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- ZAVEN ARMENAKOVICH BADASIAN Born 1942 Employed Sumgait Bulk Yarn Plant Resident at Building 34, Apartment 33 Microdistrict No. 12 Sumgait On February 27 my wife and I went to Baku to go shopping and returned to Sumgait at around five in the evening. We ran into one of my relatives at the bus station and got to talking. A lot of people had gathered not far away, near the store. Well at first we didn't know what was happening, and then a fellow I know comes up to me, an Azerbaijani guy, and says, "What are you standing here for? Go home immediately!" I asked, "What's going on?" He says, "What's the matter, can't you see, they've overturned a car and they're killing Armenians!" He helped me catch a cab and we got home safely. We sat at home for two days. During that time a gang of bandits came into our courtyard. But the neighbors wouldn't let them in the building. There were about 80 of them. They had sticks and pieces of armatures in their hands. They were shouting something, but you couldn't understand it. It wasn't one voice or two, all of them were shouting in a chorus. They turned toward Building 35. They went up to the third floor, and we see that they're breaking glass and throwing things out the window. After a while they come out the entryway: one has a pair of jeans in his hands, another has a tape recorder, and a third a guitar. They went on toward the auto parts store. We had to save ourselves. After midnight on March 1 we went to hide at School No. 33, which is in Microdistrict 13. There were two other Armenian families there with us. There were 13 of us altogether. Out of all of them I had only known Ernest before, he had moved to Sumgait from Kirovabad. The Azerbaijani guard at the school let us in. At first he didn't want to, but there was nowhere else for us to go. We had to plead with him and talk him into it. We were told that on that day, the 1st, there would be an attack on our microdistrict. We went upstairs to a classroom on the second floor. On the city radio station they announced three telephone numbers that could be used to summon assistance or communicate anything important. I called one of them and the First Secretary of the Sumgait City Party Committee answered. I asked him for assistance. 1 say, "We're in School No. 33, we need to be evacuated." Well he says, "Got it, wait there, I'm sending out help now." I know his voice. The First Secretary had been to our plant, 1 had spoken with him personally. When I called he said, "Muslimzade here." About two hours after the call we heard shouts near the school. We looked out the window and about 100 to 120 people were outside saying, "Armenians, come out, we're here to get you." They have clubs, axes, and armature shafts in their hands. The guard sat there with us, and asked, "Where should I go?" I say, "If your life is of any value to you you'll go down there and say that the Armenians were here and that they left." That's what he did. He went down there and said, "The Armenians were here," he said, "I let them out the back door, they went that way." And pointed with his hand. And with shouts and noise the mob set off in the direction he had pointed. So the assistance we had been promised did come. They sent us help, all right! Instead of sending real soldiers he had sent his own. I am positive that Muslimzade did that. No one had seen us entering the school, no one knew that we were there. In any case, we stayed at the school until seven in the morning, and no soldiers of any sort came to our aid. In the morning we went to my relative's in Microdistrict 1, and the sol¬diers took us to the SK club from there. The club was jammed with people, and there were lots of people ahead of us—there was no space available. One small boy, about three months old, died right in my arms. There wasn't a single doctor, nothing. The boy was uninjured, there were no wounds or bruises on him. He was just very ill. They gave him mouth-to-mouth resus¬citation, they did everything they could under the circumstances, but were unable to save him. And his mother and father, a young Armenian couple, were right there, on the floor ... I searched for a spot for us in the SK, we have a small child of our own, I wanted to find a room or something to put my family in. I went up to the third floor, there were a lot of soldiers up there, bandaged, with canes, limp¬ing, with their heads broken open. They were a terrible sight. Young guys, all of them. There were a lot of bandaged Armenians, too. Everyone had been beaten, everyone was crying, wailing, and calling for help. I think that the City Party Committee ignored us completely. True, there was a snack bar: a sausage was 30 kopeks or 40 kopeks, a package of cookies that cost 26 kopeks was being sold for 50, a bottled soft drink cost a ruble . . . But there was no way to get the things any cheaper. I met my old uncle, Aram Mikhailovich, there. He saw me and tears welled up in his eyes. My whole life he had told me that we were friendly peoples, that we worked together, he always had Azerbaijanis over at his house. And now he saw me and there was nothing he could say, he just cried. You can understand his feelings, of course. April 8,1988 Yerevan

■ EMMA SETRAKOVNA SARGISIAN Born 1933 Cook Sumgait Emergency Hospital Resident at Building 16/13, Apartment 14 Block 5, Sumgait To this day I can't understand why my husband, an older man, was killed. What was he killed for. He hadn't hurt anyone, hadn't said any word he oughtn’t to have. Why did they kill him? I want to find out—from here, from there, from the government—why my husband was killed. On the 27th, when I returned from work—it was a Saturday—my son was at home. He doesn't work. I went straight to the kitchen, and he called me, "Mamma, is there a soccer game?" There were shouts from Lenin Street. That's where we lived. I say, "I don't know, Igor, I haven't turned on the TV." He looked again and said, "Mamma, what's going on in the courtyard?!" I look and see so many people, it's awful, marching, marching, there are hun¬dreds, thousands, you can't even tell how many there are. They're shouting, "Down with the Armenians! Kill the Armenians! Tear the Armenians to pieces!" My God, why is that happening, what for? I had known nothing at that point. We lived together well, in friendship, and suddenly something like this. It was completely unexpected. And they were shouting, "Long live Turkey!" And they had flags, and they were shouting. There was a man walking in front, well dressed, he's around 40 or 45, in a gray raincoat. He is walking and saying something, I can't make it out through the vent window. He is walking and saying something, and the children behind him are shouting, "Tear the Armenians to pieces!" and "Down with the Armenians!" They shout it again, and then shout, "Hurrah!" The people streamed without end, they were walking in groups, and in the groups I saw that there were women, too. I say, "My God, there are women there too!" And my son says, "Those aren't women, Mamma, those are bad women." Well we didn't look a long time. They were walking and shouting and I was afraid, I simply couldn't sit still. I went out onto the balcony, and my Azerbaijani neighbor is on the other balcony, and I say, "Khalida, what's going on, what happened?" She says, "Emma, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know what happened. Well she was quite frightened too. They had these white sticks, each second or third one had a white rod. They're waving the rods above their heads as they walk, and the one who's out front, like a leader, he has a white stick too. Well maybe it was an armature shaft, but what I saw was white, I don't know. My husband got home 10 or 15 minutes later. He comes home and I say, "Oh dear, I'm frightened, they're going to kill us I bet." And he says, "What are you afraid of, they're just children." I say, "Everything that happens comes from children." There had been 15- and 16-year olds from the Technical and Vocational School. "Don't fear," he said, "it's nothing, nothing all that bad." He didn't even eat, he just lay on the sofa. And just then on television they broadcast that two Azerbaijanis had been killed in Karabagh, near Askeran. When I heard that I couldn't settle down at all, I kept walking here and there and I said, "They're going to kill us, the Azerbaijanis are going to kill us." And he says, "Don't be afraid." Then we heard—from the central square, there are women shouting near the stage, well, they're shout¬ing different things, and you couldn't hear very well. I say, "You speak Azerbaijani well, listen to what they're saying." He says, "Close the window and go to bed, there's nothing bad happening there." He listened a bit and then closed the window and went to bed, and told us, "Come on, go to sleep, it's nothing." Sleep, what did he mean sleep? My son and I stood at the win¬dow until two in the morning watching. Well he's sick, and all of this was affecting him. I say, "Igor, you go to bed, I'm going to go to bed in a minute too." He went and I sat at the window until three, and then went to bed. Things had calmed down slightly. The 28th, Sunday, was my day off. My husband got up and said, "Come on, Emma, get up." I say, "Today's my day off, let me rest." He says, "Aren't you going to make me some tea?" Well I felt ashamed and got up, and said, "Where are you going?" He says, "I'm going out, I have to." I say, "Can you really go outside on a day like today? Don't go out, for God's sake. You nev¬er listen to me, I know, and you're not going to listen to me now, but at least don't take the car out of the garage, go without the car." And he says, "Come on, close the door!" And then on the staircase he muttered something, I couldn't make it out, he probably said "coward" or something. I closed the door and he left. And I started cleaning... picking things up around the house . . . Everything seemed quiet until one o'clock in the after¬noon, but at the bus station, my neighbor told me, cars were burning. I said, "Khalida, was it our car?" She says, "No, no, Emma, don't be afraid, they were government cars and Zhigulis." Our car is a GAZ-21 Volga. And I wait¬ed, it was four o'clock, five o'clock . . . and when he wasn't home at seven I said, "Oh, they've killed Shagen!" Tires are burning in town, there's black smoke in town, and I'm afraid, I'm standing on the balcony and I'm all ... my whole body is shaking. My God, they've probably killed him! So basically 1 waited like that until ten o'clock and he still hadn't come home. And I'm afraid to go out. At ten o'clock I look out: across from our building is a building with a bookstore, and from upstairs, from the second floor, everything is being thrown out¬side. I'm looking out of one window and Igor is looking out of the other, and I don't want him to see this, and he, as it turns out, doesn't want me to see it. We wanted to hide it from one another. I joined him. "Mamma," he says, "look what they're doing over there!" They were burning everything, and there were police standing