Outcry in Armenia after municipality plays song praising criminal subculture in Gyumri

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and other members of his Civil Contract party strongly criticised an incident in which a Russian-language song glorifying criminal subculture was played in the central square of Gyumri, Armenia’s second-largest city. Municipal authorities have attributed the occurrence to a ‘technical error’.

The video of the song playing at the fountains in Gyumri went viral on Sunday evening, showing children playing and getting wet near the fountains.

The song in question, ‘Dolya vorovskaya’ (Thieves’ Share’) is a popular song with millions of views on YouTube, and was written by Boris Davidyan, known as Boka, an ethnic Armenian born in Baku. The song, penned in Russian in the late 1990s, is framed as a letter to the narrator’s mother. In it, he reflects on his life in the criminal underworld and his time behind bars, where he ended up after ‘stealing a lot in Tbilisi, and in Batumi the bastards turned me in’.

Aside from the criminal culture, it also praises the use of drugs, calling it ‘a bitter medicine’ without which he felt like ‘a king without a kingdom’.

The incident drew swift and harsh criticism from the authorities, who emphasised that the fountains in Gyumri were renovated with state funding and strongly criticised the city’s recently elected opposition mayor, Vardan Ghukasyan, representing the Communist party.

Previously, Ghukasyan was the mayor of Gyumri from 1999–2012, and was a member of the formerly ruling Republican Party (2006–2017), during which time the city saw a rise in crimes involving either him or his family members.

In a post on Facebook, David Khudatyan, the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure, appeared to ‘advise’  Gyumri authorities against turning on ‘the fountain once more with a song that glorifies the criminal subculture’.

In turn, Economy Minister Gevorg Papoyan called Ghukasyan with his pseudonym — Vardanik — with the ‘-ik’ diminutive suffix.

‘It seems necessary to remind Vardanik and his circle that they live in a STATE where criminal customs are legally punishable’, Papoyan said in his Facebook post.

After midnight, the authorities of Gyumri released a statement claiming that it was a result of ‘technical error’.

‘The specialist was unable to control the playing music due to technical problems in the system’, the statement read, adding that after receiving an explanatory note from the person in charge of operations ‘if necessary, disciplinary action will be applied’.

They offered their apologies and assured that the technical malfunction was fixed, and ‘supervision will be tightened to prevent such incidents from happening again’.

Pashinyan’s comment came later, on Monday morning, with him saying in a Russian language post, echoing the language of a song, that ‘a thief should be in prison, not fooling around with fountains!’.

Pashinyan rarely posts in Russian, and the comments came shortly after his visit to Russia earlier the same week, one user commented under his post on Facebook in an apparent sarcastic tone — ‘Oh dear Prime Minister, if you went to Russia more often, can you imagine how much your Russian would improve, our esteemed [Prime Minister]?’.

At his Monday press briefing, Ghukasyan laughed at the accusations, refuting his responsibility there.

In turn Ghukasyan accused what appeared to the authorities for staging it ‘intentionally’, prior to his press briefing on Monday, marking his 100 days in office.

He additionally stated that usually classical music played ‘day and night’ there.