29 years is a serious stretch, in the Soviet Union, reflecting the deep humanism of the Communist regime, you'd hardly find a person sentenced to more than the 15-year term. No, above that limit you straight off went to face the firing squad lined for the execution. Each one has to do their job, you know.

In 29 years Nikita Khrushchev, who ruled USSR Empire 1953-1964, would have built in the Soviet Union 1.45 Communisms (that is almost one and a half of them) if not for the palace coup in the Central Committee of the CPSU. He got life within the walls of his personal dacha while the throne of the General Secretary was seated upon by Leonid Brezhnev to run the farm till 1982.

Which exculpatory circumstances—if any against so solid background—might mitigate my guilt of dilly-dallying about the production of RR (The Rascally Romance) protracted for so serious a stretch?

The confluence and most perplexing entanglement of differently varying yet similarly unfavorable exigencies determined the sorrowful lay-over.

To begin with, I okayed a war...

The choice at that time was not invitingly wide with the USSR engaged in just one war, in Afghanistan (1979 – 1989), however, its undisguised Communist-imperialistic nature ran counter to my beliefs and I subscribed to a pending war flagged off, in part, by my signature too.

The first war for independence of Mountainous Karabakh…

On entering the village club—a serviceable edification of raw stone used, a certain period back, to be the village church before the cross was brought down and rows of plywood seats went in together with the sturdy stage—dropped in in late evening by a dozen of mujiks to tarry over a couple of boards of chess and backgammon and to chat of I dunno what because I hadn’t yet any command of Armenian, and where to, about once a month, they brought a two-sequel Indian movie—I was perplexed at seeing that crowd, thrice thicker than gathering for any movie. Which was not on at all that day.

The Village Council Chairman, delivering a speech from behind the breastwork of the on-stage rostrum, ofttimes was interrupted by vehement orators from the audience who just stood up from their respective seats so as to become seen and heard and who, in their turn, got interrupted by other orators up-springing from other seats... The common meeting of the villagers revved on at full swing.

Pargev, a ten-grader from the right seat next to me and also the Chairman’s son, elucidated that the purpose of the rally was to collect the folks' signatures and Grisha, the school principal's husband on my left, added that such collection was the decisive instrument for breaking away from the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan because living on as its constituent part grew utterly intolerable. Armenian drivers operating buses on the route Stepanakert-Agdam-Stepanakert were paid twice less than the Azerbaijani drivers operating buses on the route Agdam-Stepanakert-Agdam.

It should be kept in mind that never throughout my life have I driven any kind of bus and, additionally, that during my hitch in the Soviet Army, a construction battalion it was, our team of bricklayers reported to lance-corporal Alik Aliev (an Azerbaijani) while, simultaneously, I had a buddy plasterer Robert Zakarian, an Armenian from Third Company, because of my reckless not giving a fuck about racial differences as well as the lack of prejudices on the grounds of national affinity which also and always was another of my distinguishing features.

Life itself made me glance deeper into the historical aspect of the question and find out that Mountainous Karabakh (the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region during the Soviet rule) from the times immemorial was populated by Armenians whose huchkars (stone crosses) as well as churches being erected (also of stone) before and after the 10-th century AD prove it to the hilt.

Yet in early 20’s of the 20th century, when the 11th Red Army brought the Soviet rule to the Southern Caucasus, Mountainous Karabakh was handed over into the configuration of the Soviet Azerbaijan because of evidently empire-prone and, possibly, personal reasons adhered to by the then General Secretary Jugashvily, handled Stalin.

By the moment of my immigration lots of Armenian had left Mountainous Karabakh and numerous Azerbaijanis moved into. Two of whom, for instance, had settled in the village of Seidishen where I was provided with the job of a village teacher by the Stepanakert Regional Department of People's Education.

They were Biashir, the forester, and his son Eldar delivering gas in 40-liter tanks to kitchens in the villages of the Askeran District by a special truck.

There had appeared even purely Azerbaijani villages, about ten of them, in Mountainous Karabakh.

I was not aware of all that minutiae at the mentioned meeting yet answered Grisha’s question in the affirmative because it concerned the right of peoples for self-determination. The right which is as fundamental as the freedom of assembly (hmm), as inalienable as the freedom of speech (hmm-hmm!), as sacred as the freedom of thought and religion (someone shut me up please!)…

So naive and stupid idiot was I at that moment and scratched my signature among the uncountable autographs by others.

Four years later I confirmed the accord by taking part in the referendum on the Declaration of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh.

That day Stepanakert was being bombarded without even the lunch break, nonetheless, I ventured to the town theater and ticked “for” in my voter ballot. And even today, with my status plunged down to that of a refugee, I’ve got no regrets because up till now that right seems so too attractive to my adamant mindset.

However, back to 'in order of appearance'…

A month later there was another meeting in the village club to collect donations for the victims of the Spitak earthquake in Armenia (the seismic magnitude at the epicenter in the range of 10 to 12, 25 000 dead, 514 000 homeless, 140 000 crippled).

I donated 2 rubles and 50 kopecks, all I could contribute without losing a chance of surviving up to the payday.

