Where did the phedais take weaponry from?

Light arms arrived, for all I can guess, by night choppers from Yerevan together with the flower for the city bakery plant. Besides, the garrisoned in the city regiment of the Soviet Army, when leaving it in the dead of night, did not pick a fight with the phedais who seized the regiment’s arsenal about an hour before the troops departure. The detachment commanders had their orders to withdraw from the zone of ethnic conflict and arrive in a specified location by the specified time. Recapture of the ammunition would definitely involve delay in the discharge of their orders.

And the adversary too shared their arms, at times. Thus, fighting back the advance to Askeran City (17 km east from Stepanakert) phedais grabbed two GRAD installations...

Once, coming down (and again after midnight) to Suicide's Spring (the handle was a self-made invention for my personal use because in route to that waterhead there were 65 steep, fairly shattered stone steps coated with slippery ice) I got fucking flabbergasted by the sight of an Azerbaijani tank (the affiliation attested by the crescent and star doodled on the turret) rolling with a goddamn clang-and-clink through the black-outed city in its repose between night artillery attacks.

At the unnerving vision my asshole’s sphincter reacted in its usual way (I mean the sudden adrenaline surge shot through my system) yet, by and by, I somehow persuaded myself that the iron monster should be none but a captured equipment whose driver decided to make a flying visit home and see his wife, you know… She must’ve been missing him too… press on, man, don’t make her wait too long… the asphalt has been fucked up before you and the traffic police… well, cut it out…

Phedai groups got organized through the knowledge by acquaintance and differed in both their quantity and denomination for which purpose they used the names of the heroes of yore (Chaush group, for instance), as well as handles or names of their commanders: the Fragment’s Group, the Group of Vacho, etc.

The General Command Headquarters stationed in the former Military Registration and Enlistment Office (MREO) used also for keeping spare Kalashnikov assault rifles there. The groups were separately deployed in the abandoned kindergartens of their choice.

Stepanakert, it seemed, was infiltrated with a spy and the most conveniently positioned artillery in Shushi City persistently worked on the kindergartens, yet the nearby houses suffered more. However, one of GRAD volleys did level half of the MREO building...

And not only phedais were pulling on their activities, the usual political routine unconquerably flowed in the city despite the underground way of life. The basement shelters turned the arena in the election campaign of candidates for the Supreme Council of the self-proclaimed Republic of Mountainous Karabakh, in conformity with the internationally accepted norms and practices.

My direct boss at the deceased paper, Arcadic, the Head of the Section of Russian Translations, joined the run for the Supreme Councilmanship too. He was in obvious jitters because of the mighty popularity his opponent enjoyed among the thieves-segment in their mutual electorate. The trepidation even made him give up shaving off his bristle. Moreover, getting readied to sell his image to audience in the basement at the underground debate with his contender...

And now Arcadic, advised and coached by the more experienced (and, contrastingly, well-shaved) cadres, comes to the open debate together with his confident, a member of the upper nomenclature layer famous for his tongue of silver, by the estimation shared in the milieu of elite managerial circles. But that yokel, Arcadic's rival, does not even have the slightest idea that so is the custom for election campaigns. That goofy goon.

So, the second (Arcadic’s) takes the rather uneven floor in the scantily lit basement and paints before the present shelterers the bright picture of the glorious future awaiting everyone and all of them if they vote for this here Arcadic in the coming elections (a couple of GRAD missiles burst outside someplace in the city to let him pause and take a breath) because he is exceptionally moral, Arcadic is, the family man of unheard of integrity and faithfulness, marital.

The masterpiece of oratory art delivered, the confident sits down by his candidate to get his fully-deserved laurels shaped as Arcadic's handshake, while that dumb rustic rises in his turn:

"OK, folks you’ve just heard what the guy sez, huh? So, mark you well that his each and every word was the very portrait of me in the natural size." And he gets seated back. No sweat whatsoever…

Over the road, where Lenin street enters the main square, they pulled a cloth strip with the inscription running:

'All To Vote!'

Yes, in the usual commanding style. All by the canons of the Soviet times. However, the hard-dying habit turned a mistake, strategically, for the artillery men from Shushi read the line thru their binoculars and kicked up some hell of a barrage on the election day, precisely in the working hours, from the opening to closure of the polling stations.

I came to the theater building to do my democratic duty and scanned the ballot – not a single familiar name in the list. Yes, the most right course was staying away from all that, and I'd follow it, were they not so authoritatively discouraging my participation, the artillery from Shushi. But now I was there and crossed out all of them so as not to leave hard feelings by random, undeserved favoritism.

OK, fine, but how to get back home now, under this downpour of shelling? Sure as hell, some frigging mole sits someplace with his radio transmitter informing on scheduled events in the city life because the notice over the road never mentioned the election date…

And what about Arcadic? Of course, fell through, what else could achieve that green-horn midst the treacherous jungle in the world of political crafty realities?.

The chocking blockade gradually loosened its grip.

First off, was captured Krkjan, the uppermost part of Stepanakert. Not at once though. It was captured then given up. Captured again, and again the phedais pushed out by the fresh reinforcement coming there from Shushi. Yet, at last the night came when the shooting died out on the hill above the city and fires blazed, here and there, up the slope – the eternal law of war: destroy all what can’t be grabbed and taken away.