there, 10 or 15 of them, maybe twenty policemen standing on the side, and the crowd is on the other side, and two or three people are throwing everything down from the balcony. And one of the ones on the balcony is shouting, "What are you standing there for, burn it!" When they threw the television, wow, it was like a bomb! Our neighbor on the third floor came out on her balcony and shouted, "Why are you doing that, why are you burning those things, those people saved with such difficulty to buy those things for their home. Why are you burning them?" And from the courtyard they yell at her, "Go inside, go inside! Instead why don't you tell us if they are any of them in your building or not?" They meant Armenians, but they didn't say Armenians, they said, "of them." She says, "No, no, no, none!" Then she ran downstairs to our place, and says, "Emma, Emma, you have to leave!" I say, "They've killed Shagen anyway, what do we have to live for? It won't be living for me without Shagen. Let them kill us, too!" She insists, saying, "Emma, get out of here, go to Khalida's, and give me the key. When they come I'll say that it's my daughter's apartment, that they're off visiting someone." I gave her the key and went to the neigh¬bor's, but I couldn't endure it. I say, "Igor, you stay here, I'm going to go downstairs, and see, maybe Papa's ... Papa's there." Meanwhile, they were killing the two brothers, Alik and Valery [Albert and Valery Avanesians; see the accounts of Rima Avanesian and Alvina Baluian], in the courtyard. There is a crowd near the building, they're shout¬ing, howling, and I didn't think that they were killing at the time. Alik and Valery lived in the corner house across from ours. When I went out into the courtyard I saw an Azerbaijani, our neighbor, a young man about 30 years old. I say, "Madar, Uncle Shagen's gone, let's go see, maybe he's dead in the garage or near the garage, let's at least bring the corpse into the house." He shouts, "Aunt Emma, where do you think you're going?! Go back into the house, I'll look for him." I say, "Something will happen to you, too, because of me, no, Madar, I'm coming too." Well he wouldn't let me go all the same, he says, "You stay here with us, I'll go look." He went and looked, and came back and said, "Aunt Emma, there's no one there, the garage is closed." Madar went off again and then returned and said, "Aunt Emma, they've already killed Alik, and Valery's there ... wheezing." Madar wanted to go up to him, but those scoundrels said, "Don't go near him, or we'll put you next to him." He got scared—he's young—and came back and said, "I'm going to go call, maybe an ambulance will come, at least to take Alik, maybe he'll live ..." They grew up together in our courtyard, they knew each other well, they had always been on good terms. He went to call, but not a single telephone worked, they had all been shut off. He called, and called, and called, and called—nothing. I went upstairs to the neighbor's. Igor says, "Two police cars drove up over there, their headlights are on, but they're not touching them, they are still lying where they were, they're still lying there ..." We watched out the window until four o'clock, and then went downstairs to our apartment, didn't take my clothes off. I lay on the couch so as not to go to bed, and at six o'clock in the morning I got up and said, "Igor, you stay here at home, don't go out, don't go anywhere, I'm going to look, I have to find Papa, dead or alive ... let me go ... I've got the keys from work." At six o'clock I went to the Emergency Hospital. The head doctor and another doctor opened the door to the morgue. I run up to them and say, "Doctor, is Shagen there?" He says, "What do you mean? Why should Shagen be here?!" I wanted to go in, but he wouldn't let me. There were only four people in there, they said. Well, they must have been awful because they didn't let me in. They said, "Shagen's not here, he's alive somewhere, he'll come back." It's already seven o'clock in the morning. I look and there is a panel truck with three policemen. Some of our people from the hospital were there with them. I say, "Sara Baji ["Sister" Sara, term of endearment], go look, they've probably brought Shagen." I said it, shouted it, and she went and came back and says, "No, Emma, he has tan shoes on, it's a younger person." Now Shagen just happened to have tan shoes, light tan, they were already old. When they said it like that I guessed immediately. I went and said, "Doctor, they've brought Shagen in dead." He says, "Why are you carrying on like that, dead, dead . . . he's alive." But then he went all the same, and when he came back the look on his face was ... I could tell immediately that he was dead. They knew one another well, Shagen had worked for him a long time. I say, "Doctor, is it Shagen?" He says, "No, Emma, it's not he, it's somebody else entirely." I say, "Doctor, why are you deceiving me, I'll find out all the same anyway, if not today, then tomorrow." And he said ... I screamed, right there in the office. He says, "Emma, go, go calm down a little." Another one of our colleagues said that the doctor had said it was Shagen, but... in hideous condition. They tried to calm me down, saying it wasn't Shagen. A few minutes later another colleague comes in and says, "Oh, poor Emma!" When she said it like that there was no hope left. That day was awful. They were endlessly bringing in dead and injured people. At night someone took me home. I said, "Igor, Papa's been killed." On the morning of the 1st I left Igor at home again and went to the hospi¬tal: I had to bury him somehow, do something. I look and see that the hospi¬tal is surrounded by soldiers. They are wearing dark clothes. "Hey, citizen, where are you going?" I say, "I work here," and from inside someone shouts, Yes, yes, that's our cook, let her in." I went right to the head doctor's office and there is a person from the City Health Department there, he used to work with us at the hospital. He says, "Emma, Shagen's been taken to Baku. In the night they took the wounded and the dead, all of them, to Baku." I say, "Doctor, how will I bury him?" He says, "We're taking care of all that don't you worry, we'll do everything, we'll tell you about it. Where did you spend the night?" I say, "I was at home." He says, "What do you mean you were at home?! You were at home alone?" I say, "No, Igor was there too." He says, "You can't stay home, we're getting an ambulance right now, wait just one second, the head doctor is coming, we're arranging an ambulance right now, you put on a lab coat and take one for Igor, you go and bring Igor here like a patient, and you'll stay here and we'll see later what to do next ..." His last name is Kagramanov. The head doctor's name is Izyat Jamalogli Sadukhov. The "ambulance" arrived and I went home and got Igor. They admitted him as a patient, they gave us a private room, an isolation room. We stayed in the hospital until the 4th. Some police car came and they said, "Emma, let's go." And the women, our colleagues, when they saw the police car, became anxious and said, "Where are you taking her?" I say, "They're going to kill me, too ..." And the investigator says, "Why are you saying that, we're going to make a positive identification." We went to Baku and they took me into the morgue ... I still can't remember what hospital it was . . . The investigator says, "Let's go, we need to be certain, maybe it's not Shagen." And when I saw the caskets, lying on top of one another, I went out of my mind. I say, "I can't look, no." The investigator says, "Are there any identifying marks?" I say, "Let me see the clothes, or the shoes, or even a sock, I'll recognize them." He says, "Isn't there anything on his body?" I say he has seven gold teeth and his finger, he only has half of one of his fingers. Shagen was a carpenter, he had been injured at work ... They brought one of the sleeves of the shirt and sweater he was wearing, they brought them and they were all burned . . . When I saw them I shouted, "Oh, they burned him!" I shouted, I don't know, I fell down ... or maybe I sat down, I don't remember. And that investigator says, "Well fine, fine, since we've identified that these are his clothes, and since his teeth . . . since he has seven gold teeth ..." On the 4th they told me: "Emma, it's time to bury Shagen now." I cried, "How, how can I bury Shagen when I have only one son and he's sick? I should inform his relatives, he has three sisters, I can't do it by myself." They say, "OK, you know the situation. How will they get here from Karabagh? How will they get here from Yerevan? There's no transportation, it's impos¬sible." He was killed on February 28, and I buried him on March 7. We buried him in Sumgait. They asked me, "Where do you want to bury him?" I said, "I want to bury him in Karabagh, where we were born, let me bury him in Karabagh," I'm shouting, and the head of the burial office, I guess, says, "Do you know what it means, take him to Karabagh?! It means arson!" I say, "What do you mean, arson? Don't they know what's going on in Karabagh? The whole world knows that they killed them, and I want to take him to Karabagh, I don't have anyone here." I begged, I pleaded, I grieved, I even got down on my knees. He says, "Let's bury him here now, and in three months, in six months, a year, if it calms down, I'll help you move him to Karabagh..." Our trial was the first in Sumgait. It was concluded on May 16. At the investigation the murderer, Tale Ismailov, told how it all happened, but then at the trial he ... tried to wriggle ... he tried to soften his crime. Then they brought a videotape recorder, I guess, and played it, and said, "Ismailov, look, is that you?" He says, "Yes." "Well look, here you're describing every-thing as it was on the scene of the crime, right?" He says, "Yes." "And now you're telling it differently?" He says, "Well maybe I forgot!" Like that. The witnesses and that criminal creep himself said that when the car was going along Mir Street, there was a crowd of about 80 people . . . Shagen had a Volga GAZ-21. The 80 people surrounded his car, and all 80 of them were involved. One of them was this Ismailov guy, this Tale. They—it's unclear who - started pulling Shagen out of the car. Well, one says from the left side of the car, another says from the right side. They pulled off his sports jacket, He had a jacket on. Well they ask him, "What's your nationality?" He says, "Armenian." Well they say from the crowd they shouted, "If he's an Armenian, kill him, kill him!" They started beating him, they broke seven of his ribs, and his heart... I don't know, they did something there, too . . . it's too awful to tell about. Anyway, they say this Tale guy ... he had an arma¬ture shaft. He says, "I picked it up, it was lying near a bush, that's where I got it." He said he picked it up, but the witnesses say that he had already had it. He said, "I hit him twice," he said, "... once or twice on the head with that rod." And he said that when he started to beat him Shagen was sit¬ting on the