Armenia-Russia Relations: the Revolution and the Map

Abstract

Two polar viewpoints dominate discourses around Armenia's foreign policy. One is that the Velvet Revolution should have led to a U-turn in a pro-Western and anti-Russian direction. The other is that there is no alternative to Armenia’s pro-Russian stand. Disappointingly for many, the post-revolutionary authorities of Armenia appear to have moved from the first to the second in a matter of months. This article argues that the polarity is exaggerated: while a power rotation could not change Armenia's foreign policy priorities, dictated as they are by Armenia's surroundings, the existence of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the sealed borders with Turkey, some change is possible and inevitable as a new generation of elites accedes to power. Unlike their predecessors who grew up and came of age in the USSR, the new elites were raised in independent Armenia and operate within new geopolitical and geocultural paradigms.