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A former top security official in the Pashinyan administration has authored a book about the 2018 demonstrations that subsequently became known as the Velvet Revolution and ousted then-leader Serzh Sargsyan, who sought to remain in power.
Armen Grigoryan, who served as Secretary of the Security Council under Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan from 2018 until he recently left the post, presented his book “Take a Step, Reject Serzh” at the National Gallery of Armenia on September 5, where he also signed copies of the book for readers.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was also present at the event, which was organized as part of the 9th Yerevan International Book Festival. The 2018 revolution was led by then-opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan and his supporters, including Grigoryan. “Take a Step, Reject Serzh” was widely used by demonstrators as a slogan during the mass protests.
In his remarks at the event, Pashinyan spoke about the revolution, invoking a widely circulated remark attributed to former Chinese leader Mao Zedong that it was "still too early to draw conclusions about the French Revolution."
“My conclusions about the revolution have been changing every week since the 2018 revolution. Reading Armen Grigoryan’s book once again raised the question for me: what do I think about the 2018 people’s, non-violent, Velvet Revolution? Indeed, I now fully agree with Mao Zedong: it is still too early to draw conclusions about it,” the Prime Minister said, admitting that he had not yet finished reading Grigoryan’s book.
In Pashinyan’s opinion, there is no need to draw conclusions from the revolution because every revolution is an opportunity.
“Moreover, it is an opportunity for everyone. The question here is how each of us uses and has used that opportunity. The revolution is an opportunity even today.”
Pashinyan said he considers the revolution a success story.
“The revolution is about having daily contact with life, because when we say democracy, we mean that every citizen comes into contact with life every day. This is how non-democracy and democracy differ: the more often a person comes into contact with life, the more democratic the country is; the less they come into contact with life, the less democratic it is.”
The Prime Minister considers the greatest challenge of the revolution to be how to prevent it from reaching the zero point, the point from which it started.
“The greatest impression I had of our revolution was in 2018, when, already serving as Prime Minister and communicating with leaders of other countries, I heard from one of the long-serving leaders of a developed country that their country also needed such a revolution. I want to conclude my speech by stating that our country needs another revolution as well,” Pashinyan said.
According to Arkmenik Nikoghosyan, editor at Antares Publishing House, the book has turned out to be “a very honest” one, in which the author, as an eyewitness and, most importantly, without correcting or reinterpreting events with hindsight, has presented the events of 2018.
The speaker presented what he considers a symbolic episode described in the book, when Armen Grigoryan, with great effort, managed to calm down a young man angered by the process of blocking the streets. Describing that moment, the author came to the following conclusion: “Now I understand that that young man thinks that the revolution also happened because he was able to calm down.”
Nikoghosyan particularly values the description and interpretation of the events presented by an eyewitness at the very moment they were unfolding.
“In my opinion, the most valuable and precious thing for such processes is precisely the contemporary assessments, the emotional assessments. Today, there are probably thousands of recordings in the archives of various television companies, newspapers, and even individuals. The revolution was a process that was fully covered as it unfolded. But when reading Armen Grigoryan’s book, it seems to us that these are different events. When you engage with an eyewitness’s account of all this, many issues that concern our society are presented in a completely different way, and it is precisely with the publication of such books that they become more accurate,” he said.
Continuing his thought, Nikoghosyan noted:
“When I was reading the book, one of the questions that interested me most was whether Armen Grigoryan had edited the account of the events presented in the book during this period. Judging from the descriptions of different cases, the references to names, and the emphasis placed on events, I can confidently say—and he himself will probably confirm—that nothing has changed: the events are as they were, the people are as they were. It is a very honest book. It even contains things that the reader would not expect. I want to state that the book has exactly the content that was close to me as far back as February 23 [2026].”
Armen Grigoryan emphasized the importance of publishing such a book, stressing that if he wanted to keep all this within the personal sphere, he would have had to keep it in a red folder as classified material.
“But any text is important when it becomes public. I think the book is very important as a record of what was seen and the emotions of a direct participant in the events. I also consider it important to continue discussions around the events that took place in 2018. The book is about the democratization of Armenia, the empowerment of the public, and establishing the public as the main subject in the Republic of Armenia. And I consider it important to continue the discussion around this, and I think that publishing a position in this form and launching discussions around it is very important,” he said.
The book’s editor, Taguhi Ghazaryan, said that she had worked on the book’s text back in January-February 2020, but later, due to various events, the work was interrupted and resumed at Armen Grigoryan’s suggestion after August 8, 2025.
“We immediately decided that we would not edit the book from the perspective of the knowledge we had acquired from 2020 to 2025. It was difficult, and we discussed it a lot. Of course, there were literary interventions, but we fully preserved the attitude, analysis, assessments, and approaches. We tried to fully preserve the spirit that existed until 2020,” she said.
According to Taguhi Ghazaryan, this book does not claim to tell the whole truth about the revolution. As the speaker noted, the events are presented from one person’s perspective, while the revolution has hundreds of thousands of co-authors.
The presentation then continued in a question-and-answer format, with questions addressed to the author of the book.