The post-Soviet country found a way through its cataclysmic crises. Rishi Sunak surely can find solutions to Britain’s milder problems
I can relate to Rishi Sunak. Britain’s new Prime Minister has inherited a state of affairs that feels eerily familiar. In 1996, when I became the prime minister of Armenia at the age of 43, my country appeared mortally bruised by a combination of war, skyrocketing prices, and scarcity of food and fuel.
The toll of the winters tore at the soul. Yerevan, the Armenian capital known as the “city of lights” because its streets and buildings remained always lit, was plunged into darkness between 1991 and 1995. Trees, revered by Armenians, were felled for fuel. Families cooked meagre meals with wood and children read by candlelight. There wasn’t a flower in sight, hospitals ran on a few hours of power supply, and the cold claimed many lives.
In the early 1990s whenever I flew home from London – where I was serving as Armenia’s inaugural ambassador to the United Kingdom – all that was visible from the plane was the tarmac. Everything else was pitch black.
Hardly anyone anticipated such misery. You see, before the Soviet Union’s collapse, Armenia’s energy needs were amply met by the local nuclear and hydropower facilities and cheap gas supplies from Russia. The nuclear plant was closed in response to the public outcry following the devastating earthquake of 1988. It hadn’t been affected, but the people and the authorities thought emotionally, not rationally, taking for granted the gas supplies from Russia.