Editor's Note: This is the fourth part in a series of stories on Massachusetts immigrants in collaboration with Professor Razvan Sibii's UMass-Amherst Social Justice Journalism class.

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By Lucy Martirosyan

As Anahit Margaryan stood at the memorial for her friend's son who had died in a car accident, she realized this was no ordinary funeral. It was, in fact, a military funeral.

The 21-year-old man was entitled to it because, rather than visiting with his friends for the past two weeks as he had told his family, he had actually spent the days before the accident took his life fighting alongside fellow ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory in the South Caucasus.

Margaryan, now a resident of Hadley, grew up in Armenia at a time when that country was still a constitutive republic of the Soviet Union. The story of her family mirrors that of many recent immigrants who have come to the United States after decades of hardship in one of the countries of the former USSR: relative stability during the Soviet dictatorship, sudden economic disaster brought about by the breakup of the empire, ethnic conflict between neighbors, survival, and the quest for a better life somewhere else.

Twice Christened

Margaryan was born in 1954, at a time when the Soviet Union was emerging from the iron rule of Joseph Stalin, who had died a year before, and was entering an eventful period marked by the establishment of the Warsaw Pact, the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution, Nikita Khrushchev's destalinization drive and Sputnik. By then, Margaryan's family had been deeply scared by the brutality of the Soviet regime.

Her grandfather's seven brothers had all been executed by the Bolsheviks for being kulaks, that is, peasants who had managed to accumulate a measure of personal wealth and owned their own farms. Her father's brother also owned a factory in Russia, and the Communist authorities threw him in prison for 10 years.

"[A] very nice man. I saw him when he came back from jail. He was very sick," Margaryan recalls.

Despite her family's history of being on the wrong side of the Soviet regime, Margaryan has a nuanced view of life in the old USSR.

"Soviet Union has good things and very bad things," she explains. "Good things I love in Soviet Union: education is free. You [don't] have to pay nothing in school. Always they help children. Education staying [at a] high level. Everyone [has] to go to school. Everyone has to learn. Everyone has to be educated. Now, no. If you don't wanna go [to] school, don't go. Some children can't pay [for] it. And I like medical [in Soviet Union] is free. Again, you [don't] have to pay nothing if [you have] insurance. And not like very expensive. Soviet Union time, not expensive. When you're working - even if you're not working - if you going to hospital, government [pays for it]."

In the years before the USSR's dissolution, Margaryan's family was able to recover some of the economic status they had lost at the height of collectivization. She characterizes her pre-1992 lifestyle as "high middle class," as her husband managed a big construction outfit, owned three cars and more than one house, and was able to open a savings account for each one of his four children.

What was gained in prosperity and stability, however, was lost in personal freedom.

"When I [was] born, my mother secretly christened me," Margaryan recalls. In an avowedly atheistic country, baptizing one's child could cost one his or her job. Five years later, with the anti-religious restrictions somewhat loosened up, she was baptized again, by an aunt who had no idea she had already gone through the ritual as a newborn.

The Year of Tremors

In December 1988, a 6.8 magnitude quake struck Armenia, killing 25,000 people and ravaging the northern part of the country. The Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant, located about 60 miles away from the epicenter, was shut down for the next six years. It had fulfilled a large portion of Armenia's energy needs. Electricity was now provided only intermittently, for a few hours each day, and people were increasingly desperate to find something to heat their homes with. Many cut the trees in their yards, Margaryan says, but her husband refused to do that. Instead, he chopped off the wooden floor in their cellar and used that as fuel.

This year was not only the year of the catastrophic earthquake, but also the year the Armenian independence movement got its start.

"Armenia was the first republic of the Soviet Union that openly fought for its independence, so it launched a struggle, a peaceful struggle for its people to petition, to mass around this," explains Armen Baibourtian, a professor of political science at UMass Amherst and a former Armenian ambassador to several other countries. "But very many experts concluded later on that this movement gave birth to wider, broader movement on the territory of the entire Soviet Union, and was the trigger [of] the collapse of the entire Soviet Empire."

Economic breakdown and war

That collapse came in the last days of 1991. People around the world celebrated the end of the Cold War and the diminishing prospect of nuclear war. But in Armenia, the dissolution of the Soviet Union also meant a complete economic breakdown. When the country changed its currency from the Soviet ruble to the dram, people's savings were wiped out.

"One day, we wake up, we [were] changing money, and zero money! And not just mine. Many, many Armenians who put money in bank, nothing!" Margaryan remembers. The business her husband had managed went bankrupt. He died of a heart attack soon afterwards. Margaryan is convinced that it was the loss of everything he had worked so hard for that killed him.

For Armenia, the demise of the USSR also meant war with neighboring Azerbaijan. The bone of contention between the two former Soviet republics was the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The majority of the population was ethnic Armenian, but the region had been incorporated into Azerbaijan by the Bolsheviks. In the first years of the conflict, Margaryan kept 14 people as refugees in her home. They were her brother-in-law's family who had fled Nakhchivan, an autonomous area of Azerbaijan close to Nagorno-Karabakh.

"The [were] scared, crying," Margaryan says. "I cook[ed] for everyone. They help[ed] me. My husband [did the] shopping. They help[ed] me with dinner. My big family. Because, poor people, what they going to do? I [felt] very, very sorry for them."

After three years of full-scale war, a ceasefire agreement was signed in May of 1994, under Russia's mediation. Nagorno-Karabakh was thereafter known as one of the many "frozen conflicts" of the former Soviet Union. Recently, the conflict warmed up again, and Margaryan now worries that her son will become involved in the conflict, just like her friend's son had.

A New Life

Three years after her husband's death, Margaryan moved to Hadley in 2011 to join her daughter, Araksya, her son-in-law, and their daughter. Today, Margaryan looks after the house and her granddaughter, while Araksya, a Smith College graduate who has been living in the U.S. for 20 years, works as a nurse in cardiology at the Baystate Medical Center in Springfield.

In a year, Margaryan says she will have her American citizenship. She then hopes to bring her two other daughters, Ruzan and Liana, as well as her son, Tigran, to the United States, because life in Armenia is still nearly very hard.

"I love my country. I love my Armenia. Really. I love [it] very much. I want to live there. Every Armenian wants that. But just ... no freedom. You can't work which way you want," Margaryan says. "I don't want to too much complain. My daughter [used to] work in hospital, she make awful, hard work. She work [in] head and spine surgery. Sometimes she stay eight hours [in surgery]. Anesthesia. Six months they [did] not pay her. Six months without money!"

America is different, she says.

"What I like her very much, person is very safe her. Really. When someone feeling badly, not healthy, they calling emergency. I saw emergency cars coming very quick to just help that person. I like that very much, too. Life, person, here, valuable," she says.

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Interviews with Anahit Margaryan were made possible by the Center for New Americans.