The Blog

With hectic acceleration revved his thoughts shooting ever faster like a squirrel in the wheel in his cage…

I’ve got the squirrel syndrome?

…hold on, not everything at once yet nobody will ever bypass the inevitable…

And in the rumble of the squirrel’s plaything’s rolling rotor there grows and widens new rhythm over the mariana trenches of dismay, some full of hope dancing beat the shaggy horse fetlocks stomp out in the mincing step of claps and clops which they play up clip-clop-clap-cluppingly:

No trumps in the deck any more remains!

All of them are swept off by my virtual Ace!

As to when exactly the Lieutenant-General arrived in Karabakh the sources keep mum, and only mention scantily that it happened in 1992.

A Teacher at a military school in St. Petersburg aged 72, he left his wife, his job and the city on the Neva-River to fly to Karabakh. That’s how he worried about the motherland because he was born in Tbilisi (Georgia), both like Sayat-Nova (1712 – 1795), the great master of amorous lyrics, and Mikhail Loris-Melikov (1824 – 1888), the Minister of Interior in the Russian Empire, and the famous film director from Hollywood Ruben Mamulian (1897 – 1987), and the Soviet composer Aram Khachaturian (1903 – 1978), and lots of other differently praise-worthy Armenians.

Yet, about the date of his arrival in Karabakh Google keeps zipped sternly, which is a pity because it's interesting, anyway to me, personally.

I like his photo in the company of the Minister of Defense of Armenia, and a couple of local Lieutenant-Generals scratching their head-gear in a puzzled manner. He’s so unrestrained and ritzy there in his T-shirt and no cap at all.

My prying attitude is warmed up by the ambiguity – did he come before or after the capture of Shushi City?

I maintain a firm suspicion that it happened before the affair. Unfortunately, this opinion cannot be substantiated without Google and, on the other hand, I am reluctant to bother his relatives or venture knocking at the germane archives doors because of my sloth and timidity – why leaving a wrongly prejudiced impression of myself in certain structures of appropriate security organs? The like thirst for knowledge can very easily invoke a boomerang response and eff squarely across my skull holding this here inquisitive mind. Do I really need that?

Still and yet, all my pros are for “before” and here are my circumstantial evidence —

While phedais were busy fighting to defend Armenian settlements, in the rear (Stepanakert City), in defiance to the blockade and bombardments, went on the process of creation of the elitist-political superstructure titled the Committee of Self-Defense. As a result, the phedai groups were automatically handled the Mountainous Karabakh Self-Defense Forces, although they did not give a fuck about change of stickers being constantly on the go to fight the Turks (in Mountainous Karabakh they never had learned to call Azerbaijanis otherwise) back off this or that village, to catch on a herd of cattle stolen and driven away from one or another kolkhoz farm but not clear yet by whose assistance and/or permission and so forth, and so on.

And even if taking the village of Khojalu with such a motley company might seem feasible (moreover when supported by machine-guns of 3 armed vehicles) then capture of a city situated on the commanding heights by employment of the yesterday's barbers and auto mechanics is quite another kettle of fish.

OK, fine, there was present a military specialist of the brave nom de guerre – “Komandos”, a Major from Yerevan who besides his experience in straightening out the Czecho-Slovakia's deviation (1968) was active in Afghanistan too (true, not the all 10 years 1979-1989, but…), however, (in the way of a buddy-to-buddy talk) even a Major is not qualified for capturing cities.

That’s why before storming Shushi his function consisted of visiting villages in the Askeran District (Stepanakert, by the bye, has no district of its own and is situated in the aforementioned one) where mujiks were happy to entertain Komandos during which proceedings he assured them that everything would be all right, and together with the present in the village house of celebrations drank tutovka under the flowery toasts to the imminent victory.

Nope. Only a man with a General’s past could codename the battle for Shushi “Wedding in the Mountains”.

I was not invited to the celebration and had to observe it from aside, from Stepanakert, where in the main square they set 1 (one) GRAD installation that each half an hour fired a singleton missile in the direction of Shushi.

Take my word, the launching thunder is not a grain less disgusting than the explosion concluding the flight.

At two-hour intervals, the building of the former Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, whose basement was used for the hospital, saw arrival of another KAMAZ truck with a load of wounded in its dump.

The truck got at once surrounded by the shrieking crowd of relatives to those who left their homes to storm Shushi. Heavily wounded and unconscious were taken inside on the stretchers, those who could make it plodded to the entrance on foot replying to their friends and relatives in the crowd about who they had seen up there of their mutual friends and relatives.

Some answers caused lamentations which usually sound at the cemeteries.

