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Pogroms against Armenians in Soviet Azerbaijan


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- ZINAIDA KONSTANTINOVNA MUDRETSOVA

Born 1939

Bookkeeper

Sumgait Industrial Production Complex

Resident at 4 Lenin Street, Apartment 39 Sumgait

I'll begin my account on February 27. It was a Saturday. Since we lived downtown, almost right across from the City Party Committee and the cen¬tral square, I heard and saw a vast crowd on the square shouting and chant¬ing. It first appeared to be unorganized groups, but then they all converged on the Square. At first I couldn't figure out what was happening, and, later, my neighbor told me that it was the Azerbaijanis demanding something. On Saturday she hadn't yet told me this. So we were taking things as usual, not guessing or even suspecting. That day my daughter and her husband went to Baku and returned at nine o'clock in the evening; they got onto the bus to come home and a mob of Azerbaijanis stopped the bus and demanded that all the Armenians get out, they were going to kill them. I can't say by what miracle they were saved and survived, but when my daughter came home she announced, "Mamma, they were trying to kill us!" This was on Saturday, the 27th.

She said that they were Azerbaijanis, and it was dark. She couldn't figure it out, well in fact you really can't understand it: suddenly one evening in town, right downtown, near the bus station, a bus is stopped and all the Armenians are forced out to be killed. Somehow my daughter and her hus¬band managed to get into a taxi and get home.

On Sunday morning I was paying more attention. As a matter of fact, 1 didn't leave the balcony. The demonstration, the rally, began at eleven o'clock in the morning. Party and governmental functionaries took the microphone right away, well after all the whole thing had taken place next to the City Party Committee and the City Executive Committee. They talked and argued, I heard them speaking Russian and Azerbaijani—I could only catch snatches: "That's a lie," "That's not true." I couldn't figure out what the crowd wanted, but on Sunday our neighbor told us that they were demand¬ing that all the Armenians move out of Sumgait. I asked her what the leader¬ship's response had been, and she said that they had promised to do it. These were my neighbor's words . ..

I haven't been myself for an entire month, I've been in this trance, it's as though I'm completely numb; I can't talk, and I even forget facts, because the whole affair is so inconceivable. Well on Sunday the demonstration was over at five o'clock. I had noticed that it was very well organized. One part rallied and one part was on the move, that was the young people, who were led by three or four completely grown adults, who pointed with their arms and directed them as to where to go, where to end the procession, I guess to demonstrate their numbers so that the people living in our district would see how huge the crowd was. They had signs in their hands, I didn't see what they said, because it was on the opposite side of the street, one of the signs was red. I heard cries, "Muslims, Muslims!" You could hear that because they passed under our balcony. Then they returned. At five o'clock, when the rallies started, the city leadership took the lead. You probably read in Komsomolskaya pravda where Muslimzade announced that in order to calm the crowd he led them off toward the embankment. The remainder of the crowd went off to kill and loot. I can't pinpoint the age of these people because many of them were covered up, maybe on purpose, so no one could recognize them, but I did see some older folks, and there were those young men, the ones who were carrying the signs, and there were children, per¬haps students from the Vocational and Technical School; all the rest were adults. The crowd was huge, it's hard for me to give you a precise figure, but it appeared in such an organized fashion that I noticed it. At eleven o'clock it was quiet, and suddenly the square was jammed with people. No one tried to restrain them. I also noticed that when Muslimzade was leading the crowd the police made way, went off to the side, and the only thing I knew, I sensed it intuitively, was that they were going to kill, although on that day I didn't yet know that there had been murders on Saturday, but for some rea¬son I concluded that there would be killings, and told my husband, "Go and take down the building directory on the first floor," because our last name was on it: Sargisov, Apartment 39. He said, "What kind of nonsense is that, nothing can happen, there's no reason to panic." This was on Sunday. In the evening my mother-in-law called, because my daughter and her husband and their small child were at her place [the Babaians, residing at Building 2/27A, Apartment 12, Block 4]. She called and said, "Don't worry, the tele¬phone's been cut off, I'm calling from an apartment on the first floor, I just wanted to let you know." And on Monday morning she called from work, she's a kindergarten teacher, and said that after she had called from the apartment on the first floor the day before those neighbors had been attacked: the husband was killed, his wife's clothes were stripped off and she was beaten, she lost consciousness, and that's why she survived, they thought she was dead, and the son threw himself out the window and escaped.

