After Myrthe reported that she was picking up up more accesses to her site from people searching on Google for Gagik Tsarukian (aka Dodi Gago) and his daughter, The Armenian Observer also reported the same, as did I. However, it was Observer who appeared to discover why exactly after Myrthe concluded it must have something to do with the recent marriage of Tsarukian’s daughter.

Observer even managed to find a video on YouTube showing the celebrations which more significantly gave us a rare and unique look into the controversial house that is home to perhaps Armenia’s richest and most powerful oligarch. Kronstadt on The Armenian Libertarian-Socialist Movement offers his opinion on Tsarukian’s estate in a country that can still be considered poor by international standards.

When I first watched this video, the first instinct was Anger – pure anger! But then one needs to sober up and look at all this in calm analytical and historical perspectives. This is not Oligarchy!!! “Oligarkhia” is a stupid apologetic term applied by the social scientists to some post-Soviet republics, with a connotation of “a peculiar case of capitalist development that went *slightly* off track” … as if Capitalism is designed to deliver general prosperity and long-term balance for all, but in some rare cases small anomalies such as oligarkia are possible. Bullfuckingshit. This is Capitalism, and that’s all there is to it. And oligarchy is the integral and inseparable part in its development.

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As I watched this video the second time, I couldn’t help but recall the videos from pre-Castro Cuba… it was all the same. Cuba was a satellite puppy of America with very small white minority owning everything there was to own and indulging themselves in endless endeavours of bourgeois decadence, while the vast majority of population was living in shanty-towns and townships with no education, healthcare, regular food - toiling in sugar cane plantations and tobacco fields. And sooner or later people did rebel - people rebelled and as we have seen in so many other places the Communist forces hijacked the revolution.

My instinct is to wait - wait until the conditions have matured to the point when people will see that it is not the Individual leader or the Will to do good that is the question, but the Structure of the economical system that cultivates these material and cultural conditions, and the social and political contradictions and paradoxes. Until people themselves realise it that capitalism is not the right path to democracy, free-entrepreneurship and participatory-politics, until that day revolutions will either be shipwrecked or replaced by dictatorships.

My opinion? Well, yes, it’s amazing to see so much wealth and one has to wonder why Tsarukian pays so little in taxes. On the other hand, it also struck me that having such wealth doesn’t equate into having any taste. More regal than any stately home I’ve seen in England, I can’t even imagine how anyone could live in a home like that. Moreover, comparing it to the homes of those oligarchs raided by Georgian police after the 2003 revolution, Tsarukian’s wealth seems to surpass even them.

Embedding of the video has been disabled so check it out here.