The screechy deafening report at launching of a GRAD missile is heard from afar yet the missiles themselves are nearing unheard, exactly the way ALAZANs do, and only when they had transported to Aghdam the cannons from the Caspian flotilla battleships and those started bombardment of Stepanakert from there the sound track grew richer – you hear the 'boom!' of a cannon at about 20 kilometers off and in a half-minute from the same sector in the horizon there nears and widens the scream of the air torn apart by the purposeful flight of the shell until it bursts somewhere in the city – GRHDAHKB!

Everything according to the technology of admiral Togo who sent the flotilla of admiral Rozhdestvensky to rest on the bottom of Tsushima straits on May 27 1905 and—who could ever predict!—exactly 70 years later that day I was set free after my hitch in a construction battalion of the Soviet Army of the USSR.

Still the explosions of any sort sounded equally disgusting…

After dinner they always found some urgent work for me and as a rule in the basement – to fix the section with electric wiring (though all knew the electricity would be cut off all the same) to install the door, to seal the openings between the foundation blocks with cubics to stop the droughts and brazen rats' raids (cement for the job had to be ferried from our house building site and cubits are limestone blocks of 20 cm x 20 cm x 40 cm which could be easily collected in the basement too).

On completion of tasks (intended as I suspect to keep me down there in the basement’s relative security) I retired to our rented flat and plunged into translating of Ulysses. With the daily task set at 1 page, sometimes I knocked out one and a half yet hardly a half page was the more often output.

Then it was getting dark and the time to go out after water.

No, I never took the Joyce’s masterpiece with me to the editorial office—you never can tell but the book was not mine—so there I scribbled a translation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Earth, a si-fi throwaway in the chewing gum style yet you have to kill time somehow even at a war. The undertaking served a practicable distraction though explosions at any distance caused equally dismal contractions of the asshole.

At times I paid visits to the postponed project at our house building site, you can’t let everything to just drift by itself and leave it to good will of your neighbors who have enough of their problems.

The fact of 3-tonne water container getting emptied and ladled out to the last crumble of ice was met with understanding on my part but where the heck disappeared the bundle of the barb-wire collected by me around the CPSU Regional Committee building after the special troops of the Soviet Army abandoned it for good?

The twigs and boughs chopped off the pine trees in Chkalov Street by the fragments at cover shelling were used for the construction of a passable Xmas tree so that the kids were able to get divers feel from their childhood besides the monotonous panicky alertness of the adults around them in the miserly flicker of a candle that melts trickling wax tears in the murky basement vault…

So why after those relentless bombardments and in absence of “the Russian bayonet” appraised in the Empire’s poetry as a panacea and pledge against Asiatic blood bathes, why (excuse the monotony in use of the same question word) not to enter the city and kick up (no! we won’t say “carnage” we are too globalized citizens of the new order for that) some fun at another ethnic cleansing, and get read of all those basement dwellers (possible carriers of more threatening pandemics), and rename the city into “Khankendi”?

Well, they would if they could, if not for the nagging impediment named “phedais”.

Despite the Arabic-Muslim origin of the word that means “self-sacrificer”, some researchers derive it from Neo-Greek roots when Hellas was no more and Greece was not yet around and in their stead there was the Osman Empire (otherwise denominated the Ottoman or just Sublime Porte). To make things clearer, phedai is simply a guerrilla-fighter or Bandera-man who kisses his family good-bye, grabs his wooden fork or AK, and leaves his home sweet home going to defend his village.

What did Armenians need phedais for?

It’s certainly a good question, yet after skirring thru Wikipedia or Britannica you’ll see that in a 15-year stretch (1894-1909) 2.5 millions of Armenians under the wise rule of the Osman Empire lived thru 3 massacres the most heinous of which was the first (1894-1896).

Over-meticulous German pastor Johannes Lepsius had counted (absolutely proved) killing of 88 243 Armenians alongside the destruction of 2 493 villages (inhabitants of 456 of those got Islamized), the desecration of 649 churches and monasteries (328 were luckily turned into mosques), and death of additional 100 000 Armenians caused by starvation and diseases among the homeless. The total number approximates 200 000.

The following 2 massacres:

a) 25 000 in Diyarbakir Vilayet (yet since there were massacred Assyrians as well let’s divide the number evenly which leaves 12 500 for each of the groups in brotherly way);

b) variously estimated from 15 000 to 30 000 in Adana Vilayet (only Armenians this time) which makes average of 22 500.

Sum total: 235 000 in 3 massacres.

(I don’t call for boycotting your summer vacation in Turkey, the hotel Manager over there might very well be a great-grand kid of an Islamized Armenian).

Each outbreak of the mentioned atrocities was vigilantly responded to with a commonly shared outcry from the indignant Europe and unsparing headlines in the leading newspapers.

In the 20-th century the word “massacre” fell out of vogue getting replaced with the word “genocide”.

The Armenian genocide in 1915-1923 sums up to 1.5 millions of human lives. And ultimately we come to:

2 500 000 – 1 500 000 – 235 000 = 765 000

Two third of the entire people exterminated or (to put it optimistically) one third survived.