Then came Malubalu's turn with their nagging howitzer battery…

For so large-scale operations phedai groups united under the command of a Major from Yerevan sporting the brave handle of “Kommandos”, who had behind his back the school of the Afghanistan war. Although even without his educated opinion it was clear to everyone that the next step to ensure survival was taking the Village of Khojalu which cut Stepanakert from Askeran town and controlled the Stepanakert airport.

However, capture of Khojalu changed the nature of the Karabakh conflict drastically, making of it a multinational fight in place of just two neighbors squaring it off…

People are all different, some like playing with dirt in their kitchen garden, others prefer fishing or they are fond of gambling at stock exchange or, maybe, of cooking. Were I asked, there’s nothing better than roaming and watching round with the eyes in my head in some, preferably not privatized area. But then you can’t go on without traders too, who also are people of their specific, mercantile predilection.

And there is some special breed among us, people, which by different tribes is named differently, though, in essence, they are of the same strain – stardust lovers.

Viking, conquistador, cossack, mujaheddin sighs up a condotta on paper or verbally, puts an intact pack of condoms into his pocket or under his belt, and joins a pack of freelance mercenaries, his likes. And then, led by an experienced condottiere, starts the poor devil off to conquer the wide world and become a new king/czar/sultan of all his subjects not killed in the process of subjugation.

The chances are also there that it never will happen, oops, and he might very well turn a disarranged heap of bones beside a sorrowful saltbush or a skeleton half-buried in the listless sand of dunes, yet living otherwise is not for him ‘cause he is an active stardust lover, cannon fodder of his own accord…

Before the storm of Khojalu such volunteers popped up on both sides of the confrontation: Afghani mujaheddins, Chechen militants (could you figure out on which particular side?).

An acquaintance swore to me on most holy things of his seeing Negroes (?) in the hills, my argument was – he’d wrongly interpreted Gastarbeiters from Tunis made up in the Arnold Schwarzenegger's style.

Later on when aviation was put to operation, a group of pilots took leave at their respective places of service and came to scrape together some petrodollars from Baku oilfields or was that euros after all? (No, monetarism has never been my strong point.)

In short, when one of them got shot down over Karabakh, he rapped on his buddies and got sentenced to the capital punishment but the request of the Belorussian “Daddy” Lukashenko and other elitist appeals set him free.

The group of Kuban cossacks with their lively tricolor and one KAMAZ truck that brought all of them (“I was marching to attack with just a cossack saber in my hands, the Azeries got stunned and stopped the fire”) and one military field nurse.

A score of Dashnak Party members from the Diaspora.

Two groups of stardust lovers from Yerevan.

A couple of Ukrainians worked at a rapid-fire anti-aircraft gun "Shilka" in the air defense of the RMK.

Much later, the cossack leader-ataman, a handsome albinos guy sporting thread-thick mustachio along his upper lip, was driving home his personal trophy from Aghdam (white car of the Zhiguli ’Kopeck’ brand) but at the crossroads of Lenin and Chkalov Streets the traffic lights were not working and he rammed a “goat”-Willis of phedais’.

Both sides to the accident exclaimed “fuck!” (each one in their mother-tongue). The ataman jumped out of the “Kopeck”, spat on the road from the disappointment.

They did not mean to wait for the traffic police to come and run an expert examination of whose fault the accident was because they both were without the respective license plates and just revved off, each one his way.

Although failing to become a czar, he still had grabbed a car. The hood dented a lil bit. And let him keep himself the count of condoms in his pocket and the count of buddies cut in the hills away by mortar fire. That’s all a part to the condotta-stipulated fate…

During the collapse of the USSR, while up there was a complete oatmeal—rigged out in a sciatica corset, not to spill a slippery puddle, you know, that make-believe President, who, like, was there yet, simultaneously, was not, some unpluggable thing, dangling askew—and down there, at the former outskirts of the brotherly Soviet Union, went on internecine sorting out, trampling, ramming, and turf securing; Azerbaijan opened widely for refugees from other regions of the late Communist Empire.

Most welcome were Meskhitian Turks and other Shia Muslims from the Sunni republics in the Central Asia all of whom were directly sent to settle in Karabakh.

Their destination became Khojalu Village which saw a hectic boom of transforming into a town which would surround the Stepanakert airport and also cut the city from two district centers (as mentioned above).

And it’s high time to apologize for the incomplete list of the mercenaries, to which I’ve inadvertently omitted entering collections of low-rank officers from the Soviet Army (on both sides), a quite excusable lapse though – it’s hard to keep in mind the mitts habitually stuck under your belt because they are always there.

Now, one final stroke. As both sides to the conflict wore the same fatigue (cotton-wear uniform of the Soviet Army) phedai groups’ fighters were ordered to bind white bandage strips up the left arm in their winter trench coats to see “ours” from “theirs” in the pending storm of Khojalu Village.

The night from 25 to 26 of February 1992 was assigned for Khojalu Tragedy, “the unseen in the 20th century Genocide”.

And that’ll do for today, the bottle is not of rubber...

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