Alone with Myself

Alone with Myself or How to Reach You, Descendants! by Leonid Karakhanovich Hurunts. A posthumous publication of entries from 1975-1982. Translated from the original Russian to English by Learn for Artsakh. 

Part Four: Fires in Karabakh 

New "Enlightener" of Karabakh

October 10, 1975. Just returned from Karabakh. Everything is still there. True, Kevorkov is cunning. He no longer has that straightforward, global dislike for Armenians. He is now able to say from the podium: “I am an Armenian and I am proud of it.” Apparently, after our letters, his tail was twisted somewhere. He even learned to swindle people and flaunt a change in himself. This was especially revealed in him in “Days of Soviet Literature in Azerbaijan.”

Guests, participants of the decade arrived in Nagorno-Karabakh. Sero Khanzadyan and Aramais Sahakyan are among them. What a paradox! Sero Khanzadyan, as you know, at the conference of the creative intelligentsia of Yerevan rightly called Kevorkov Sultan Hamid [1] of the Armenian people, and Aramais Sahakyan is not without sin. It was because of him that a very good man, Yasha Babalyan, suffered in Karabakh. Suffered is not the word. Was removed from work, expelled from the region. Remember the unprecedented entry in his work book? "Sacked from his job at the Soviet Karabakh newspaper for publicly reading a poem with a nationalistic content." Aramais Sahakyan is the author of that poem!

You understand, if someone who reads a poem of nationalistic content recieves such a severe punishment, therefore, its author should simply be imprisoned.

What an unwanted duet. But don't worry too much about the fate of these writers who came to visit Kevorkov. The meeting was at the highest level. Kevorkov turned out to be not so petty as to remember the past. A guest came to your house - what grievances can there be?

There were toasts, usual for such an occasion, kisses, unbridled mutual compliments. For example, such: “Antey of Armenian literature!” – this is about Sero Khanzadyan. “Enlightener of the Armenian people, David Bek!” - This is about Kevorkov.

What a Christ this Kevorkov is, what a lofty soul he is! What a reception given to the Armenian writers who planted a pig on him! It might have seemed so if you didn't know the little detail that immediately put everything in its place. This detail is a decade. Khanzadyan and Sahakyan did not just take but came from Yerevan. They arrived as participants of the decade through Baku, from Aliyev. As guests of Aliyev. And this is a completely different matter. I would like to look at Kevorkov, who dared not to receive Aliev's guests! To the dish licker Kevorkov, who suddenly forgot his personal offense! But it has long been known: for the sake of scrambled eggs, you can kiss the handle of the pan. And if this kisser is Kevorkov, I won’t wait. Not only the handle, he will lick the hottest base.

The owner orders, he is ready to fraternize with the devil himself. But Sero, our beloved Sero? Why did he have to lavish these praises, to whitewash the darknss? Why did he need all this vaudeville? What demon pushed him to take this step, which wounded the hearts of the witnesses of this fraternization, this outright betrayal? Those rosy prospects that Kevorkov promises Karabakh? But it's all lies! And before him, they promised Karabakh various benefits: they built a railway to Stepanakert, designed factories, gasified collective farms and regional centers, and improved the city. But the secretaries came and went, and Karabakh was left without a railway, without any promised benefits. Without the most essential - passing country roads. Some pack trails throughout the territory instead of wheeled roads. Karabakh remained the way she was - humiliated, constantly deceived, insulted, spat upon. 

I would like to ask Sero Khanzadyan: how could he himself or Aramais Sahakyan, with his innocent poems, which seemed nationalist to Kevorkov, have grown up on such soil? Forgot, did you, dear Sero Nikolaevich [Khanzadyan], how they treated Zori Balayan, Bagrat Ulubabyan, Bogdan Janyan? The writer of these lines, the author of many books about Karabakh, does not dare to set foot in Karabakh. Don't you know this, Sero Nikolaevich? Don't you know how much evil Kevorkov brought with him to our mountains? How do you, Sero Nikolaevich, explain your fraternization with the killer of all life in Karabakh, with Kevorkov, who ascribes to us what we do not have - nationalism. What's this? Optical illusion? Illusion? Please wipe your eyes. Before you is an enemy that sows discord between neighbors - between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

Now a few words about the man who came to Karabakh not through Baku, but directly from Yerevan, bypassing Aliyev. How should it be received? Of course it's bad.