ground, and when he hit him he fell over. He said, "I left, right nearby they were burning things or something in an apartment, killing someone," he says, "and I came back to look, is that Shagen alive or not?" I said, "You wanted to finish him, right, and if he was still alive, you came back to hit him again?" He went back and looked and he was already dead. "After that," that bastard Tale said, "after that I went home." I said, "You . . . you . . . little snake," I said, "Are you a thief and a murder¬er?" Shagen had had money in his jacket, and a watch on his wrist. They were taken. He says he didn't take them. When they overturned and burned the car, that Tale was no longer there, it was other people who did that. Who it was, who turned over the car and who burned it, that hasn't been clarified as yet. I told the investigator, "How can you have the trial when you don't know who burned the car?" He said something, but I didn't get what he was saying. But I said, "You still haven't straightened everything out, I think that's unjust." When they burned the car he was lying next to it, and the fire spread to him. In the death certificate it says that he had third-degree burns over 80 Percent of his body... And I ask again, why was he killed? My husband was a carpenter, he was a good craftsman, he knew how to do everything, he even fixed his own car, with his own hands. We have three children. Three sons. Only Igor was with me at the time. The older one was in Pyatigorsk, and the younger one is serving in the Army. And now they're fatherless . .. I couldn't sit all the way through it. When the Procurator read up to 15 years' deprivation of freedom, I just ... I went out of my mind, I didn't know what to do with myself, I said, "How can that be? You," I said, "you are saying that it was intentional murder and the sentence is 15 years' deprivation of freedom?" I screamed, I had lost my mind! I said, "Let me at that creep, with my bare hands I'll ..." A relative restrained me, and there were all those military people there ... I left. I said, "This isn't a Soviet trial this unjust!" That's what I shouted, I said it and left... I said that on February 27, when those people were streaming down our street, they were shouting, "Long live Turkey!" and "Glory to Turkey!" And during the trial I said to that Ismailov, "What does that mean, Glory to Turkey? I still don't understand what Turkey has to do with this, we live in the Soviet Union. That Turkey told you to or is going to help you kill Armenians? I still don't understand why "Glory to Turkey!" I asked that question twice and got no answer ... No one answered me... May 19, 1988 Yerevan

соскучились? )) айтенц ккаротек )))

- TATYANA MIKHAILOVNA ARUTUNIAN (NEZHINTSEVA) Born 1932 Train Conductor Azerbaijani Railroad Resident at Building 13/15, Apartment 27 Microdistrict No. 3 Sumgait I hadn't lived very long in Sumgait, only eight years. I moved there from Novosibirsk. My son entered the Baku Nautical School, and so I transferred to Azerbaijan. Later I met someone and married him, and now my name is Arutunian, my husband's name . . . That there would be a massacre was not discussed openly, but there were hints and gibes, so to speak, at the Armenian people, and they were mock¬ing the Russians, too. I was constantly aware of it at work, and not just this past year. I couldn't find a definite place for myself in the pool at work because I, I'll just say it, couldn't steal, couldn't deceive, and couldn't be involved in bribe-taking. And when I asked for decent working conditions they told me, "Leave, don't keep the others from working, you aren't cut out for this kind of work." And at work and around all the time I would hear gibes at the Armenians, like "The Turks had it right, they killed them all—the way they've multiplied here they're making it hard for us to live," and "Things will be just fine if we get rid of them all." "No problem, the Turks will help," they say, "if we ask them, they'll rid Armenia of Armenians in half an hour." Well that's the way it all was, but I never thought, of course, that it would spill over into a bloody tragedy, because you just couldn't imagine it. Here we've been living under the Soviet government for 70 years, and no one even considered such an idea possible. But I had been forming my own opinions, and in the presence of authori¬tative people I would often ask, "Where is this all leading, do people really not see what kind of situation is emerging here. The Russians are fleeing Sumgait, there are very few of them left. Why is no one dealing with this, what's going on?" And when it all happened on the 27th and 28th, it became clear that everything had been arranged by someone, because what else are you to make of it if the First Secretary of the City Party Committee is marching ahead of the demonstration with an Azerbaijani flag? I wouldn't be saying this now if I hadn't received personal confirmation from him later. Because when we were under guard in the SK club on the 1st, he came to the club, that Muslimzade. The women told me, "There he is, there he is, that's Muslimzade." I didn't believe the rumors that he had carried an Azerbaijani flag. I thought that they were just false rumors. I went over to him and said, "Are you the First Secretary of our City Party Committee?" He answers me, "Yes." And I ask him, "Tell me, did you really inarch ahead of that gang car¬rying an Azerbaijani flag, and behind you they were carrying denigrating signs, I don't know exactly what they said, but there was mention of Armenian blood?" And he tells me, "Yes, I was there, but I tried to dissuade them from it." Then I asked him another question: "And where were you when they were burning and slaughtering us? And he said, "I ... We didn't know what to do, we didn't know, we didn't anticipate that that would hap¬pen in Sumgait." Comrade Mamedov, the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Azerbaijani SSR, answered the same question for me: "No, we actually didn't anticipate the slaughter in Sumgait. At that time we were trying to contain the crowd of 45,000 in Baku that was preparing for a mas¬sacre." Those are his exact words, the ones he said in the office of the Council of Ministers of the Armenian SSR. And now, about the events themselves. Of course it's painful to discuss them, because it may seem that it's not true to someone else. Various rumors concerning what happened are making the rounds: some are true, others aren't. But unfortunately there are more true ones than false, because it was so horrible: in our age, here in the space age, the age of science, the age of progress, I don't know, if someone had told me this story, if I were living in or around Moscow, I wouldn't have believed it. Why not? Because it was really a genocide, it was a massacre. That's genuinely what it was. For example, on that day, the 28th—I didn't know about the 27th because my husband and I were both sick, both of us had the flu, and we were in bed—on the 28th our neighbor comes to our place and says, "You're in bed? You don't know anything about it? There was a demonstration in town, and after it they were overturning Armenian cars and burning them. They were looking into cars and asking, 'Are you an Armenian?' If they answered in Armenian, then they turned the car over and burned it." This isn't made up, the wife of the Senior Investigator of the Baku Ministry of Internal Affairs told us. He was returning home from his dacha with his wife, Raisa Sevastyanova, she's my neighbor. She immediately came and told us that they had landed right in the middle of it, I don't know what to call it, the cavalcade of automobiles they were stopping. He answered in Azerbaijani, they let them go, but they made him honk the horn, they were kicking up a fracas. We didn't even believe it, and I said, "Certainly that didn't happen, how can that be?" And she said, "Muslimzade was leading the crowd, and the Sputnik store was completely smashed because most of the salespeople there are Armenians. And when he saw that they had started breaking the glass in that store, he said, "Don't break the shop windows, don't destroy state property, but do whatever else you want." I didn't hear this with my own two ears, but it is a fact that the store was torn up and the director of the store was beaten for employing Armenians although he's an Azerbaijani-While we were talking, all of a sudden right across from us . .. Sevastyanova is the first to look out the window and say, "Look, there's a crowd out there." And sure enough, when we looked out there we saw that the crowd had already started wrecking the neighboring building. There was an Armenian family there, a woman and two girls. They lived across from us. I'm sorry, I don't know the building number or the people's names, since we were in my husband's apartment, in Microdistrict 8, and I lived in Microdistrict No. 3. There was awful looting going on there at the time, the most hideous things were going on there then. One building there, ours, was Hacked twice, once wasn't enough for them. They returned to the places where they hadn't finished the Armenians off. If an Azerbaijani family dared to conceal Armenians, they beat the Azerbaijanis too. They also beat Russians, if it was Russians doing the hiding. Because there were Russians among them, they said so on television, there were people of various nation¬alities. But they didn't tell us why there were people of different nationali¬ties. Because they wouldn't have touched the Azerbaijanis if they hadn't dared to stick up for the Armenians and give them temporary shelter in their homes. At the time I saw this from the window I was there, Sevastyanova was there, and so was my husband. We went out onto the balcony and saw a television fly off a balcony. All kinds of things, even a sofa. Then, when it was all down there, they burned it up. Then we saw the crowd, and they were all shouting. At first I couldn't figure out what was happening. And later I told my husband, "Lendrush, I think they're beating someone out there." And he answered, "I don't know, could be." Suddenly the crowd separated for a moment, and I saw it, and Raisa Sevastyanova saw it too. My husband had turned the other way, he didn't see it. I saw a naked girl with her hair down. They were dragging her. She kept falling because they were pushing her and kicking her. She fell down, it was muddy there, and later other wit¬nesses who saw it from their balconies told us, they seized her by the hair and dragged her a couple of blocks, as far as the mortgage bank, that's a good block and a half or two from here. I know this for sure because I saw it myself. Then the crowd rushed toward our building. We were standing there, and you can of course imagine what we were feeling. Were they going to kill us or not? And I also had the awful thought that they might torment me the way they tormented that woman, because I had just seen that. I asked my husband. I gave him an axe and said, "You kill me first, and then let them do what they want with the corpse." But our neighbors, it's