The teacher of Biology, Rafic Shakarian, a ready-made Roman senator by his looks, began to carp “no need for kopecks!” I had to curb his patrician pride by reminding that he, personally, was not the target of my offering and 50 kopecks were equivalent of 2 bread loaves… The discussion dried up, the kopecks were accepted.

In February, the Lenin square in Stepanakert saw the outset of mass rallies in support of the exit from under the Azerbaijani jurisdiction and unification of Mountainous Karabakh with Armenia. The Regional Council of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region sent petitions on this account to Moscow, Baku and Yerevan…

From the jokes of that period:

“They clear up the heaps of debris made of the houses tumbled by the Spitak earthquake. The derrick pulls up a huge concrete flooring slab revealing a man still alive, miraculously.

‘Is Karabakh given back to us?’ – asks the survivor.

‘No, man! No!’

‘Drop the fucking slab back then!’"

Some stuff to perk you up, huh? Still, I have heard folks laughing at it…

Laughing even after that beastly carnage of Armenian population in the city of Sumgait, 27 – 29 February 1988. I cannot write on that. Physiological stoppage. Hands hang, spasmodic clutch at the throat to keep back senseless whine of a small kid. Looks like senility has its say already. Maybe…

The troops of the Soviet Empire did not interfere for three days and nights. When they entered the city to disperse the ferocious mobs, 276 soldiers got bruised.

There followed a bubble of hush for a couple of months, when multi-thousand streams of evacuees filled the highways between Armenia and Azerbaijan: Armenians from Baku to Armenia and Karabakh, Azerbaijanis from Armenia to Azerbaijan. Counter-directed migration of peoples…

A year later, influenced by the common spirit of turbulent times, I married and migrated to Stepanakert to weave the family nest atop of the stirred up volcano.

The job of an isolation-tape man at the construction of gas pipelines to far-off parts of Karabakh was an extensively outdoors and far-off employment so the son was born in my absence.

About half-year later, in August, they attempted at the SCES putsch in Moscow. The Central TV news program Vremya presented a dozen of bureaucratic pans in a consolidated row behind their wide desk reading up to the population their orders – the democracy announced null and void, we were to live as before, as we had always been trained, and follow the five-year plans approved by them at their CPSU Congresses.

In the morning, to demonstrate my discontent, disgust, and fury I did not board the truck starting to carry my co-workers off to remote villages but handed in my resignation letter to the personnel department of the BMM-8:

“...as long as this here organization is a state firm and I have no desire to work for the state of SCES, please fire me of my own accord”.

The BMM-8 Chief, Samvel, giggled amusedly and signed his approval to satisfy my plea.

Next morning the SCES putsch went kaput and I, having lost the job along with their lost cause, concentrated on building up our family house in the lot allocated by the City Council on the ravine slope behind the Maternity Hospital.

When the walls were raised 1 meter tall, there started bombardments of Stepanakert City with Alazans from Sushi and Khodjalu yet in the following 2 months I still laid the walls up to the height for spanning them with the concrete slabs over the “girding” layer because sand and cement had been acquired already and the construction of the running water line of iron pipe (cross-section 0.5”) accomplished.

The money for the slabs had been paid too but the Building Materials Plant never delivered them because of the unfavorable situation.

For about a month I stayed unemployed because the city enterprises were coming to a halt one after another and there appeared a gap to busy myself with Ulysses in earnest.

My mother-in-law spotted that I could write for stretches longer than normal and fixed me up with a job at the editorial house of the regional newspaper The Soviet Karabakh where she had the position of a janitor while the editor thereof originated from the same village as her and, as luck would have it, their family names coincided too.

My job come to be translating articles from Armenian to Russian because The Soviet Karabakh was printed daily in Armenian added on Saturdays with a Russian digest, to assist Big Brother's checking the stuff published in 7 days.

The position of a translator was not an instance of nepotism under the mother-in-law's motherly protection. Not in the least! In two years at the village school I studied all the curriculum textbooks in Armenian Language and Literature starting with the ABC Primer.

Learning a language by textbooks is much more easier than thru communing with the native speakers because texts allow you more time to get it and do not strain as much as tries at catching serendipitous shreds in the too quick non-stop twitter of those who use it from their crib.

However, I did not chanced to be paid for the first month at the newspaper because the city got blockaded and bombarded on a regular basis with heavy artillery pieces and the population switched over to dwelling in the basements of the five-story buildings, for the most part. Often blackouts worsened the situation before the electricity was switched off for good and in the basements they used oil-lamps or candles. When a candle melted away completely the wax drippings were used for production of a new one, though of lesser size, of course.

The gas was not cut off because the gas supplying trunk-line after Stepanakert went on up to the Shushi City which after the massacre in March 1920 was populated, ethnically, by Azerbaijanis who you couldn't left without heating in winter.

The most forceful report on the ravages in the spring of 1920 was left by Osip Mandelstam in his poem “Here in Mountainous Karabakh, in the ancient Shushi-City…”

He didn’t eye-witnessed the carnage but ten years later roamed about mute lanes in the demolished Armenian blocks in Shushi.

However, poets can see thru not only into future...

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