I was in the lair of this molted wolf and remained alive.

I'll tell you how it happened. What an incident happened to me. I came to Karabakh following Sero Khanzadyan and Aramayis Sahakyan, participants of the decade. For several days I lived in Stepanakert, trying not to catch the eye of the leadership. They found out about my stay in the city. A raid began on me, but slyly: "Kevorkov burns with tenderness for me, Kevorkov longs to meet me." Damn it, hasn't he suddenly become an angel?

I had a conversation with him for a long time. After all, for the convenience of fighting me, he declared me the son of a kulak [2]. For friendship with me, Komitas Ter-Karapetyan, chairman of the collective farm of my native village, Norshen, was reprimanded along the party line, and a 94-year-old old woman, my uncle’s wife, was expelled from my uncle’s house, once dispossessed, although by the decision of the collective farm she was returned to her dugout room. And this is before the eyes of the whole of Karabakh!

When I arrived in Norshen after those events, Komitas Ter-Karapetyan, previously accused of having links with me, the son of a kulak, got into a car and disappeared from the village. All the leaders in the area also fled. Either they were embarrassed for their “activities” in relation to my relatives, or they were afraid of meeting with me, a meeting because of which you could lose your party card. In any case, any meeting with Hurunts did not bode well for them.

This is what I urgently wanted to talk about with the newly-minted “Padishah of Karabakh.”

A meeting time was set. I arrived on the minute. I open the door. All the apostles of the region are sitting. Every single one. And lackeys are here, driving me into this lair. Not a single smile on their faces. Now there was no need to pretend: the victim was driven into a cage. They offered to sit down. I would have turned around, gone home, but I sat down next to the apostles - my Karabakh people, who turned into rabbits, afraid to breathe.

Without mincing words, Kevorkov threw out the first wave of anger. The lackeys were silent. I thought that if Kevorkov decided to use his fists and trample me, no one would have raised an eyebrow or lifted a finger. The lackeys were silent even when Kevorkov shouted: “What are you writing? All history and history. And where is today's Karabakh in your works?” Am I writing history? Am I far from today's Karabakh? All twenty-four books about Karabakh, about today's Karabakh, and the leader of today's Karabakh is unaware, he has not read a single one. It is understandable, according to him, I am not Tolstoy, he only reads Tolstoy. But why are the apostles silent? They know what kind of Karabakh I am writing about. There were no suicide bombers among them. To say anything in favor of justice at this moment is tantamount to suicide.

The apostles are silent. I look at these silent people, at dead idols, and I stop believing that there is clean air, singing birds, a cloudless sky in the world. Everything seems to be trampled into the dirt, mixed with dust.



There is a beautiful new house in Norshen, built of strong stone. In Karabakh, you rarely see such a sight. I stopped the car, admired. The driver was from Norshen. He grinned, “Like?”

“Beautiful! And whose is it?”

“The son of Samvel Harutyunyan, our machine operator. If you had been here a few days ago, you would have heard what the secretary of the district committee Gabrielyan said about this house.”

“What did he say?” I asked curiously.

“Threatened to bulldoze it.”

“For what sins?”

“He thought the stones were from Yerevan.”

"Well, why didn't you take it down?"

“The owner of the house, a tractor driver, was called from work, they cross-examined him. It turned out that these stones were brought from a quarry near Agdam, Azerbaijani stones.”