My mother-in-law lives in Block 4, I don't know the building number. She only said that they were on their way to their place too, but a Russian woman from the first floor said that no Armenians lived there, that they should leave, and they did. You know, these words make me think that if the police or our precinct police had been somewhere in the block—that Russian woman chased off a group of criminals with mere words, criminals who had already killed and robbed an apartment on the first floor, and alone the words that there were no Armenians living there turned them away—I think that probably the intervention of the police would have helped, yet basically I didn't see a single policemen entire time the events were taking place.

I'll continue. On Monday I went to work, still unaware of the scope of the tragedy. At the Industrial Production Complex no one knew anything for certain either, everyone had been at home, but they had seen the looted apartments and the cars that had been burned during the night. On the way in I saw the smashed SK myself, right there across from the City Party Committee. All the news kiosks where Armenians worked had been smashed, and the soft-drink booth, the woman who worked there was an Armenian, too. They wrecked her booth and her apartment, too, I passed by it. Mattresses and the television had been thrown from the broken windows, and this was right downtown . . . right in the middle of town! Can it really be that this couldn't have been prevented, can it really be that there was no police patrol, nothing?! In the center of town, on Lenin Street, there was loot¬ing and killing. I also saw an apartment with a terrace. Apparently they had broken the windows, and the people who lived there heaved containers of tomatoes and pickles at them, they had thrown everything possible so as to defend themselves.

Nothing particular happened at work, they just said that there had been a directive to excuse the Armenians from work for at least 3 or 4 days. This was on Monday. But on Sunday evening the troops were already there. I guess I'm not telling things in order, I'm sorry. I was able to see that well because they stopped in front of our balcony. They set up headquarters, apparently, at the City Party Committee. They were new recruits. I'm a woman and really don't know all that much about the various types of troops, but I saw that there were troops from the internal forces and new recruits. They donned bulletproof vests and helmets, and they had shields and clubs. That was the first time I had seen the clubs. They were given their rations and went out on patrol about town, evidently. I think the curfew was imposed beginning March 1. I can't say when the order to use weapons was given, but apparently it was then, when the curfew was imposed. 1 saw a sign on our building announcing the curfew, and the sign had General Krayev's name on it. That was the only thing that saved the people of Sumgait from annihilation. Because if the troops hadn't been introduced, maybe not a single person would have been left alive. 1 mean the Armenian population, of course. They couldn't restore order despite the curfew, and fear prompted them to evacuate all the Armenian families from the microdistricts to the square, to the SK. They were guarding them there, they had tanks and armored personnel carriers, and several flanks of troops cor¬doned off the whole complex, and later I was told that they had been guard-ing the hospitals, kindergartens, and schools, but that was later. There were a tremendous number of people and children at the SK club, and of course the conditions were completely unsanitary ... I saw injured Armenians, people who had been stabbed, women who had been beaten, with black eyes, a fellow covered in blood in a bloody shirt, apparently by some mira¬cle he had escaped and gotten away. Well they helped us as they could, they had apparently called in military doctors and used disinfectants, there was free food, and—of course, of course!—every request by the Armenian fami¬lies was carried out unquestioningly by the troops: to be taken somewhere, to get something for the children, and to track down someone who had been left behind . . . My daughter was there too. She decided to go home to get food and clothing and was accompanied by two soldiers with machine guns; they went to her apartment and waited while she gathered her things together, and then they escorted her right back to the club. At the time there still hadn't been any talk of evacuating the Armenians; apparently the situa¬tion on the 1st was still uncontrollable, it was still quite serious, complicated, and terrifying. From the balcony we heard shooting even during the day and around evening time. That was on March 1. It was machine-gun fire.

I still can't figure out why innocent residents of Sumgait became victims. I found out recently, for example, that Nagorno Karabagh is located 250 miles from Sumgait. We hadn't heard of the problems in Nagorno Karabagh; we didn't know about them. The mass media coverage had been very skimpy, and we didn't see anything out of the ordinary in it. Living was quite difficult for us. We couldn't figure out why Karabagh was being talked of at the rally, after all there was television, the newspapers, the radio . . . Essentially the people of Sumgait were innocent victims. We were murdered in our sleep, so to speak. You just can't imagine what it's like to sit there and wait for them to come for you, to sit by the door holding an axe. We knew that it was hopeless, they weren't going around alone or in twos, they were moving in huge mobs, they would have made quick work of us regardless. I still can't understand why we, the people of Sumgait, became the victims of crimes. In what name and why they were committed. I still don't under¬stand that, even now. I can guess, of course, but I still can't understand it all the same.

