August 23. If you grew up in a former Soviet satellite state, dates like this land differently. They are not some distant development, they are something you felt on your own skin. Tonight is about a small republic that told a vast empire, this far and no further.
On Thursday, August 23, 1990, the Supreme Council of the Armenian SSR, sitting in Yerevan, adopted the Declaration of Independence. It was signed by Levon Ter-Petrossian, President of the Council, and Ara Sahakian, Secretary of the Council. The document was not a polite petition. It renamed the country: instead of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Republic of Armenia. It made Armenian the state language. It stated that only Armenia’s own constitution and laws were valid on its territory. It built on the December 1, 1989 joint decision of the Armenian Supreme Council and the Artsakh National Council on reunification. With that, Armenia became the first Soviet republic to formally secede from the USSR.
That was not where the story ended. Full statehood only arrived on September 21, 1991, after a nationwide referendum. But the August 23, 1990 declaration was the step that closed decades of Soviet rule and set the country on the road to sovereignty. If you have watched a process like that from the inside, you know how much weight one piece of paper can carry when it has that sentence on it.