In passing, let’s talk about reportomania, about those who like to complete and overfulfill everything and everyone in the world ahead of schedule. In the days of Khrushchev, it was, during the years of corn mania. One collective farm chairman in Karabakh plowed the entire pasture, sowing corn, which did not grow here. He killed the cattle, but received the passing red banner.

In my opinion, it is necessary to strictly ask those who, chasing awards, infringe upon the vital interests of people, corrupt their souls. I mean the strictness and prohibitions that Kevorkov imposed on the grape harvest. Draconian bans. People who grow grapes can't get close to the garden. Not a single brush for the peasant! This is the motto of Kevorkov. Each brush is a number for the next report, an application for a new award. And there is nothing to say about the carp, with the advent of Kevorkov, it is empty, mice run around in it. The peasant buys wine in the shop. And you don't always buy. Deficit. Little is brought to rural areas. It is understandable. It would be ridiculous to take wine to where it is produced. What do you think, a peasant, placed in the position of a laborer, deprived of the feeling of the owner of his land, the vineyard that he has grown, will take care of the grapes as you would like? The sense is in our genes. The strictness and prohibitions cannot be etched out of us. The offended collective farmer, the peasant, offended in his best feelings, is no longer a full-fledged worker. Don't expect much from him. But that is not all. By stupid actions we kill in the collective farmer, in the peasant, the feeling of a master in general. He loses interest in production. We knock its roots out of the ground. And nothing holds such a collective farmer. If he buys wine in a store, but does not see the grapes in person, what should he do in the village? Why should he hold on to the village, which, whatever you say, is far from the city? He will live in a city where there is plenty of everything. 

But Kevorkov is a damn thing. In Karabakh they are also called summer residents. Not just him [Kevorkov] alone. All the leaders are nice people sent from Baku. They live alone. No wives, no children. Temporary workers. And everyone is chosen so that there is no "yan" in the surname: Kevorkov, Muradov, Aslanov, Samvelov, etc [3].

It is no coincidence that in a conversation with me, one of the justice workers in Stepanakert said with pain: “You will not find a single Karabakh Armenian here. Nobody here will understand you. Go to your area, to Martuni. Maybe you can still find a Karabakh citizen there.”

But my Karabakh people in Martuni turned out to be Karabakh people only by birth. They were Kevorkov's people. We have already mentioned one of them. Gabrielyan, who almost demolished the house of the tractor driver Harutyunyan with a bulldozer, suspecting that the stones of the house were brought from Armenia. These are the kind of Karabakh people Kevorkov surrounded himself with.

The authoritarianism of the party leader, the unwillingness to listen to the voice of the people, the complete disregard for criticism from below - this is an invincible evil that hangs like a sword of Damocles over our heads. Nowhere has this evil bloomed in such a riotous color as it does now, in our day. Before Kevorkov, Volodin raged in Karabakh, loving to kiss the mulberry tree. He was also unclean. An extortionist, he did not hint, but demanded. He sent an official car to the collective farms for tribute. He took, basically, in kind: some chickens, some cheese, butter, some well-baked Karabakh tonir bread. He especially liked the Karabakh mulberry. Here, his appetite knew no bounds. He took ten, twenty liters. There was a case when Volodin demanded as much as forty liters. One of the chairmen once could not stand it, sent the secretary to go to hell. He even cursed obscenely, calling him an extortionist, a beggar. He said it and got into trouble. They expelled him from the party, removed him from work, then imprisoned him.

Under a drunken hand, Volodin once said, “I will put the whole of Karabakh behind bars, who is my judge?”

And he did just so. Wagon loads of anonymous letters written about Volodin's "activities." Director of the Stepanakert school No.3 named after Griboedova, Christopher Alexandrovich Petrosyan, at the city party conference called Volodin an adventurer who dishonors the name of a communist, and demanded that a commission be created to check his "activities." The commission was not created, but the old man, who criticized the adventurer, was properly punished - he barely got out.

Where do They Come from, Officials?

A childhood friend, now a teacher at the Norshen school, Shagen Avanesyan, wrote to me: “If you want to see how furious the officials are here, come.”

