For the first time in years peace has taken root. It is no longer necessary for anyone to burn furniture or park benches to keep warm. The longest lines at stores are of shoppers clamoring to buy microwave ovens to use in kitchens that last year had no electricity and little food. Suddenly there are cafes, restaurants, banks and a currency worth holding for more than an hour. Inflation is plummeting and real incomes, while still low, are slowly on the rise.
Boutiques sell French shoes and Italian suits.
But there are no celebrations this season. Once regarded as an oasis of civility and democracy among former Soviet republics, Armenia has drifted toward dictatorship. Presidential elections this fall were found to be so deeply flawed that the United States, which provides more foreign aid to Armenia per person than to any country except Israel, declined to offer routine congratulations to the winner, Levon Ter-Petrossian. It has been a year of diminishing press freedom and rising human-rights violations. Most of all, it has been a year in which Ter-Petrossian, once revered as the man who brought democracy to Armenia, appears to have completed a journey from liberal intellectual to stony autocrat.