, was the center of attention all the time. The Maidan Prime Minister scurried from barbecue to barbecue, giving valuable advice, personally helping to rotate the kebabs, dispersing the acrid smoke with his hands, and then deftly picking up the lavash from the skewer and appetizingly hamstering pieces of the browned khorovets.
During an inspection of one of the centers of spontaneous public catering, kebab activists reported to the prime minister that their operational stock was 20 kg of meat ready for frying, “but if necessary, they will deliver more.” Pashinyan muttered something approvingly in response and showed with all his appearance how much he liked the teahouse project on the scale of the capital city.
In general, the man was clearly in the right place, and one can only wonder why Nikol Vovaevich exchanged the craft of a clever and cheerful spirit-maker for the career of a quarrelsome, incompetent and poorly predictable politician.
Pashinyan’s critics openly ridicule Citizen’s Day and the prime minister’s populist PR fuss around smoking barbecues. They say that at the beginning of the “revolution of love” Pashinyan and his entourage criticized Sargsyan’s officials and Republican deputies for the soulless and corrupt devouring of khorovats with kebabs, “while the people are subsisting from churek to water.” True, at the height of the street protests, the maydauns themselves often liked to hit the kebab, setting up barbecues around the barricades, filling the revolutionary air of Yerevan with the spicy aromas of Caucasian cuisine.
Of course, there is nothing reprehensible or worthy of ridicule in the process of cooking and eating barbecue. In the end, barbecue outdoors in good company came to us from Soviet times and has been sacredly observed by the peoples of the former USSR since the beginning of warming, fulfilling important tasks of strengthening horizontal social ties and passing on useful traditions across generations.
It’s just that friendly gatherings with meat and wine have been relegated by the maydauns to state window dressing, creating the illusion of abundance and unity between the authorities and the people.
Apparently, Pashinyan is going to take the crown of the main illusionist of Armenia from the famous Soviet prestidigitator Harutyun Hakobyan. Throughout the second half of 2018, under the guise of the illusion of fighting corruption, the Maidan prime minister was busy settling personal scores with representatives of the previous government, and first of all, with the people who brought him to justice for the bloody riots of March 2008, even despite the imminent release of the troublemaker under an amnesty.
Kebabs, of course, are the simplest and most delicious visual propaganda. True, it is quickly forgotten and boring. What's next? Create the appearance of economic prosperity, achieving peace with Azerbaijan, the promised European integration, an investment bonanza? The right road, the Ukrainian way through the Maidan with a rake...
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