I learned that a thunderstorm had passed over Karabakh: they were offending the mulberry.

As soon as the campaign against moonshining began - this was under Khrushchev - how some unlucky fighters against alcoholism drove bulldozers to Karabakh. Indeed, we drink arak [a type of spirit] from mulberries. But more than just arak is made from mulberry. And yet trees are cut down. I've seen bulldozers knock down ancient trees. Why? After all, they don’t burn wheat or sugar because various poachers sometimes drive vodka out of them?

Leaving everything to do, I'm going on the road. Stepanakert, the capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region, is within easy reach of Yerevan. An hour and a half later, the plane lands on a green meadow near Stepanakert. A few minutes later I am in the regional committee.

“Why are they not allowed to collect mulberries, are mulberry trees cut down? What did they do wrong?” I ask.

The committee members avert their eyes. “You know... such a campaign. Yes, and from above, an instruction came from the ministry.”

“Well, what do you mean? Are you sure the direction above is correct? That with a single stroke of the pen one can write off countless wealth from the collective farms, deprive them, perhaps, of their most profitable item?”

The regional committee members again avert their eyes.

“What is our mulberry accused of anyway? Why did she not please the authorities?” I ask.

The accusation is most trivial: mulberry arak contains a large percentage of fusel oil. And fusel was discovered due to the low degree of raw alcohol. The lower the strength, the more fusel. 

The chairman of Karvintrest, called by phone, comes to the rescue. He turned out to be my fellow villager Aram Babayan. I studied with him in a rural school.

“We overlooked it,” Babayan admits. "They reduced the requirements, the collective farms produce arak of reduced strength. And who needs it, uses it ..."

The solution comes on its own: if we imagine an araka in which the most meticulous analysis will not find even a hint of fusel... Having pronounced the right to collect mulberries in our native village, we set off to Norshen. 

Mulberry picking is a lively and noisy job. But now, neither the thumping blow of the taka, nor the merry roll call, nor the jokes that accompany each blow are heard, nor the fractional rattle of falling berries, knocking on the canvas stretched out under the tree in a short plentiful downpour, is heard. Quiet. No people, no sound. Gardens greeted us with graveyard silence.

Nothing affects a person as depressingly as a mulberry tree bursting with an excess of overripe berries. The branches drooped down heavily, hung, bent down to the ground. Eight harvests are taken from a mulberry tree per season. The third was already ripening, and the first and second had not yet been removed. It was painful for me and Babayan, who grew up in respect for the mulberry, to look at this dull picture. We go to the gardens. Not a soul. In the depths of the gardens there is a spring - a trough carved into the rock, a stone chest where spring water flows. Kagriz - this is how such a structure is called here. Only here, at the kagriz, a few elderly people appeared. Sitting down along the gutter, turning over the rosary, they talked peacefully.

We drove up. Said hello. The old men returned the bow, but without much respect.

“Is that the case?” Babayan began right off the bat. “The branches are bursting with berries, and you sit and delight yourself with a conversation.”

Samvel Harutyunyan was also here - a man not very bright in business, but easy on the word, a philosopher and a joker. There are many talkers-philosophers in Norshen. But you will never hear swearing or rude abuse. Samvel Harutyunyan recognized me and Babayan, but did not show it, did not even look in our direction. In his hands he did not have a rosary, but a long stick, with which he impassively picked at the ground and, trying to hit the same point, hollowed out a decent hole. Harutyunyan's three fingers are twisted, his palm is disfigured - the memory of a war that has long since passed away. The image of this deeply peaceful, light man, as if stuffed with puns and jokes, did not fit in my head with a soldier called to kill, although often people as cheerful as our Samvel Harutyunyan in soldier's overcoats warmed our harsh, cold trench life.

“You're not standing up for your mulberries, old man.” I turn to Harutyunyan. “I’ll tell you straight, hiding in the bushes at our age is not good. Shameful, even. Have you forgotten what mulberry is for Norshen?”

