Page 33 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 13(1) (2025)

Armenia gathered and demanded the resigna- in red, temporary artefacts constructed by the
tion of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, whom protesters are in blue, and non-human actors
they blamed for the fall of the Artsakh region in related to the state have golden outlines. The
the war, calling him a traitor (Associated Press five demonstrations presented above collective-
2020). The protests began when the mob broke ly contributed to the reconfiguration of urban
into the Parliament building and seized Ararat spaces, reflecting broader socio-political narra-
Mirzoyan, the President of the National Assem- tives and shaping the public’s interaction with
bly, in their search for Pashinyan (Tass 2020). the built environment. In the axonometric view,
The aggression and following arrests grew dur- we can discern the areas under the control of the
ing the two weeks, and people protested also in state and those that were left to the initiative of
the Republican Square and the Yerevan Opera the crowd. Vegetation played an essential role in
Theatre Square, extending to Baghramyan Av- the definition of the morphology of the protest
enue. On December 9, approximately 15,000 because it could limit the visibility of the crowd 33
people rallied on Baghramyan Avenue to pro- to itself (see Kyiv and Yerevan).
test against Pashinyan’s rejection of his resigna- The drawing of the protest in Moscow (Fig-
tion. The recent two-week protest in December ure 6) is based on the photos found in the ar-
2020 echoes the crisis that was rooted in the first chives of daily Russian newspapers like No-
Artsakh Movement 25 years ago, utilising the vaya Gazeta (Новая Газета) and Svodka Plus
space in front of the National Assembly Build- (Сводка Плюс), further supplemented by on-
ing as a cross-historical link. line public archives of TASS and Radio Free Eu-
rope. The black smoke emanating from the upper
Discussion five levels of the building is the most recurring
The protests mentioned above span from the ear- theme. As Canetti points out, ‘of all means of
ly 1990s to 2020, showing that the process of de- destruction the most impressive is fire. It can be
communisation is a long, tortuous path, marked seen from far off and it attracts ever more people’ The Critical Position of Soviet Parliament Buildings Today
by political shifts and contested symbolism. (Canetti 1978, 20). As shown in the axonometric
Each case is accompanied by a series of studies view, the crowd was unable to station itself near
that provide a deeper understanding of the polit- the building because military vehicles protected
ical history of the dissolution caused in post-So- the garden. Another peculiarity is the presence of
viet states that we have summarised above. This a river and a bridge that allowed people to follow
analysis has a more modest aim to elaborate on a the event from a distance, staying on the opposite
methodology that visually reconstructs the mor- bank of the Moskva River. Eventually, after the
phology of the protest, based on local press cover- flames were put down, the bright white façade of
age and photos. It is a work-in-progress elabora- the parliament building shifted to a black-and-
tion that we plan to invigorate with more details white elevation that bore the signs of the political
while discovering new sources. The austere ap- conflict. The dense vegetation on the side facili-
pearance of public space, static and immutable, tated the distancing of onlookers and the sur-
became the stage for collective rituals, in which veillance of the adjacent area. The clock tower on
architecture acquired a fundamental persuasive top of the building was eventually replaced with
role. The feature of repetition, employed in ritu- a symbol of the Russian Federation and a fence
als, verbal formulas, and architectural elements, was built, marking some of the few changes exe-
established a visual code, or style, to achieve a cuted in the post-protest reparation works. Com-
domesticated experience of the crowd perform- pared to Moscow, Baku (Figure 7) was the stage
ing its aesthetic role (Resta and Gatip 2021). of a much more actively participated protest, in
In the drawings, the built environment is which the crowd appropriated the building, used
represented in grey, human actors are represented the architectural elements as stages, as is visible in