“I’ve never been here before. It’s very emotional,” says Ruben Vardanyan, as he walks into a long, grey-brown brick school building just outside Yerevan. It’s not hard to understand why. If it were not for this building and what happened in it, Vardanyan and his sister Marine Ales would not have been born.
The low-slung structure stands at the entrance to Etchmiadzin, the headquarters of the Armenian Church. The corridors are lined with their black and purple robes and every hour the air is filled with the sounds of singing and chanting.
One hundred years ago, there were songs and music, too. But they were the laments of children – orphans of the Armenian Genocide. Vardanyan’s grandfather, Hmayak, was one of them.
“His father and two brothers were killed during the Genocide. He fled on foot as an eight-year-old from Archesh, Van province in the Ottoman Empire, where he and his family grew up. He walked north with his mother and other family members,” Vardanyan explains.
His mother and younger sister died within days of reaching Eastern Armenia, which was then under Russian control. Hmayak was taken in by the orphanage, which was run by the Near East Relief Foundation, an American charity that had raised millions of dollars to help care for the victims of the Genocide.
Today, Ruben Vardanyan is among the few Armenian pioneers who were born in Armenia and spend much of their time working to rebuild their homeland almost from scratch. Like Ireland and Israel, Armenia is one of those countries that has more citizens living outside the homeland than in it.
Vardanyan is well-placed to raise Armenia’s gaze. He is a survivor who has thrived and wants Armenia now to do the same.
Vardanyan moved to Moscow in his late teens to study at Moscow State University. When Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev came to power he saw the advantages of liberalization and began a career in banking and financial services that would eventually make him a fortune by the time he was in his thirties. His business interests survived the collapse of the Soviet Union.
He returned to his homeland to watch it win its independence in 1991 – and then collapse from the effects of the devastating earthquake three years earlier, economic blockade from Turkey, turmoil to the north as other former Soviet republics seceded from Moscow, and war with neighboring Azerbaijan. “We went from the 20th century to the 17th century almost overnight. We had to burn wood and even burn books to survive the winter. We had to get up at five in the morning and queue for hours just to get bread, to eat to stay alive.”
Year by long year, he watched his homeland gradually get back to normal.
It’s scarcely surprising that Vardanyan says he feels “like I’ve had around four lives already.” He is about to start a fifth, which, to him, is perhaps the most important of all.
It started more than a decade ago when Vardanyan met Noubar Afeyan, a Boston-based entrepreneur of Armenian heritage, while studying at Harvard. The two successful businessmen began talking about how they could use their business skills to benefit Armenia.
In 2009 Vardanyan and Afeyan began to think about how they might use the centenary of the Genocide to draw attention to Armenia and spur change. 100 LIVES is the result.
“Armenia is a 25-year-old independent country, but, as a people and a broader nation, the Armenian civilization is 5,000 years old. We need to build on that. We need to cast off our sense of victimhood and look to the future.”
“That’s difficult. It’s a change in the mind. We are encouraging Armenia to go beyond survival and into prosperity. It’s revolutionary, but revolution from a different angle.”
Changing minds will take time and money. Vardanyan has both. He is devoting most of his time to 100 LIVES and he is also investing in Armenia. With his wife Veronika he has founded and funded a new $135m United World Colleges school at Dilijan, a one hour drive away from Yerevan. And, thanks to 100 LIVES, there’s more to come.
As they leave the grey-brown building that saved their family and head back into Yerevan, Marine turns to her brother and says: “Every man or woman can do what he or she can do. Just do what you can. You cannot do more.” Vardanyan hopes Armenians everywhere will feel the same and do what they can.
Text – https://100lives.com/en/stories/detail/regular/5963/ruben-vardanyan
The story is verified by the 100 LIVES Research Team