I can afford this. Samvel is overgrown with a beard, he plays old man, but he is not much older than me.

Without raising his head, Harutyunyan continues to pick in the ground with concentration, now carefully falling into the hole. He does this deftly, pressing the stick with his index and thumb. Without looking up from his work, without disturbing his stern concentration, he exclaims, “The authorities don’t want anything bad. It's not allowed, so it's not allowed.”

I peer into Samvel's face and don't know if he is being cunning when he says these memorized words, or if he really thinks so.

“What is not allowed, Samvel? And you are not ashamed to flounce such nonsense?” I could not stand it, hiding behind big words. “Well, here's your solution. Gather a team, start gathering.”

The stick in Samvel's hands trembled, stopped picking the ground. From under his faded cap, Samvel looked at me, at Babayan. In the depths of open eyelashes, lively, not at all indifferent lights began to play.

“You do not joke?” He jumped up, now piercing with a sharp look first me, then Babayan. I take out the license and hand it to him. Samvel snatched it from me, looked for glasses in his pockets for a long time and, not finding them, called a young man. The permission was read aloud. Samvel grabbed the ground with his hat.

“People have heard what the son of the blessed memory of Karakhan brought us!"

It's about me. 

“Wow!" He shouted with all his might. “Don't delay, people. Get your canvases here! Let's shake here! Bring the canvas. Whoo-hoo!”

I listened to the suddenly transformed Samvel and could not determine when he was more sincere: when he spoke about the ban on the collection of mulberries or when he learned about the lifting of this ban. Not even an hour had passed before the first blow of the tak was heard, to which others responded from different places, immediately breaking the graveyard silence in the gardens. Jokes flew into the air. The berries fell on the banners stretched under the trees, covering the merry voices with explosions of downpour ....

I left the village loaded with bottles, which were supposed to refute the fable about the fusel oil. I also took with me bekmez - honey boiled from the juice of mulberries, cudweed, not inferior to sultanas, reviews of many patients sentenced to death and cured with mulberries. We will not let the mulberry be dealt with, we will defend our breadwinner!

Looking ahead, I will say: the Izvestia newspaper published my article, which decided the outcome of this dispute. The order to ban the collection of mulberries has been cancelled. But it cost the Karabakh collective farmers a whole year's harvest.

Offenders

How humiliated, insulted, and spat upon a person is! You have a Constitution. The most democratic. All your rights are written in golden letters in it. You have a court, a prosecutor's office, a Supreme Council, various councils, ministries. The union, finally. But if you are in trouble, say, a party worker, the smallest one, does not love you, you have nowhere to go with your truth. And if he is also a deputy, secretary of the district committee, regional committee, instructor of the Central Committee ... Oh, oh ... Better not stutter, do not rush about with your truth - there is a blank wall in front of you. But you do not believe in your defenselessness, you beat your head against this wall, and the reinforced concrete wall does not give in. From impotence, you have a heart attack - the end of your war. If your lesson had been learned. If only one stone in this wall would move...

Take a swing at a party worker, play with his authority?! Let's talk about authority. Someone came up with the idea that this wall has authority. Let the wall think and do whatever it pleases. And what about a person who is so rich in rights and so thoroughly robbed, robbed poor? Not protected by any law. This man is the whole people.

Why are we in this state, people? We can be overcome by our stupidity. We have been standing on the scaffold for a long time. They themselves climbed onto a stool, threw a rope around their neck ... It pains me greatly, this death sentence imposed upon all my people. Is there a force on our earth capable of kicking this stupidity out of us?

But back to our sheep. We will talk about Karabakh, which is no exception. Karabakh is the drop that can give an idea of ​​the sea, of all our land, given at the mercy of the Turks, who have no account.

