Thursday April 30 - Yerevan

Thursday, April 30. In the morning we walk to the Hotel Dvin to straighten out our train tickets to Tbilisi. This hotel has had a fire recently, and looks awful--one side is completely bricked up on the ground level. Apparently during the winter there was no gas, and as a result, electric resistence heat (ie, small space heaters) was widely used (between brownouts), but these heaters are considerable fire hazards. My hotel room had a burn in the carpet where such a heater had obviously tipped over. Yerevan unfortunately looked on the face of it to be in the worst condition of all the cities visited so far . One theme I noticed was that in each city I visited, eventually someone would say, "here in xxx we have it the worst." And in each place, this person would be right. In Moscow, they have it the worst: they have fallen the furthest in their standard of living. In Belarus, they have it the worst: they received the brunt of Chernobyl. In Moldova: they are fighting a civil war. And here in Armenia they were still recovering from the earthquake of three years ago while fighting for Nagorno-Karabakh. (And Georgia, they would speak of what seemed to them unbelievable: Georgians shooting Georgians.) There are apparently huge unemployment and underemployment problems. There are crowds of young and middle-aged men on the streets in Yerevan with apparently nothing to do. The infrastructure appears to be deterioriating. While the Metro appears in acceptable condition, the city busses and trolleys are totally overloaded. Yerevan has more cars per capita than any other city of the FSU, but traffic is low because few here can afford the price of 40 rubles per liter (compared with 17 per liter in Chisinau and 6 in Minsk and Moscow). We walk and take Metro to the National Library with Nerses. We stop at a bookstore. The most noticable attribute of the bookstores visited in Yerevan is the large proportion of Russian language materials, many quite old. Nerses explains that this is a holdover from the Soviet period. Although the bookstores are not ever going to sell much of this material, they are apparently not interested in just throwing it away. (I saw the same collection about Brezhnev in several bookstores.) At the Armenian National Library I meet the director as well as a representative of the Academy of Sciences library and the director of the University library. Thus a new technique is tried--simultaneous presentation of the first half of my presentation to three partners. This actually works fine, and is followed by a discussion of exchange issues with the appropriate National Library staff member (I will meet separately later with the Academy of Sciences library and the University Library). The answers to many of my usual questions are similar to those in the countries visited so far. The National Library does have staff who buy materials on the street. They know of fifty new "independent" publishers and are collecting there materials. The Armenian KP is doing the national bibliography in real time while the National Library is working on the retrospective version (and the National Library has plans to absorb the KP). During a tour of the Library there was a brownout--thus we had to examine the materials in the rare book room in the dark. Fortunately we were not in an elevator. Returning to our hotel we stopped for dinner (unusual) at a restaurant, the Ararat—and the food was actually quite good. Because we could not make up our minds about the vegetables, the waiter brought a huge selection of trays out for us to choose from. A small group began to play Armenian music. Very pleasant.