true, defended us, they said, "There aren't any Armenians in our entryway, go away, only Muslims live here." Disaster missed us that time. But at two o'clock in the morning a crowd of about 15 people, approxi¬mately, came back to our place. My husband was already asleep. He can sleep when he's upset about something, but I can't. I was standing, running from balcony to balcony. Our power was out, I don't remember for how long, but it was as though it had been deliberately turned off. There were no lights whatsoever, and I was glad, of course. I thought it was better that way. But then I look and the crowd is at our balcony. This was at 2:15 in the morning. The first time they were at our building it was 6:30, and now it was 2:15 in the morning. But I never thought that that old woman on the first floor, the Azerbaijani, was awake and watching out, there were human beings among them too. So she goes out with a pail of garbage, as though she need¬ed to be taking garbage out at two o'clock in the morning. She used it as a pretext and went toward those young people. They really were youngsters from my balcony you could see perfectly that they were young Azerbaijani boys. They spoke Azerbaijani. And when they came up to her she said "What do you want?" And they answered, "We want the Armenian family that lives here" [pointing toward the second floor with their hands]. She says, "I already told you, we don't have any Armenians here, now leave, do you hear, this is an old Muslim woman talking to you," and grabbed the hand of one boy who was trying to walk around her and enter the building anyway and started pushing him away. And so they seemed to listen to her. They were all very young, they started apologizing and left. That was the second time death was at our door. I forgot to mention about one other apartment, a man named Rubik lives there, I don't know him really, I knew his daughter, I mean I saw her around, but we really didn't know them. But I do know that that guy who lives on the fourth floor across from our entryway went to Chernobyl and worked there for eight months, to earn money. Can you imagine what that means? He risked his life to earn X amount of money in order to better his family. He bought new furniture and was getting ready to give his daughter's hand in marriage, but, alas, everything was ruined by those creeps and scoundrels. They threw everything out the windows, and the rest we saw from our balcony: how the neighbors on the left and right ran into the apart¬ment and carried off everything that hadn't already been smashed or taken. What is one to think of that? It means that the parents in those families were in on it too. Unfortunately I came to be of the opinion that it was all orga¬nized and that everything had been foreseen in advance: both the beating of the Armenians and the stripping of apartments. Something on the order of "We'll move the Armenians out and take over their apartments." I have worked honestly my whole life, you can check everything about me. I came as a patriot from China, waited for nights on end in front of the Consulate General of the USSR, I came to my homeland as a patriot because I knew that the Party and the Komsomol were holy things. But when I saw in Sumgait that there wasn't anything holy about them, that Party member¬ship was bought, that Komsomol members joined only for personal gain, that there were no ideals, no ideas, God save me, everything was being bought and sold, I saw all of it and understood how they could allow that crap to go on like it did. I can't talk any more about it ... the image of that beating . . . When I went out of my own apartment—they picked us up under Soviet Army guard, they had arrived from all over to suppress that gang—not only Armenians, but some Russian families and their children, too, came out of their apartments and joined us, because no normal person who had seen that could stay there with the situation the way it was. And what's interesting is that when we left on the buses I rode and thought that at least one group of people, for sure people would basically rise to the situation, would have some compassion for the Armenians, would somehow understand the injustice of what was done. But having analyzed and weighed the whole thing, once I calmed down, having thought it all through, I came to a conclusion that is shared by many people. If a lot of Azerbaijanis didn't want their Armenian neighbors to be killed, and that basically depended on that Muslimzade—he said that he had wanted to calm them down—then is it possible that he didn't have people at hand to whom he could whisper at the last minute, "Go and announce it on television: Citizens of Sumgait! Take what you can into your hands, let's protect our neighbors from this mas¬sacre?" Those crowds weren't such that there was no controlling them. Basically they were unarmed. They didn't have firearms, mostly they had knives, they had all kinds of metal parts, like armature shafts, sharpened at the ends, special rocks, different to a degree that we noticed them: there aren't rocks like those in Sumgait soils, they were brought from somewhere, as though it were all specially planned. So as I was saying, I weighed it all out and if any of our neighbors had wanted to defend us, why wasn't it arranged? It means that the government didn't want to do it. When the crowd was moving from the City Party Committee to the Sputnik, what, there was no way of informing Baku? No, there was no way, it turns out! The crowd was doing violence in our microdistrict. I won't mention the things I didn't see myself, I'll only talk about the things I myself witnessed. They were in Microdistrict 8 beginning at 6 o'clock in the evening, when I saw them from the other building, and they were somewhere else until mid¬night or one o'clock in the morning, because at 2:15 they came back to our building. They hadn't completely finished making their predatory rounds of Microdistrict 8. When they returned to our building I told my husband, "Lendrush, now the police are probably going to come, my God, now the authorities are probably going to find out and come to our aid." Well, alas, no, there were to be no authorities, not a single policeman, not a single fire¬man, not a single ambulance came while they were raging, as it turns out, as we later found out, beginning on the night of the 27th. There were dead people, ruined apartments, and burned autos: one car near the bus station, it was burned and overturned, it was probably there about four days, every¬one saw it and what went on in Block 45! Those who live there know, they saw from their balconies how they attacked the soldiers in the buses, how they beat those poor, unarmed soldiers, and how on that square, I can't remember the name of it, where there is that fork coming from the bus station, that intersection, now I'm upset and I can't think of the name . . . there's a tall building there, a 9-story, and from the balconies there people saw that butchery, when the poor soldiers, wearing only helmets, with shields and those unfortunate clubs, moved against that mob. And when they fell, those 12-to 14-year-old boys ran up and using stones, big heavy stones, beat them to death on their heads. Who could have guessed that something like that could happen in the Soviet Union and under the Soviet government? The upshot is that this republic has not been under Soviet control for a long time, but no one wanted to pay any attention or get involved. If you were to go and ask at my work many people would confirm that I tell the truth, I've been struggling for truth for five years there already, the five years that I worked at the Azerbaijani railroad. Some people there con¬sidered me a demagogue, others who knows what; some think I'm an adventure seeker, and some, a prankster. But I wanted everything to be right, I would become outraged: how can this be, why is it people treat one another this way on a Soviet railroad, as though the Azerbaijani railroad were Azerbaijani property, or the property of some magnate, or some "mafia": If I want to, I'll get you out of here; If I want to, I'll get rid of you; If I want to, I'll do something else? And there's a black market price for every¬thing, in the most brazen way: a coach to Moscow costs so much, a coach on a local train costs so much. Once when I was complaining to the head of the conductor's pool, he had the nerve to tell me, maybe you won't even believe this, but this, I'm afraid, I heard with my own ears: "Tatyana, just how long can you fight for something that you know will never have any effect? You're alone against everyone, so instead why don't you give more money to the chief conductor, and everything will go fine for you." I started to cry, turned, and left. What else could I do, where else could I go to complain? I realized that everything was useless. And the root of the whole thing is that it all goes on and no one wants to see it. I filed a written complaint, and they ground it into dust, they destroyed it, I still have a copy, but what's the use? When the General Procuracy got involved with the investigation of the bloody Sumgait affair, in addition to the information about what I saw, what I was a witness to, I gave testimony about the mafia at the railroad. They accepted my petition, but I don't know if they're going to pursue it or not. Because, you'll excuse me, I no longer believe in the things I aspired to, the things I believed in before: It's all dead. They just spit on my soul, stomped on everything, physically, and most important, spiritually, because you can lose belongings, that's nonsense, that all comes with time, but when your soul is spit upon and when the best in you—your beliefs—are destroyed, it can be very difficult to restore them .. . I want to tell of one incident. I just don't know, at the time I was in such a state that I didn't even take minor things into account. Here is an example. Of course, it's not a minor one. My neighbor, Raisa Sevastyanova, she has a son, Valery, who is in the 9th grade in a school in Microdistrict 8. A boy, Vitaly [Danielian], I don't know his last name, goes to school with him, or rather, went to school with him. I was just sitting in an apartment trying to make a phone call to Moscow . . . Oh yes, and there's one important detail: When the massacre began, for two to three hours the phones weren't work¬ing in Armenian apartments, and later, in several Russian and Azerbaijani apartments. But the fact of the matter is that service was shut off, you could not call anywhere. Why? Again, it means it was all planned. How come ser¬vice is cut off for no reason? And the lights went off. And those brats were raging as they liked. They weren't afraid, they ran about freely, they knew that no one would slap their hands and no one would dare to stop them. They knew it. Now I'm going to tell about the incident. So this little Vitaly, Vitalik, an Armenian boy, went to school with Valery; they were in the same class. According to what Valery and his neighbor pal said—at the time I was in the me apartment as they were, I