A Soviet-era cable car dangles part-way between the lower station and the top of the hillside mine. Although empty, it still appears stranded, doggedly awaiting rescue.
Something about it had silenced the three of us seeing it for the first time (the young Chinese couple and myself), while our driver glanced at it once with bored familiarity. More poignant somehow than the abandoned infrastructure of the copper mine beneath it, I wanted to believe the young couple was experiencing something similar to what I was – even if I wasn’t sure what exactly that was. In former communist countries, these skeletal structures are commonplace. But the cable car, like a single lost soul, had a pathos about it that was vaguely unsettling.
Armenia had created an unexpected effect on me.
The narrow road we followed was surrounded by exposed rock, open plateaus glowing in warm sunlight, dense green eroded peaks. We arrived first at a 10th-century Apostolic monastery, a working church, and the remains of a fortress. Built from the dark gray local stone, the church appeared like a bold refinement, one spontaneously yielded from the rock. The effect of the stonemason’s art was to exalt the earth without abusing it, as much a devotion to pagan Nature as to Christian faith. The architectural lines and carved decorations were resolute; the faded colors of worn frescoes inside entrancing. The raw beauty – so much closer in time to our prehistoric origins than our modern-day endeavors – left a powerful impression.
Juxtaposed against these ancient stone structures were the rusting modern-era remnants of the foresaken mine. Apartment blocks and ragged houses stood against the surrounding hillsides in desultory arrangement, laundry hung out to dry the only sign of life. Sprawling at the bottom of the narrow canyon and up into the shallow gorges, the mine was conspicuous evidence of the failed communist experiment. As it succumbed to the supremacy of Nature, the efforts of stonemasons more than ten centuries ago had only enhanced it.
This daytrip to northern Armenia had been my first excursion outside Tbilisi. Our driver maintained an informative commentary over the short distance to the Armenian border, touching on the condition of the roads, the poor driving habits of the average Georgian, the state of the used car market in Georgia, as well as a few subjects which weren’t automotive in nature (my favorite being a virtual ode to Georgian cuisine). Cattle roaming onto the highway was the only unwelcome amusement that took a sudden turn for the worse when the car ahead of us swerved violently to miss colliding with a cow. Outside the cities, free-ranging livestock is regrettably common. And deaths, both bovine and human, are not uncommon.
The border crossing set the scene for so many Soviet recollections: enormous national flags on either side of the border; the long and slow-moving queues with dysfunctional security equipment that sporadically sounded an alarm everyone ignored; police in drab green uniforms, the same Eisenhower jacket-like jackets worn for decades together with the large Russian military-looking visored hats; the old shuffling Soviet tempo visible in everything. After a long wait in a short queue, I finally reached the window and handed the officer my passport. He scowled at me, flipped through a few pages with obvious disinterest, inspected the back and front covers with the disdain reserved for forgeries, then he stopped scowling and bellowed my name – GREGORY – before asking my purpose in visiting Armenia. I gave the expected response, my passport was stamped and returned, and I was welcomed into the country. Only later did I realize that the megaphone-like pronouncement must have related to the fact that I share the name with the founder of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Gregory the Illuminator brought Christianity to Armenia in the fourth century, making it the first state to adopt Christianity as its official religion. The flimsy link had greased the wheels for my entry.
The difference between the Armenian side and the Georgian side wasn’t stark, but it was noticeable; the elderly man driving a horse and cart fixed with car wheels underscored the poverty. There is always a unique kind of fast and loose souq quality to border towns the world over: the intensity might vary but the feeling is the same. On the Georgian side, in Sadakhlo, we saw men seated alongside the road doing nothing other than watch passing cars, men talking in small groups, men playing backgammon – Azerbaijanis, our driver told us – living out their lives in resigned poverty. The poverty on the Armenian side was similar, but with the atmosphere of a last-chance trading post; doors open to travelers; a faint but reassuring commercial pulse. Still, the apparent hardship remained only a matter of degrees between the two states.