Here is the story of the murder of a seventy-year-old Armenian man by an Azerbaijani in my native Karabakh. The political background of the crime was ruled out initially. Money was found in the pocket of the murdered man - two hundred rubles. Let such a meager absurdity fall on the conscience of the judges: why did the old man, who was walking into the forest for firewood, need this money? The money was needed not by the old man, but by the court, Kevorkov, in order to deceive public opinion - the murder took place for the purpose of robbery. So they believed. After all, according to the law for deliberate murder - the highest measure of punishment. What a fool would lay his head on a chopping block for two hundred rubles. But the criminal was sure that the murder of an Armenian was not punishable.

And the killer of the old man was "unscrewed."

Kevorkov said, “It cannot be that an Azerbaijani killed an Armenian. We need to show the killer to the doctors. He's probably not sane, he's sick."

Three doctors determined: “No mental abnormalities were found in the killer. Completely healthy."

Kevorkov called the doctors - they were subject to him - he said harshly, “Do you also suffer from Yerevanism? So I will send him to Kirovabad for an examination, and then I will deal with you.”

As expected, Kirovabad did not hesitate to answer: the killer is “hopelessly ill.” And how he still hasn't slaughtered half the village! You see, there is even consolation: he could cut out half the village, but limited himself to one old man. The killer is already on the loose. He's being treated...for murder. But doctors are hopelessly ill. There is no cure for Yerevanism. They must share the fate of many Karabakh people suffering from Yerevanism.

I could not stand it and sent off an alarming telegram addressed to the Minister of the Interior, Comrade Andropov. Two employees went to the site. The facts have been confirmed. Having arrived in Yerevan, they wished to meet me. We met with the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Mikayelyan. Mikaelyan was in the rank of colonel. The guests are in civilian uniform, but they must also be in ranks. The conversation lasted over three hours. Our conversation, it turns out, was recorded. When I left, in the presence of Mikayelyan, the tape was played and one of the employees who had arrived from Moscow said about me: “Where is the nationalist here? A completely normal person, rooting for his land ... "

Mikaelyan told me about this conversation under great secrecy. How’s that? It turns out that the fact of the murder and the impunity of the crime interested them less than my personality. They investigated me.

Oh my God! And how this earth tolerates us, a country inhabited by an army of violators, endowed with the right to trample on everything and anything that is dear to the heart. A donkey, having stumbled over a hummock on its pack path, will not pass along this path another time. The magician will not appear a second time where his trick is solved. We know the price of the faith that we had in Stalin. We know what the faith in Bagirov cost. What have we learned from that river of human blood that flowed in the country? What conclusions have we drawn?

None. Stalin, Bagirov, and other executioners were buried, and the faith was transferred to others who kill with new methods. Tortured without camps and physical mutilations. But they also kill. Kill morally.

My story was accepted in Literaturnaya Gazeta. It should have been printed. But they printed exactly two and a half years later. During this time, my story wandered through the departments in the depths of the editorial office. It was dismantled and reassembled twice. On the eve of its publication, the following telephone dialogue took place between a newspaper employee and its special correspondent for Armenia, writer Zori Balayan:

“Zori Gaikovich, tomorrow we will publish Hurunts, but only without an insert.”

"But why? Is the text poor?”

“That's not the point. There are the following words, ‘The writer often refers in his work to the images of his countrymen - workers of Nagorno-Karabakh, paints their original character’…”

“Well, what does not suit the editors? Indeed, almost all of Hurunts' books are devoted to his native land, Karabakh.”

“This is exactly what the editors do not like …”

“But why? What exactly does it not suit? Karabakh? That she (Karabakh) exists and books are written about her?”

Pause on the phone. A minute later, the same voice again, but already visibly annoyed, “Don't play naive, Zori Gaikovich. As if you don’t know what kind of war Hurunts waged against the leaders of Karabakh and the republic itself a few years ago?”

“Was this fight unfair? Not only Hurunts spoke out against the excesses of the leaders of the region-”

“Let's not talk about it. This is the editorial decision.”