sat at the phone waiting for the call to be put through—a mob attacked the building where Vitalik lived. So Valery ran to (us mother and said, "Mamma, please let me go to Vitalik's, what if they kill him? Maybe he's still alive, maybe we can bring him here and save him somehow . . . He's a nice guy, we all like him, he's a good person, he's smart." His mother wouldn't let him go. In tears, she says, "Valery, you can't go because I am afraid." He says, "Mamma, we can get around the crowd. We'll just watch, just have a look." They made it through. I don't know, I think Vitalik's parents lived in Microdistrict No. 1, and when they got there, they made a superficial deduction. Knowing that balconies and doors were being broken everywhere, that you could see from the street which were the Armenian apartments in the building, they went here and there and looked, and saw that the windows were intact, and so they calmed down. But even though the windows in that apartment were not broken, everything inside was totally smashed, and Vitalik lay there with a broken skull, and his moth¬er and father had already been murdered. Little Vitalik didn't even know they were dead. So two weeks ago, I don't know, he was in critical condition, no, maybe it was longer: we left Sumgait on March 20, spent some time in Moscow, and then we came to Yerevan. So it's been about a month already; it's so hard to keep all this straight. So Valery, the next day, when he found out that Vitalik's family has been killed and Vitalik was lying in the Semashko Hospital in Baku, Valery and his classmates got together and went to visit him. But they wouldn't admit them, telling them that he was in critical condition and that he was still in a coma. They cried and left, having also found out that the girl I saw being kicked and dragged was in that hos¬pital too. As it turns out she was brought there in serious condition, but at least she was alive at the time ... When we got to the SK club we would see first one friend and then another, throw ourselves into their arms and kiss them, because you had Wondered if these friends were alive or not, if those friends were alive or not ...And when you saw them you were so glad to find out that the family had lived! When you saw people you heard things that made your hair stand on end. If you publish everything that happened it will be a hideous book. A book of things it is even difficult to believe. And those two girls who were raped were entirely black and blue, the ones at the SK, they know I'm not lying, that girlfriend came up to one of them and said, "What happened?" and she bared her breasts, and they were completely covered in cigarette burns ... those rogues had put cigarettes out on her breasts. After something like that I don't know how you can live in a city and look at the people in it. Now . . . When we stayed at the military unit for a while, they provided well, basic conditions for us there. The military unit is located in Nasosny some six miles from Sumgait. And living there we met with a larger group of people. There were about 1,600 people at the unit. You know, there was a point when I couldn't even go outside because if you went outside you saw so much heartbreak around you. And when you hear the false rumors . .. Yes, by the way, false rumors were spread in Sumgait saying that the Armenians around Yerevan had destroyed Azerbaijani villages and razed them to the ground with bulldozers. I didn't know whether to believe it or not. And people who don't know any better get the idea that it was all done in revenge. But when I arrived in Armenia and was in Spitak, and in Spitak all those villages are not only intact, but at that time had even been protect¬ed just in case, they were guarded, they got better food than did the inhabi¬tants of Spitak. Not a single person there died, and no one is planning to harm them. Around Yerevan all the villages are safe and unharmed, and the Armenians didn't attack anyone. But actually, after an evil of the magnitude suffered in Sumgait there could have been a feeling of vengefulness, but no one acted on it. And I don't know why you sometimes hear accusations to the effect that the Armenians are guilty, that it is they who organized it. Rumors like that are being spread in Azerbaijan. And if one old person says it and ten young ones hear it, they not only perceive it with their minds, but with their hearts, too. To them it seems that the older person is telling the truth. For example, one says; "Did you know that out of 31 people killed (by the way, originally they said 31 people, but later they found a 32nd), 30 were Azerbaijani and one was an Armenian?" Of course I'm upset, but it's utterly impossible to discuss such things and not become upset. Sometimes I forget things, but I know I want to return to the time when we were in the SK club across from the City Party Committee. When I saw Muslimzade in the SK club building I went to him to ask because I couldn't believe that he had marched in the front carrying a ban¬ner. I already mentioned this, and if I repeat anything, please excuse me. I asked him, "Why did you do that and why are you here now, why did you come here? To laugh at these women who are strewn about on the floor?" The overcrowding there was tremendous, it was completely unsanitary, and several of the children were already sick. It's true the troops tried to make it livable for us. They cooked for us on their field stoves and provided us with wonderful food, but the thing is that their main job was to ferret out the gang that was still at it everywhere, that was continuing its sordid affairs everywhere. Plus they were never given any direct orders, they didn't know what they were authorized to do and not to do. And it was only on March 8 at five o'clock in the evening that Krayev himself, the Lieutenant General the City Commandant of Sumgait, was given full authority and told every¬one over a microphone from an armored personnel carrier that now he could do what he wanted to do, as his heart advised him, and relocate people to the military unit. But that's not what I want to talk about now. Muslimzade, characteristically, tried to get me out of the SK building and take me to the City Party Committee, which is across the square from the club. He took me by the hand and said, "Citizen, don't worry, we'll go and have a talk in my office." I told him, "No, after everything you've done, I don't believe one iota of what you say. If I go to the City Party Committee I'll disappear, and the traces of me will disappear too. Because you can't stand it when ..." Oh yes, and there was another interesting detail from that meeting. It was even very fun¬ny, although at the time I wasn't up to laughing. He was in a nice, expensive hat, and so as to put him to shame, so to speak, I said, "Oh, why did you come here all duded up like a London dandy, you smell of good perfume, you're in your starched shirt, and you have your expensive hat on. You came to ridicule the poor women and children who are lying on the floor, who are already getting sick, whose relatives have died. Did you come to laugh at them?" And the one who was accompanying him, an Azerbaijani, I don't know who he was or what his title was, he quickly snatched the hat off Muslimzade's head and hid it. Then I said, "My God! We're not marauders. We're not you! We didn't come to you with the intention of stealing!" "Well kill me, kill me!" Muslimzade says to me, "But I'm not guilty . . . kill me, kill me, but I'm not guilty." And I say, "OK, fine, you're not guilty, have it your way. But give us an answer, we're asking you: Where were you when they were torturing and raping those poor women, when they were killing the children, burning things, carrying on outrageously, and wrecking all those apartments? Where were you then?" "You know, we didn't expect it, we did not know what to do, we didn't anticipate that something like that would happen in Sumgait." I started laughing and said, "It's truly funny." He says, "What could I do? We didn't know what to do." And I say, "I'm sorry, but it'll be ridiculous if I tell you: The First Secretary of the City Party Committee shouldn't march out in front with a banner; he should fall down so that the gang would have to cross over his dead body. That's what you should have done. That's the way it was during the war. Not a single Party committee secretary compromised himself; either he died or he led people into battle. And what did you do? You ran away, you left, you hid, you marched with a flag, because you were afraid, excuse my language, you feared for your own damned hide. And when we ask you, you tell us that you got confused and you ask me what you could have done? That's right," I told him, "the City party committee got confused, all the party committees got confused, the police got confused, Baku got confused, they all lay in a faint for two weeks, and the gang ran the show with impunity. And if it weren't for the troops it wouldn't have been just two days, there wouldn't be a single Armenian left in Sumgait for sure, they would have finished their bloody affair, because 'hey brazenly went up to some Russians, too, the ones who tried to say something to them, and they told them, 'As soon as we finish with the Armenians we'll come after you, too.'" And by the way, there was a colonel, who took us to the military unit. He's the one with the light blue collar tabs who flew in and two hours later arrived on an armored personnel carrier when we were at the SK and took us to the military unit and who later started moving us from the military unit. We asked him, "What? How? What will come of us?" He openly said, "You know, for us the main thing now is to catch that gang. We'll finish that quickly. You'll stay at the military unit for the time being, and we'll decide later." The General Procuracy of the USSR arrived, it consists of investigators from all cities. There were some from Stavropol, from everywhere, just everywhere, because the affair was truly frightful. About this, by the way, Comrade Katusev spoke; as everyone knows, he's the First Deputy General Procurator of the USSR. When he gave us a speech from the armored per¬sonnel carrier at the military unit, by the way, he told us the honest truth, because he couldn't not say it, because he was still experiencing his first impressions of what he had seen, and he said, "There was Afghanistan, and it was bad, but Sumgait—it's horrible! And the people who dared to do such a thing will be severely punished, in accordance with our laws." And that's a quote. Then one mother throws herself at him—her two sons had died before her very eyes—and says, "Who will return my sons? Who is going to punish the [culprits]?" They tried to calm her down, and he said, "In order for us to conduct a proper investigation, in order that not a single scoundrel avoid responsibility, you must help us, because we don't know, maybe there was someone else in the gang who is now being concealed in homes, and maybe the neighbors know, maybe someone saw something. Don't be afraid, write about