Up there, khakied formations ran to attack supported by 2 tanks (God only knows how they managed to get up there yet they did the trick), and among them Mykola the Ukrainian, who arrived a day earlier to boost his rating at the “Rukh” movement in Ukraine.

So was the common practice in those days. Representatives of vehemently proliferating parties, organizations, and associations from all over the former, newly collapsed Soviet Union flew to Stepanakert to take shots of themselves among the ruins so as when back home use the pics in the way of a kinda trump card, ‘I visited the spot of the kickoff for the Soviet regime disintegration!’.

Those politicians are so monotonous in aping each other, you know.

However, Mykola, besides being a political activist, was also a stardust lover. He asked for an AK, they fixed him with one and in the outskirts of Shushi he caught a whole clip of bullets, into his belly.

No wonder, a two-meter giant among the bantam, against the backdrop of Mykola, welders and carpenters – anyone would imagine him to be the decisive factor in the battle.

When the chopper laden also with him took off in Stepanakert, Mykola was still alive yet only up to Yerevan.

A week later another Ukrainian dropped in, by chance, to the PC of the SC of the RMK, who worked at an anti-aircraft gun Shilka. We talked of life, he complained of being paid irregularly.

It took him just a week to make a legend of Mykola, of his heroically supernatural qualities. Say, when he began to talk, you unconditionally fell under the spell all over, like entranced by a murmuring river you turned, “Kobzar” thru and thru, I swear…

I kept back boasting of the half-hour personal communication with Mykola who preferred to use Russian and (which was especially captivating) in the same tongue-tie curse of a manner as my ingrained one. Although after a couple of shots it kinda lessen and you like feel, well, you know, to kinda give out, er, some, well, toast, hum, and stuff, you know…

Phedai Valyo did not participate in storming Shushi. Three hours before the battle his group began attacking Kyusalar Village east of Stepanakert with the since long deployed artillery battery up there. An elementary trick from a military school textbook on strategy. The reinforcement sent to Kyusalar from Shushi were several times impeded with machine-gun fire on their route and eventually they were called back without reaching the village and for the battle they also were late. That way the village of Kyusalar fell and Shushi City too.

There was no massacre of civilians when they captured Shushi because of the road leaving the city at the opposite end in the direction of Lachin City and from there another road (without any asphalt though) to Kalbajar and farther on to Ganja.

The practice from the first war for independence proved it more than once that existence of a way out pours oil on the attackers efforts.

By 5 pm on May 8 phedais captured the city…

Later in the evening in Kyusalar, captured by the phedai group where Valyo belonged, arrived the ‘goat’-Willis with commander Karen sporting his swanky white boots who called Valyo aside.

He got it at once it was an ominous sign and did not mistake. His elder brother, Vladic, mechanic-driver of one from 2 tanks in the battle of Shushi, when they busted the left track, got out thru the bottom hatch under the tank and was hit with a bullet through his chin. The exit hole was in the opposite jugular.

The fighting raged on and Valyo’s brother died under the tank…

One murder happened though after the battle, when a journalist from the local television, Borik, ascended to Shushi by his Niva vehicle to collect factual materials and was roaming thru empty, winding lanes until he ran into a couple of Azerbaijanis.

They either did not know that Shushi was captured or else on their way out recollected something forgotten at home and decided to go and fetch it quick, on foot.

They were a middle-aged mujik and a guy about 20 with an AK. He slung up his assault-rifle yet Borik was faster to draw his AK and shoot, without harming the elder one though.

Phedais ran up to the sound of a burst round and grabbed the alive man.

At that time man-trade went at full swing, the captured hostages were exchanged for money or for the compatriot hostages kept by the hostile party, variously.

The major merchant on the Azerbaijani side, handled Fant?mas, even created a private prison for the purpose, and his Armenian counterpart in charge of live goods exchange was a former KGB officer whose handle and rank I do not know or, maybe, have completely forgotten.

I did not keep a journal at war except for the winter of 92, and that one in English so as to keep in check my garrulousness by means of a not native language, yeah, which is another weak point of mine – I just cannot pull up my cacography but only trot and trot on without any periods. Possibly to counter-balance my oral tongue-tiedness when every next word has to be born in phonetic spasms same way as by Mykola killed in Shushi battle, but that copybook was over long before the storm and I never picked up another.

Told by Ashot (the Head of a field medical battalion at that war)

'I had to become a surgeon, yet my dentist kit kept by me, the hand fairly used to those tools.

You never can tell by a wounded. Say, they bring a couple of them, just a scratch on one, the other entirely in khkhrots (‘agony’ in Karabakhi Armenian). Late in the evening you ask, "How’s the guy with a superficial?"

"Died."