As a result, the story was published in a heavily censored form. Everything related to Karabakh was crossed out.

Recently, a letter from a reader came from North Ossetia, from the city of Ordzhonikidze, in which Tamara Galoyan, an elderly woman who once left Karabakh, dreams, “If I don’t fall off on the way,” to go to her native Dolanlar, a village in the Hadrut region, to say goodbye once again and to look at her native village, which, as she writes, all the years of separation from, she carries in her heart. In the same letter, she says that she does not remember her father, but knows about the tragedy that befell her family in 1912, when she was not even a year old: “While haymaking, in broad daylight, the eskers [soldiers] suddenly attacked - Azerbaijanis, as I understand it. They killed nine Dolanlarians, including my father, grandfather Ab, and uncle Melikset.”

“This tragedy,” Galoyan writes further, “is well remembered in Dolanlar, the families who lost their relatives are still alive.”

My naive correspondent invites me to go to her native village, find out the details of this tragedy and write about it. “After all, people should know about this wild massacre, which the eskers [4] inflicted on peaceful people ...”

How can I tell this old woman not to go to her native village, that in this very Dolanlar, as in the entire Hadrut region, she will not see anything good - only empty villages from which the people fled? That these same eskers, who once killed physically, now kill morally, that the genocide in her native Karabakh continues to this day. Don't go to Dolanlar, dear woman, you'll have the same heart attack that brought me down. I am writing these lines already in the hospital, where I ended up after my war against moral and physical reprisals against people.

I can say for consolation that you and I are still lucky. In your native Dolanlar you will still find people. If you were born in Nakhijevan, which is close to Armenia, at a stone's throw from Yerevan, in Agulis, you would not find a single living soul. Nakhijevan would meet you with extinct Armenian villages. Only the names of the once flourishing villages remained in the memory of refugees from Nakhijevan. And from the ancient khachkars, from the tombstones of the devastated Armenian cemeteries, our neighbors, trumpeting friendship from morning to night, build their own houses and live in them without feeling remorse. What should I tell you, my dear stranger? The Armenian issue, with the tacit consent of Andranik's descendants, who falsely swore love for him, for his memory, is being resolved in Ankara.

There are still Armenians in our Karabakh. Find consolation at least with this, my compatriot. Not all villages have died out yet.

In one collective farm, they removed the chairman, a good leader who did not please a high official. The instructor, who came from the area, says: “The party entrusted comrade Tovmasyan with responsible work, the party is taking him out.”

An elderly man, head of a sheep farm, gets up, “Please explain, Comrade Instructor. Why are you removing our chairman? I won't stand for this.”

No matter how the instructor explained, the farm manager shrugged his shoulders, still could not understand the reason. An old wit rises from his seat, “Listen, Yerem, don’t you understand? You are the farm manager. When you shoot a shepherd, you don't ask the sheep for permission, do you? What's incomprehensible here?”

Every time, remembering Kevorkov, the expression comes to mind: guards, they're killing me!

Kevorkov was sent to Karabakh to turn it into a solid Agulis.

Here it's not even about Karabakh, it's not about the danger that threatens its inhabitants. More terrible, irreparable things can happen. What does it mean to constantly eradicate the human out of a person, to constantly stun him with a shout, a kick, to humiliate him physically and morally, depriving him of the right to think, to think independently, to decide for him what is bad and what is good? Where does such a line lead, if you mentally draw it further? And it will fall, you can be sure of this, into a musty swamp, from which there is no way out: a living being cannot breathe. And the Kevorkovs drive you into this swamp. It is more convenient for them when you are a faceless, blind executor of someone else's will, when questions of morality, honor and dignity have faded into the background. When, having memorized a bunch of slogans and quotes, you are unable to digest them.

I understand that it's not just Kevorkov's business. But until he breaks his neck on this, he can do a lot of trouble.

The Truth is in the Numbers

In 1923, 175,000 people lived in Karabakh, of which 93.2% were Armenians.

