As to when that Lieutenant-General arrived in Karabakh the sources keep mum scantily mentioning 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 is interesting to me, personally.

I like his photo against the background 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 the 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 pick up 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 squarely eff across my skull holding this here inquisitive mind. Do I really need that?

Anyway, 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 for 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, 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 still and yet), 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 and during the 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.

It 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 manage) 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 and when back home use the pics as 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 his background, 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 got under the spell all over, like entranced by a murmuring river you turned, “Kobzar” thru and thru, I swear...

I withheld 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 the Kyusalar Village east of Stepanakert with the long-established artillery battery up there. An elementary trick from a military school textbook on strategy. The reinforcement sent there from Shushi were several times impeded with machine-gun fire on the route and eventually they were called back without reaching the village and for the battle they also were late. Thus the village of Kyusalar was captured and the 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 (without any asphalt though) another road to Kialbajar and farther on to Ganja.

The experience at the first war for independence proved it more than once that presence of a way out pours oil on the attackers efforts. By 5 pm on May 8 phedais captured the city.

Later in the evening to Kyusalar captured by the phedai group where Valyo belonged, came the ‘goat’-Willis with commander Karen sporting his swanky white boots and 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 at 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. 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 Fantômas, even created a private prison for the purpose and his Armenian counterpart in charge of goods exchange was a former KGB officer whose handle and rank I do not know or, maybe, has 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 revenge 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 (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."

"And the other?"

"Got up, went to dinner. Should I fetch him?"

Once they’ve brought a Turk, young.

"Check him, eh?"

What’s there to check? Unconscious, a massive fragment stuck out from the skull.

"I ask you brotherly, check him, eh?"

On the table with him. The fragment anchored tight, I had to pull with mandibular molar forceps. Cleaned the bone fragments off the brain. Treated the wound. And the guy survived.

Yet some gyrus suffered, obviously. Time and again he starts to shriek, "You Armenian bastards! This is Azerbaijani land!"

The nurses couldn’t calm him down, always called for me. Of me he was afraid. I says, "Ara! Behave!"

"Doctor, doctor! I’m fine!" says he.

Then he was traded for two of our hostages for he had rich parents. When they were taking him out they tell me, "You also go, eh? In case he wanted to die on the way? But you’re a doctor."

The exchange was on the road between Askeran and Aghdam. An ambulance from their side and we by the same brand UAZ vehicle.

Stopped at a distance from each other. I go on with him and from that side his parents and two ours who could hardly move, the chest of one burned with dry ice and the second man is all like a balloon, minces each footstep. They made him eat raw clover, the shepherds, they know what it does to sheep.

But mine does not move at all, stands still and watches those mujiks. His mother calls, "Sunny! Sunny!"

And he cries, "I don’t go! We, Azerbaijanis, are not human! We’re beasts!" Tried to run away.

Phedais caught him by our ambulance, brought back.

"Ara!"’ says I. "Do behave!"

"Doctor, I’m fine! I’m fine, doctor!"

Came up to his parents. They’re hugging him, crying. Each ambulance drove back to where it had come from.

Later a man spoke up to me at the bazaar. "You know me, doc? I was the one fed with clover."

Well, now had come back to himself, looking like a man. But about that Turk boy I know nothing whether he’s alive or not.'

. . . . .

A day later a crowd of civilian marauders ascended from Stepanakert to Shushi. What was impossible to loot they set on fire. Some crying idiocy – their homes ruined by bombardments and here they got an intact city but no – burned it up. Emotional incontinence of paupers robbing other paupers.

On their way back the crowd was caught in a scel (it’s a torrential rain of a major meteorological proportions, you’d feel pity for your enemy getting under such a one). Yet one marauding old woman was lucky to loot a washing tub. So she turned it over and kept above her head and plodded home that way under her enamel umbrella, bypassing the streams along the broken road...

I saw Borik in a week after the Shushi capture and I couldn’t recognize him, his hair turned ghostly white and later on he left the region for good...

Inside the Shushi Temple of Savior (of XIX century) they fund an arsenal of GRAD missiles, some huge warehouse, actually, based on logical premises that Armenians would not shell their temple.

In 2 days after the storm there came a jet to hit the temple so as not to leave such huge ammo stock to the opposing side. Yet the raiding jet missed and later there was no reason for further tries because the ammo was moved from the building.

And that jet had been coming so belatedly because in Baku they for a long time could not believe in the capture of Shushi, it’s a citadel on impregnable cliffs and they had brought so much artillery there together with manpower and stuff...

Valyo’s mother told him to bring a cow from the Kyusalar Village because her daughter, a sister of the two brothers, alive and dead, lost her milk and her baby stayed unfed – the children hospital bombarded and no milk kitchen for newborns around...

Another consequence of the successful completion of the “Wedding in the Mountains” became seeing off the Major, vet of Afghanistan, in the wake of the exhortation voiced by the commander of a self-defense group handled Izho.

The handle got stuck still at school because of the Teacher of Russian. After a dictation, she censured him before all of the class for failing to write the word «ещё», wrong in each of the three letters! She laughed, fucking bitch, and quoted his variant.

So he got hurt and dropped out after his eight grade but the handle still remained. He became a petty punk then got a job of a car washer and married and what else would you do in such backwaters?

But then the Movement started up, mass rallies in the square, and the one-horse burg became a hot theme on TV, then Sumgait, ‘Operation Ring', the region washed in arms, who but hoods had to take it under their control?

He threw together a group of his likes, not as invincible fighters as the Fragment’s group but not the last too.

When Izho visited Komandos and without diplomatic equivocacy said, ‘Fuck off out of here!’, Major did not dare to speak up because even though smelling no gunpowder in Afghan (well, in fact, he was a supervisor at a big ammo warehouse there, inventories, accountancy, you know) he knew it pretty well – do not kick against a war component if you wanna stay on a safe side.

Like a wise pussyfoot packed up and departed he to Yerevan. There sage Major lived to his pension becoming a Major-General on the way and getting government awards regularly. For Armenians in Armenia he still remained the legendary Komandos, the Captor of Shushi with minimal casualties.

It’s only that the official sources, to spite me, moved the storm of Shushi from May 8 to May 9 which happened later though to synchronize the event with the totalitarian Day of the Great Victory celebrated yearly by Big Brother. But I did not take offense at all – everyone does his job at his workplace and puts their signature in the payroll of their kolhoz.

In September the Self-Defense Forces were reorganized (read renamed) into the Army of Self-Defense of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh.

Izho became the Commander-in-Chief although wise people abstained already to use the handle and even in their private conversations preferred to use his rank: “comandushchi” (from the distorted Russian word because Armenian, however rich in its phonetic system—some of the 36 sounds I cannot pronounce up till now—, does not have the Russian «щ» and staging dictation tests with it is an example of outrageous pedagogical sadism).

The Lieutenant-General remained in the shadow as an adviser (no, not in vain I liked that photo of him!) and was driving it home to the General Staff of the Army of Self-Defense what the hell was that fucking logistics about and stuff.

Later they built a house for him in Stepanakert where he did not dwell, of white cubics, and renamed Khojalu, captured not by him, after his name – Ivanian.

What was then? Whoever is interested might google it out.

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