it in detail. So that you're not afraid . . . Everyone knows that many of you are afraid, having lived through such horrors, they think that if they write the whole truth about, let's say, their neighbor or someone else, that they will seek revenge later. We're going to do it like this: We're going to set up an urn and you can throw what you write in there. We don't need to know who wrote it. The names of the people who write won't be made pub¬lic, but we need all the information. Let each and every one not be afraid, let each write what is necessary, who they saw in that gang, who made threats or shouted threatening gibes about the Armenians .. . You must describe all of these people and put the information into the urn." Two soldiers and a major guarded the urn. And, sure enough, many peo¬ple, people who didn't even want to write ... I know one woman who asked me, she came up and said, "You, as a Russian, the same thing won't happen to you as will happen to me. So please . . . I'll give you the information, and you please write it down for me." So she was afraid, and there were a lot like her . . . But later, after Katusev made his speech, she sat and wrote down everything she knew. And we threw it all into the urn. Now we don't know if it will be of any use. For a factual picture will emerge from all that infor¬mation. One person can lie, but thousands can't lie, thousands simply can't lie. You have to agree with that, a fact is a fact. Why, for example, should someone say that black is white if it is really black? The First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Azerbaijani SSR, Mamedov, as I said, was in Yerevan. My husband and I were at the Council of Ministers of the Armenian SSR and found out that Mamedov was present, the one who had come to convince the people of Sumgait to return to their previous dwellings, to their old apartments. We asked for a meeting with him, and it was granted. When we went to see him he tried to behave properly, very politely, delicately, but. . . when the truth was told right to his face and when I asked him some of the same questions I had asked Muslimzade, "Where were you personally when they were beating us? Now you're trying to convince us to return, why didn't you think at the time that they were slaughtering us where it was all leading?" he says, "You're telling the truth. Let's not mince words. You've told me right to my face, and I'll tell you straight. I'll tell you the pure truth. I was gotten out of bed in the evening, the whole government was up, including me, and we were restraining a crowd of about 45,000 in Baku. But we never expected that in a city like Sumgait, with its fine international record, such a thing could hap¬pen. We expected it in Baku." I say, "So that means you expected it all the same? Why were you expecting it?" And he says, "You know, it just hap¬pened that way. We were expecting it in Baku, we were trying to restrain it, but in Sumgait ..." I say, "Fine, you didn't know for the first three or four hours, but then you should have known. Why did no one help us?" And he says, "Well, OK, we didn't know what to do" and things like that. Basically it was the same story I got from Muslimzade. Later, when he said, "You go on back, the situation in Sumgait is favorable now, everything is fine, the Armenians are friendly with the Azerbaijanis ..." To this I answered, "You know what. .. I'm speaking with you as a neutral nation ... I have never argued with Armenians or with Azerbaijanis and I was an eye¬witness . . . You tell me, please, Comrade Mamedov, " I asked him, "What would you say about this honestly, if you were being completely frank with us?" Then he said, "Yes, I admit that I am honestly ashamed, shame on the entire Azerbaijani nation, we have disgraced ourselves not only before the entire Soviet Union, but before the whole world. Because now the Voice of America and all the other foreign radio stations of various hues are branding us with all kinds of rumors, too." And I say, "There's nothing to add to what really happened. I don't think it's possible to add anything more awful." He says, "Yes, I agree with you, I understand your pain, it is truly an unfortu¬nate occurrence." I repeat that he said "unfortunate occurrence." And then he suddenly remembered himself, what he was saying—he had a pen in his hands, he was fidgeting with it nervously—and said, "Oh, excuse me, a tragedy, really ..." I take this to mean that he really thinks it's an "unfortu¬nate occurrence." "And of course," he says, "I understand that having gone through all this you can't return to Sumgait, but it's necessary to cool down and realize that all those people are being tried." And he even gave a detail, which, I don't know if it matters or not, that 160 policemen were being tried. Specifically in relation to that bloody affair. Yes, by the way, there is another good detail, how I was set up at work in Baku after the events. I went to an undergarment plant, there was an Azerbaijani working there, and suddenly she tells me, "What, they didn't nail your husband? They screwed up." I was floored, I hadn't imagined that anyone in Baku, too, could say something like that. Well after that I went up to see ... to my office, I needed to find out about those days, what was going to happen with them, how they were going to put down those days from February 29 to March 10 ... and the administrator told me, "I don't know, Tatyana, go to the head of the conductors' pool. Be grateful if they don't put it down as unexcused absence." I was really discouraged by this. They all know that we were but a hair away from death and barely sur¬vived, and here they're telling me that I was skipping work, as though I was off enjoying myself somewhere. I went to the office of the chief of the pool, his last name is Rasulov, and he's had that position for many years. Incidentally, he's a Party member, and is a big man in town. And suddenly, when I went to him and said, "Comrade Rasulov, this is the way it was ..." He looked at me askance and said, "And why are you"—he knows me by my previous last name—"why did you get wrapped up in this mess?" I say, "What do you mean, why did I get wrapped up in this mess? My husband's an Armenian," I tell him, "I have an Armenian last name." And he screwed up his face, made a kind of a grimace, as though he had eaten something sour, and said, "I didn't expect that you would ..." What did he mean by that? And "how" should he behave, the chief of the pool, a man who super¬vises 1,700 workers? Now, it's true, there was a reduction, but for sure there are still 1,200 conductors working for him. And if someone who supervises a staff that size says things like that, then what can you expect from a simple, uneducated, politically unsophisticated person?! He's going to believe any and all rumors, that the Armenians are like this, the Armenians are like that, and so on... By the way, that Mamedov—now I'm going back to Mamedov's office—when I asked him "Are you really going to guarantee the safety of our lives if we return to Sumgait?" he answered, "Yes, you know, I would guarantee them ... I don't want to take on too much, I would guarantee them firmly for 50 years. But I won't guarantee them for longer than 50 years." I say, "So you've got another thing like that planned for 50 years from now? So they'll be quiet and then in another 50 years it'll happen again?!" I couldn't contain myself any more, and I also told him, "And how did it get to that point, certainly you knew about it, how they were treating the Russians, for example, in Baku and in Sumgait, how they were hounded from their jobs? Certainly you received complaints, I wrote some myself. Why did no one respond to them? Why did everyone ignore what was going on? Didn't you prepare people for this by the way you treated them? And he says, "You know, you're finally starting to insult me!" He threw his pen on the desk. "Maybe now you'll say I'm a scoundrel too?" I say, "You know, I'm not talking about you because I don't know. But about the ones who I do know I can say with conviction, yes, that comrade was involved in this, that, and that, because I know for certain." Well anyway he assured us that here, in Yerevan, there were false rumors, that 3,000 Sumgait Armenians were here, and 15,000 were in Sumgait and had gotten back to work. Everyone was working, he said, and life was very good. "We drove about town ourselves, Comrade Arutunian [First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia SSR] came from the Council of Ministers of Armenian, he came and brought information showing that everything was fine in Sumgait." When I asked Mamedov how he had reached that conclusion he said, "Well, I walked down the street." And I said, "Walking down the street in any city, even if I were to go to New York, I would never understand the situation because I would be a guest, I don't have any contact with people, but if you spend 10 days among some blue-collar workers in such a way that they didn't know you were the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, you'd hear something quite different." I told him, for example, that I drew my conclusion when we left the military unit to look at our apartments. They took us all in turns to pick things up, since people had fled to the military unit; they got on the bus just to save themselves as soon as possible. How are the neighbors in the microdistrict, how will they view us, what do they think? I thought maybe that in fact it wasn't something gener¬al, of a mass nature, some anti-national something. And when that bus took us to our building, because it was the same bus, while we were going up to our apartment, an armed soldier accompanied us. What does that say? It speaks of the fact that if everything there were fine, why do we need to have soldiers go there and come back with us, going from apartment to apart¬ment? And in fact, especially with the young people, you could sense the delight at our misfortune, the grins, and they were making comments, too. And that was in the presence of troops, when police detachments were in the microdistricts and armored personnel carriers and tanks were passing by. And if people are taking such malicious delight when the situation is like that, then what is it going to be like when they withdraw protection from the city altogether? There will be more outrages, of course, perhaps not organized, but in the alleys ... April 20, 1988 Yerevan