Deeper into the country, the privation showed in the cars we saw on the road. Ladas. Everywhere. Thirty- to forty-year-old four-door sedans making laborious progress, windows rolled down, trailing a cloying scent of cheap petrol. As you pass, you can make out the steering wheel in the driver’s hands rotating far more than the front wheels turn. You’re struck by a desperate hope for nostalgia when seeing old cars on the road, but like everything Soviet, the aesthetic is blunt to the point of chilling, each example a wobbly time capsule of stale odors and solemn fatalism.
So many jumbled impressions, mixing ancient with modern, prompted me to reflect on the ideologies that drive us. Not any specific ones, but ideologies generally. We are drawn to them by an innate compulsion to fit in, the weight of peer pressure that lures us into groups and group thinking, which leads to what we see as integral within us but also bigger than us: beliefs that form our own characters and, consequently, our communities and countries.
We require fundamental tenants, ideologies that we can build a life on, individually and collectively. But all ideologies have an elastic quality to them; they evolve as we evolve, a bit like language, always adapting and growing to accommodate the inevitable changes in our human condition. The capitalism we know today isn’t the one known by our forebears three or four generations ago. Other isms have influenced it to arguable degrees – individualism, materialism, consumerism. And all economies (or societies), whatever their foundational ideology, whether it’s communism or socialism or capitalism (or a hybrid of some kind), all share one thing in common: in the simplest terms, they are a mechanism to manage society, to control populations.
The suspended cable car, the abandoned mine, the worn roadways filled with archaic automobiles – all evidence of an attempt at society built on an ideology (in the case of Georgia and Armenia, communism that led to Stalinism) that failed. The essential ideology was unable to maintain its grip on the psyche of the people. As conviction faded, the ideology unwound, and the state fell. Ultimately, they all do. We know it from ancient civilizations but refuse to see the ones today, the ones that failed fast. The copper mine, now abandoned, was running full-tilt in 1973 – just fifty years ago. The towns surrounding it were populated; they were relatively prosperous. People had work. These recent ghosts should be haunting us more energetically than they do. We don’t just forget history, we forget yesterday. While our economic endeavors pass like a whim, our spiritual ones endure.
This wasn’t some kind of religious awakening. But it did point my mind toward how much more fleeting our fleeting moments in history have become. While the Armenian Apostolic faith perseveres, many other ideologies, especially the most recent, the post-industrial ones, have failed. My late father’s lifespan (he was born in 1920) was longer, for example, than the Soviet Union’s. The straws we grasp for have become fewer and more uncertain.
It seems when humans industrialized the world, we unleashed a power that no one was prepared to handle. The repercussions are wide-ranging and continue even as we hurtle forward in the name of growth and progress without ever pausing to evaluate the downsides, the reckless damage, the eventual decline.
Maybe there are no straws left. Seeing these remnants of medieval monasteries and the failed Soviet State did that to me. It was like a peek into the future. It wasn’t just another insolvent business, boarded up and left to the ineluctable powers of Nature. That copper mine represented not only the failed state but the failed ideology. It illustrates how quickly and easily – when you look at it on a historical scale – a small number of influential individuals (politicians, moguls, or tyrants) can have an enormous impact on millions of people and on the course of human history. And after they have failed us, how long the consequences linger, as toxic and irreversible as a radiation spill. It requires generations to overcome – if it ever can be.
I was in Georgia (and certainly Armenia) for too short a time to draw any sweeping conclusions. While Armenia left me with an unsettling sense of having perceived something that might perhaps be best left unexplored, Georgia intrigued me, Tbilisi in particular. I encountered in everyone I met an enormous and justifiable pride in the history and culture of the place. Despite the economic and political challenges, I recognized optimistic energy in living now and cautious hope for the future. I left with more regret than I anticipated, mild disappointment that I didn’t see more and couldn’t stay longer. I went there thinking this would be a place to cross off the list. I departed with a surprisingly strong desire to return as soon as I can.