The Armenian population of the NKAO in 1970 compared with 1923 decreased by 36,932 people. That is, by 24%, and the Azerbaijani population of the region increased by 16,179 people or 147.8%. Russian population in 1970 compared to 1959 decreased by 27.2%.

For valor and heroism in the battles of the Patriotic War, 15,000 of its participants were awarded military medals and orders, 27 were awarded the honorary title of Hero of the Soviet Union, and the legendary pilot Nelson Stepanyan was awarded twice.

The region gave the armed forces of the Soviet Union 18 generals, many officers, such talented organizers as Air Marshal S.S. Khudyakov (Armenak Khanferyan), Colonel General M.A. Parsegov and many others. 20% of the Heroes of the Soviet Union are Armenians born in Nagorno-Karabakh.

According to the all-Union census of 1939, the population of the NKAO was 150,838 people, of which 90% were Armenians. Of this number, during the Great Patriotic War, 45,000 thousand or 30% of the population were mobilized to the front, and in the Soviet Union - out of 194 million - 11 million, that is, 6%. In percentage terms, 5 times more people were mobilized here than throughout the country. 22,000 people died. The total loss of the armed forces of the USSR is 3% of the population, and in the NKAO - 15%. (This data is taken from the books of General of the Army S.M. Shtemenko - “The General Staff during the War,” book two, pp. 506–507, M., 1974, M.A. Parsegov, pp. 13–14, Stepanakert, 1970).

“The percentage of mobilization of the population into the army in the NKAO was almost twice as high as even in fascist Germany during the Second World War. The Nazis, who carried out several total mobilizations, did not reach such heights - they mobilized 16% of the population. Stalin considered such a high percentage of German mobilization as adventurism, which undermined the viability of the country one of the reasons for the collapse. (Shtemenko, ibid., pp. 506–507)

Isn't it clear: it reeks of Genocide here. Our brother has been persecuted for exactly as many years as Soviet power in Azerbaijan - a kind of unspoken genocide 60 years long.

60 year long Genocide. No, I don't make reservations. Listen to these wild words for our ears: "The government of Azerbaijan decided to allocate 200 million rubles for the annexation of Karabakh and Zangezur to Azerbaijan." Further: “So far, 90 percent of Zangezur villages have not been disarmed. It is sad. But it is more sad that the Zangezur Armenians have not yet been beheaded (not left without leaders). Its intelligentsia and military leaders still remain in the villages. Work day and night. Try to ensure that all prominent and necessary Armenians are arrested. Abandon philanthropy - you cannot create a state, conquer countries by this ... In places rich in warriors, in order to weaken the Armenians, kill one Russian soldier and blame the Armenians for this. You know what the Russians will do!”

It remains to say where and when these lines were written. In Ankara before the 1915 genocide? No, they were recorded in Baku, at the dawn of Soviet power. I can give the exact dates: the first directive was launched on July 19, 1920, and the second two days later, on June 21. And they were written by one of the first leaders of Azerbaijan, whose portrait you can see in Baku on the stands next to Shahumyan, Azizbekov and other founders of Soviet power in the republic. This is Asad Karaev. Yes, yes, the same Asad Karaev, about whom books are written, whose portraits are drawn. For non-believers, let's refer to the archive -CPA IML, f.64, op. units ch.10.

Notes

[1] Sultan Hamid (Abdul Hamid II) is responsible for the Hamidian Massacres of 1894-1896, which martyred 300,000 Armenians.

[2] Kulak is a term used to refer to peasants who were wealthy enough to own a farm and hire labor. The Soviets considered kulaks a danger to socialist collectivization of agriculture. They believed in order to create an equal society, the riches of the kulaks must be diminished so they do not abuse the less wealthy peasants. 

[3] The "-yan" suffix is commonly seen in Armenian last names.

[4] Esker is the Turkish word for soldier

Discussion Questions

Read part one here.

Read part two here.

Read part three here.

Part five will be released on February 23.