- YURI VAGARSHAKOVICH MUSAELIAN Born 1953 Line Electrician Sumgait Streetcar and Trolleybus Administration Resident at Building 4/21, Apartment 29 Block 14, Narimanov Street Sumgait I spent almost all of February doing overhaul. The 27th was a short day at work, we worked until eleven or eleven-thirty and left for home. I decided to go for a short walk. I went to Primorsky Park. I walked past the Eternal Flame and saw a group of about 8 to 10 people standing there. When I had walked another 15 to 20 yards I heard the screech of automobile brakes behind me. I turned my head toward the sound. It was a light blue GAZ-24 Volga. I see that the people who were standing there have gone over to the car. A man and a woman get out. The man is expensively dressed, in a suit, and the woman has a raincoat on. She doesn't have anything on her head, and her hair is let down, slightly reddish hair, a heavy-set woman. They're 40 to 45 years old. They get something out of the trunk. The people start to help them. I become curious: just what are they pulling out of there? When I got up close I heard them turn something on. I didn't see what it was, but it was probably a tape recorder. They put it on the ground near the Eternal Flame honoring the 26 Baku Commissars and formed a tight circle around it. I ask, "What's going on?" Someone tells me, "Come listen." Well they were Azerbaijanis, I had asked in Azerbaijani. I hear appeals: "Brother Muslims, our time has come ..." and something else along that line. I didn't understand what it was all about. I walked around the group trying to get a look at the owner of the tape recorder. But the circle drew in tighter. New people started coming from various directions, five here, seven there. And the comments started: "Right, we should slaughter the Armenians!" and "There's no need to be afraid, all of Moscow is behind us." I even heard that: All Moscow is behind us." Well I watched and listened in and realized that this was no joke. I quietly left and went home. Now before that at work I had heard that something was going on in Karabagh, that there were demonstrations there. Well, people were saying all kinds of things, but I didn't have any idea what was really going on. My wife and son were at home, but my daughter was at my aunt's house in Baku. I didn't say anything to my wife. We sat and drank tea. Sometime around two o'clock right behind our house suddenly there is noise, whistling, and shouting. I looked out the window and saw a crowd. The crowd is moving slowly, like they show on TV when blacks in South Africa are striking or having a demonstration and move slowly. My wife asks what's going on out there. I say I don't know. I put on some outdoor clothes and went out to find out what it was all about. In the crowd people are shouting "Down with the Armenians!" and "Death to the Armenians!" I waited for the entire crowd to pass. At first they went down Narimanov Street on the side with the SK club and the City Party Committee; then they turned and went against the traffic—it's one way there—down the Street of the 26 Baku Commissars toward the streetcar line. I went home and told my wife there was a demonstration going on. In fact I thought that we were having the same kind of demonstrations that they had had in Yerevan and in Karabagh. Aside from the things they were shouting, I was surprised that there were only young people in the crowd. And they were minors, under draft age. My wife and son wanted to go upstairs to visit a friend, but I was kind of uneasy and said, "No, let's stay at home instead." An hour went by, or maybe an hour and a half. Well, I wasn't keeping track of the time, I can't say exactly how long it was. I look and see another crowd on Narimanov, but now on the side with the microdistricts, the bazaar, and the Rossiya movie theater. I put outside clothes on and went out again. There's noise, an uproar out¬side, and the crowd has grown. There are more people. And whereas the first time there were individual shouts, this time they are more focused, more aggressive. No, I think, something's wrong here, this isn't any demon¬stration. They would run, stop, then walk quickly and make sharp dashes, and then run again. I was walking along the sidewalk and they were in the street. I followed them. I was thinking I'd just watch and see. Who knew where this was leading? We came out on Lenin Square. At the square the SK club is on one side, and the City Party Committee is on the other. I went toward the square and heard noise and shouting, as though the whole town had turned out. There was some sort of a rally going on. I go closer and hear exclamations, appeals. I heard both anti-Armenian and anti-Soviet appeals. "We don't need perestroika, we want to go on living like we have been." Now what did they mean by "living like we have been?" The Azerbaijanis work like everyone else. But too many people live at the expense of the gov¬ernment and at the expense of others. Speculation, theft, and cheating go on all the time. And not just in Azerbaijan, everywhere, in all the republics, but I've never seen it anywhere else like I have in Azerbaijan. Now at this rally someone says that they should go around to the Armenians' apartments and drive them out, beat them and drive them out-True, I didn't hear them say "kill them" over the microphone, I only heard "beat them and drive them out." I stayed at the square a few minutes longer First one, then another are going up onto the stage, and no one tries to stop the crowd. Off to the side of the crowd there were small groups of three or four people, and I think they were MVD [Ministry of Internal Affairs] or State Security KGB. There were also uniformed policemen there, but I didn't see any of them try to pacify the crowd. New people kept coming up onto the stage. Well I had finally decided that this could end badly: This was no demon¬stration, and I had to protect my family. I left the Square to return home and suddenly noticed a truck. It was next to the City Party Committee, on Narimanov Street, it stood next to the tai¬lor's shop there, a low truck, and it had low, wooden panels. I see that some¬thing is being unloaded, crates of some sort. I decided to go look because after all those appeals I was apprehensive and thought there might be weapons in there. They pulled the crates out onto the square, not toward the City Party Committee, but toward the SK club. And when I went right up to them I saw that they were cases of vodka. There were two people handing down the cases from the bed of the truck, and on the ground there were many people, 15 to 20. They were handing them down from the truck and each case was carried off by two people. Two people, one case of vodka. And there was a man standing right next to the truck and he was handing out round black lumps, maybe about the size of a fist, maybe a little big¬ger or smaller. It was anasha. When I passed next to that person, he stood with his side to me. There was about a yard and a half between us, and two people were standing near him. He has a package in his hand, and he's pulling out anasha and handing it out. I have never smoked it myself. Once I tried it for fun, but I've seen a lot of people smoke it, I've seen it many times, and I know what it is. I strolled around and no one asked me who I was or what I was doing there. Before I got to the Glass Bazaar I heard more howling, more warlike shouting. I turned around and saw them running. Well I'll just keep on going like I am, I thought. When they caught up with me I saw that they were carrying flags. And I recognized the person who was carrying the flag on my side of the street. He's a young guy, 21 or 22 years old. He was carry¬ing a red flag, which had "Ermeni oryum" written on it in Azerbaijani, that means "Death to Armenians!" That guy used to live off the same courtyard as us. I don't really know what his name is, but I know his father very well. His father's name is Rafik; he used to be a cook, and then became head chef. He used to have a dark blue Zhiguli van, then he sold it and now he has a white Zhiguli 06. His family, as I said, lived on the same courtyard as we did. Our building was on Narimanov Street, and theirs was on the Street of the 26 Baku Commissars; their apartment was in the far entryway, on the fifth floor, the door on the left. Now Rafik's little brother lives there, and he, Rafik, I heard, got a new apartment either in the forth or eighth microdistrict. In a word, his son was carrying a flag that said "Death to Armenians!" I was surprised because before this I had gotten the impression that all of this nonsense was being done not by people from Sumgait, but by Azerbaijanis from Agdam and Kafan. Well anyway I went home. My wife was upset. I told her, "It's OK, it'll pass, they're young kids, they've just gotten all whooped up." Naturally I didn't want her to get overly upset. After a while a new surge of crowd went by. And this time they were breaking glass. I could hear it breaking, but I couldn't see where. Well I think, here we go, the machine's in motion. They weren't handing out that vodka and anasha for nothing. I didn't see people drinking and smoking on the spot, but they certainly hadn't unloaded the vodka and hashish to put in a store window! So the thought flashed through my head that the machine was running, no one would stop them now, they weren't even trying, although, I'll say it again, the police were there, I saw them. And it's not just that the police weren't breaking them up, they were joking with them, they were having a good time. True, at the time I couldn't even imagine that under our govern¬ment, our much-vaunted leadership—and I'm not afraid to say these words: so many people died, so many women were abused, and how many abomi¬nations there were!—I couldn't imagine that under our much-vaunted authorities, and if I were to be specific, I would say under the much-touted authorities in our city of Sumgait, I couldn't imagine that such things could take place. When they started breaking glass I told my wife and son: "Let's go upstairs." We went to our neighbors, the Grigorians, on the fourth floor. And in the evening, when those crowds started going past again, I went outside once more. I stopped at "The Corner," a place called that right next to the bazaar. I look and see a crowd on the run. And there, a few yards from the entrance to the bazaar, are three respectable-looking men of around, say, 50 years old. The crowd was running and one of the three waved with his arm and pointed toward the bazaar. And then the whole crowd, as though it were one person, wheeled and raced toward the bazaar. And not a soul went past those three, as though it were off limits! Well everything got all churned up, there was more noise, and the glass was flying again. We spent the night at the neighbors'. My apartment was on the first floor, there was really no way to defend yourself there. In the morning I went out to buy bread and to see what was happening in town. On the way I saw someone hunched up, still. I never found out who it was or what happened to him. There were 10 to 15 people standing near him. I got the bread and on my way back, they had gathered around the per¬son who was lying there hunched up, sort of enclosing him; because of the way they were standing you couldn't even see him. That was on the morning of February 28. Everyone knows the rest. May 17, 1988 Yerevan

насколько я знаю в Вене есть аллея бюстов со срубленными головами. Это турки, завоевав Вену, рубили все подряд, даже головы памятникам. Головы памятников потом находили в Дунае и просто ставили на бюст не прикрепляя, в качестве памяти о зверствах турок, для того чтобы будущие поколения помнили.