Figures are a fucking effective means of consolation – the skimming shoot of eyes over the long row of zeroes and that’s it, you’re good to live on further. The trick is just not to let the details crack your mental mail of arms by pictures of a mujik sliced with sabers, a baby hoisted on the bayonet, a woman beastly raped and killed and dumped into the same mountain of decomposing bodies.

No. It is not a feverish verbal diarrhea of a wacky blogger, the illustration is taken from the pencil sketches by an eyewitness (they did not travel with cameras yet). Poor Frenchman! Poor Frenchman! What repulsive nightmares he was haunted by in his following life!

Turkey flatly rejects this arithmetic (ask the hotel Manager) yet the obstinate figures are there to show the remainder of one third of survivors (minus those who took Shahada).

Where are they, that third? Fled to Russia, fled to France, fled to America.

In Russia they would become citizens in the pending USSR, in the West they’d flesh out the Diaspora.

As noted by a European eyewitness of the massacre in 1894, the attackers were distinguished by exceptional cowardice and if running into resistance they immediately moved along to shoot up, rob, rape, and kill in the next village which underlines the need in phedais-guerrillas-Bandera-men if you want to survive in your native land.

Yet what were they, those 2.5 millions of Armenians who could not last in their land (albeit provided with phedais of their own)?

I’m gonna put it straight – just mujiks they were. All life long they plowed, harvested, cleaned the dung from cow houses, were digging, hacking, building and from 1555 they clung to the same occupations but already as a part of Turkish Empire (all over one quarter of the then state’s territory).

Well, okay, the mujiks also had their own elite: merchants, political figures, shoemakers, writers and composers, however, those were far away, in the capital city of Istanbul. So, on the whole, just mujiks as is.

From 1915 to 1923, while the elite were being hanged out on the lampposts in the capital city, the arrangement about mujiks was way simpler – collected in crowds, they were driven to Syria (also a part of the then Ottoman Empire), driven into the desert under the pretext as if some camps were awaiting to accommodate them there. So one million human beings died on that trek because they were driven without any food, shepherded by riflemen. The guardsmen did not bypass gutting dead womenfolk in case she swallowed her gold earrings while alive. Some were lucky to find. (Armin Theophil Wegner; 1886—1978, another German witness of atrocities.)

Still, what did Turkey need all that trouble for? Easy as pie – it’s an Empire and any state of that status has no choice but to grow. It exists only while it grows like those polyps in the Coral Reef.

But behold and see – the neighboring insistent grower, Russian, end 1800’s grabbed ample swathes off the Ottoman Empire. Who else's guilt it might possibly be if not of those Armenians? They also worship the Cross.

At the dawn of the next, 20th, century Turkey looses almost all of its possessions in Europe. Who’s guilty again?

For consolidation of any Empire having an enemy is the must, be it an external or inner one. Such supposition can be exemplified with the Third Reich whose efforts brought the German nation to be consolidated not only by their just pride in their philosophers, composers, and high quality household appliances but also the genes-deep feeling of guilt for the Genocide of Jews. Which is, of course, another story yet the core is the same – you can’t go on without an enemy and in the absence of the sufficient bogey to make us stick together, we’ll invent some covid or another, and draw a useless mask on each and every visage, and subject folks to shitty injections, and any bitch holding off is against us, we’ll shut up their squeaks opposing the holy institutions and wisdom of our rulers…

The Stepanakert phedais were noticeable by their young age, from 16 to about 32. Night after night they kept shooting at the positions of the other side to the conflict entrenched in Krkjan, the commanding hill in Stepanakert outskirts. There sounded bazooka bums too in that neighborhood connected with a dirt road to Shushi and then to the rest of Azerbaijan.

When someone got blown up by a mortar fire in his fox-hole, they buried him a day later in the city cemetery – everything was conveniently nearby, in the same blockade…

For me personally, the phedais are – Mishik, who after the first (unsuccessful) storming of the Malubalu Village returned home frozen thru and thru and slept for about 24 hours;

Gavo, my one-time coworker at BMM-8, after a night in Krkjan passed the AK to his shiftman and was coming back home, and winked at me proudly in the sidewalk of Lenin Street;

Samvel, whose wedding pants were shot thru in the second (successful) storming of Malubalu yet he never looted a thing there, not a kopeck worth;

Edo (the Draftsman) sporting an obsolete army officer’s harness belt.

In the then Stepanakert parlance the appellation “draftsman” was used to designate a person whose eyes in his head watched the world speeding round thru the prism of cannabis smoke because of the characteristic thoughtfulness pervading their countenance and optics in particular when on high.

Nope, I did not know them closely enough to learn these details from them personally. The short-sighted policy of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR in respect to the citizens doing their stretch in the construction battalions of the Soviet Army had not allowed me to acquire the skills needed for operating a Kalashnikov assault rifle which would somewhat excuse my being a non-Armenian and over the age requirements. However, my wife Satenic was from the same generation with their wives.

True, I’m not sure about Edo’s being married which does not constitute an unapproachable problem though – being a “draftsman” he’s always suited to design something. And easily enough, believe me, bro...

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