:victory: :hi:

■ VANYA BAGRATOVICH BAZIAN Born 1940 Foreman Baku Spetsmontazh Administration (UMSMR-1) Resident at Building 36/7, Apartment 9 Block 14 Sumgait During the first days of the events, the 27th and the 28th [of February], I was away on a business trip. On the 10th I had got my crew, done the paper¬work, and left for the Zhdanov District. That's in Azerbaijan, near the Nagorno Karabagh region. After the 14th, rumors started to the effect that in Karabagh, specifically in Stepanakert, an uprising had taken place. They said "uprising" in Azerbaijani, but I don't think it was really an uprising, just a demonstration. After that the unrest started. Several Armenians living in the Zhdanov District were injured. How were they injured? They were beaten, even wom¬en; it was said that they were at the demonstrations, but they live here, and went from here to Karabagh to demonstrate. After that I felt uneasy. There were some conversations about Armenians among the local population: the Armenians had done this, the Armenians had done that. Right there at the site. I was attacked a couple of times by kids. Well true, the guys from my crew wouldn't let them come at me with cables and knives. After that I felt really bad. I didn't know where to go. I up and called home. And my chil¬dren tell me, "There's unrest everywhere, be careful." Well I had a project going on. I told the Second Secretary of the District Party Committee what had been going on and said I wanted to take my crew off the site. They wouldn't allow it, they said, "Nothing's going to happen to you, we've entrusted the matter to the police, we've warned everyone in the district, nothing will happen to you." Well, in fact they did especially detail us a policeman to look after me, he knows all the local people and would protect me if something happened. This man didn't leave me alone for five minutes: he was at work the whole time and afterward he spent the night with us, too. I sense some disquiet and call home; my wife also tells me, "The situation is very tense, be careful." We finished the job at the site, and I left for Sumgait first thing on the morning of the 29th. When we left the guys warned me, they told me that I shouldn't tell anyone on the way that I was an Armenian. I took someone else's business travel documents, in the name of Zardali, and hid my own. I hid it and my passport in my socks. We set out for Baku. Our guys were on the bus, they sat behind, and I sat up front. In Baku they had come to me and said that they had to collect all of our travel documents just in case. As it turns out they knew what was happening in Sumgait. I arrive at the bus station and there they tell me that the city of Sumgait is closed, there is no way to get there. That the city is closed off and the buses aren't running. Buses normally leave Baku for Sumgait almost every two minutes. And suddenly—no buses. Well, we tried to get there via private drivers. One man, an Azerbaijani, said, "Let's go find some other way to get there." They found a light transport vehicle and arranged for the driver to take us to Sumgait. He took us there. But the others had said, "I wouldn't go if you gave me a thousand rubles." "Why?" "Because they're burning the city and killing the Armenians. There isn't an Armenian left." Well I got hold of myself so I could still stand up. So we squared it away, the four of us got in the car, and we set off for Sumgait. On the way the driver says, "In fact there aren't any Armenians left. They burned them all, beat them all, and stabbed them." Well I was silent. The whole way—20-odd miles—I was silent. The driver asks me, "How old are you, old man?" He wants to know: if I'm being that quiet, not saying anything, maybe it means I'm an Armenian. "How old are you?" he asks me. I say, "I'm 47." "I'm 47 too, but I call you 'old man'." I say, "It depends on God, each person's life in this world is different." I look much older than my years, that's why he called me old man. Well after that he was silent, too. We're approaching the city, I look and see tanks all around, and a cordon. Before we get to the Kavkaz store the driver starts to wave his hand. Well, he was waving his hand, we all start waving our hands. I'm sitting there with them, I start waving my hand, too. I realized that this was a sign that meant there were no Armenians with us. I look at the city—there is a crowd of people walking down the middle of the street, you know, and there's no traffic. Well probably I was scared. They stopped our car. People were standing on the sidewalks. They have arma¬ture shafts, and stones .. . And they stopped us ... Along the way the driver tells us how they know who's an Armenian and who's not. The Armenians usually . . . For example, I'm an Armenian, but I speak their language very well. Well Armenians usually pronounce the Azeri word for "nut," or "little nut," as "pundukh," but "fundukh" is actually correct. The pronunciations are different. Anyone who says "pundukh," even if they're not Armenian, they immediately take out and start to slash. Another one says, "There was a car there, with five people inside it," he says. "They started hitting the side of it with an axe and lit it on fire. And they didn't let the people out," he says, "they wouldn't let them get out of the car." I only saw the car, but the driver says that he saw everything. Well he often drives from Baku to Sumgait and back . . . When they stop us we all get out of the car. I look and there's a short guy, his eyes are gleaming, he has an armature shaft in one hand and a stone in the other and asks the guys what nationality they are one by one. "We're Azerbaijani," they tell him, "no Armenians here." He did come up to me when we were pulling our things out and says, "Maybe you're an Armenian, old man?" But in Azerbaijani I say, "You should be ashamed of yourself!" And ... he left. Turned and left. That was all that happened. What was I to do? I had to ... the city was on fire, but I had to steal my children out of my own home. They stopped us at the entrance to Mir Street, that's where the Kavkaz store and three large, 12-story buildings are. That's the beginning of down¬town. I saw that burned automobile there, completely burned, only metal remained. I couldn't figure out if it was a Zhiguli or a Zaporozhets. Later I was told it was a Zhiguli. And the people in there were completely inciner¬ated. Nothing remained of them, not even any traces. That driver had told me about it, and I saw the car myself. The car was there. The skeleton, a metallic carcass. About 30 to 40 yards from the Kavkaz store. I see a military transport, an armored personnel carrier. The hatches are closed. And people are throwing armature shafts and pieces of iron at it, the crowd is. And I hear shots, not automatic fire, it's true, but pistol shots. Several shots. There were Azerbaijanis crowded around that personnel carri¬er. Someone in the crowd was shooting. Apparently they either wanted to kill the soldiers or get a machine gun or something. At that point there was only one armored personnel carrier. And all the tanks were outside the city, cordoning off Sumgait. I walked on. I see two Azerbaijanis going home from the plant. I can tell by their gait that they're not bandits, they're just people, walking home. I joined them so in case something happened, in case someone came up to us and asked questions, either of us would be in a position to answer, you see. But I avoided the large groups because I'm a local and might be quickly rec¬ognized. I tried to keep at a distance, and walked where there were fewer people. Well so I walked into Microdistrict 2, which is across from our block. I can't get into our block, but I walked where there were fewer people, so as to get around. Well there I see a tall guy and 25 to 30 people are walk¬ing behind him. And he's shouting into a megaphone: "Comrades, the Armenian-Azerbaijani war has begun!" The police have megaphones like that. So they're talking and walking around the second microdistrict. I see that they're coming my way, and turn off behind a building. I noticed that they walked around the outside build¬ings, and inside the microdistricts there were about 5 or 6 people standing on every corner, and at the middles of the buildings, and at the edges. What they were doing I can't say, because I couldn't get up close to them, I was afraid. But the most important thing was to get away from there, to get home, and at least find out if my children were alive or not... April 20,1988 Yerevan

ух какие эти армяне .. огонь прямо..

обряда и церемонии не было. Вот: http://www.armenianow.com/?action=viewArti...dff37f243a8a003 Of course, it was a symbolic ceremony, as the Armenian Apostolic Church does not condone gay marriages. They exchanged rings in the church and staged a small wedding party at a restaurant with Misha’s mother and their friends. They came from Paris especially to exchange vows in Echmiadzin.