All these events caught us completely unaware. Our building wasn't hit. Because of where our building was located, when there weren't any police around, there were troops. Being there, our safety was assured. But this is what struck me. We lived in friendship with our neighbors, we always said, "hello" and "good bye," one of the neighbor women used to come and use our telephone, and when she saw the demonstration headed by the city leaders, you know, she welcomed it, saying, "That's right, they're doing the right thing." Why? Because the Armenians allegedly had the best apart¬ments and the best jobs. I was really struck by that. She herself has a won¬derful apartment, her rights were in no way encroached upon; if anything, the reverse was true. She's a cook. And her husband works at a plant. An average family. They have a dacha. What harm had been done to her? And now this malicious delight. Incidentally, I think that by and large the Armenians had apartments on the lower and top floors, they didn't have the best apartments. That's what I suspect. Earlier I never thought about where the Azerbaijani families were and where the Armenian families were, I'm no nationalist, I don't even know the meaning of the word, but when I was walking down the street and saw the looted Armenian apartments, they were on the lower floors. That was Monday when I was on my way to work. Of course the traces of the looting were carefully covered up, because when I was coming home from work—I realized it wasn't safe to stay there—I saw that everything on the main streets had been cleaned up and that those food containers and mattresses had been removed. They tried to remove the evi¬dence. The traces of the burned automobile remained, however.

Our power was cut off on Saturday, apparently when the killing began, for three or four hours, I remembered it for some reason since my daughter was in Baku. Later the phones were shut off, which was surprising, I mean who were we going to call up and tell that they were beating us or that they were breaking down the doors to our apartments? There's an Azerbaijani family in our entryway, they're quite an upstanding family, to be sure, and their phone was cut off too. Apparently it was thought necessary. The phones were cut off at the exchange. On the street I ran into the major's political officer and asked him how to call for help without telephones, but it wasn't his decision and so everything stayed the way it was.

I was talking with the troops with machine guns who accompanied my daughter home; they came into the apartment and I asked them what we should expect, what was to come. They only spoke Russian because they were young guys, still objective, so to speak, and they said that the authori¬ties were to blame, they had even arrested the criminals but the authorities had then released them. Two soldiers told me that personally, I was also struck by the fact that at first the police were letting people go, and then they started taking them to Baku, to the Bailov Prison. Of course this was all so unexpected, this whole tragedy ... I talked with the major. Apparently they hadn't expected it either. A soldier standing next to the officer inter¬rupted him and said, "They sure did catch us off guard", the military people, that is, he said it just like a soldier would, he had a severe limp and was all cut up. I asked him, "Hey you guys, what happened?" I thought that they were armed . . . He only said, "They sure did catch us off guard." I was told that there were casualties among the military, and a lot of them. People saw them, the neighbors saw them. The military themselves didn't tell me this, evidently they were afraid to, they tried not to talk about what they had seen, but apparently it was quite brutal and terrifying, and they, men, could not stand it ... Many of the military people were limping, they were bruised, others had torn-up cheeks, but all of them were still standing, there was no point in taking them to the hospital. It was terrible to see the soldiers giving sour cream to the Armenian children. Everyone had fled their homes with nothing, they were unclothed and hungry ..

I gathered my family together, and my son-in-law's family, and realized that it wasn't safe to keep them in our apartment. I told the military that an Armenian family was hiding in my home and that I was very worried, and asked them to patrol near our building and check on us, if they could. And 17 of them came. I don't know if it was a platoon or what, headed by an offi¬cer. They stayed right nearby, at night they even came up to our floor and checked on us, and the next day I went downstairs and asked one of the sol¬diers what the situation was. He was quite nervous, shaken. This was on the 1st. He said that he himself didn't know what was going on, he was upset he said that the safest thing would be to take them to the City Party Committee. At that point we still didn't know that the SK club would be housing refugees, and even they suggested that we go to the City Party Committee. He said that maybe we would be evacuated from the city alto¬gether. We went to the SK club and the whole family spent the night there on chairs, in the theater seats, on the floor, every which way, because there was a terrific number of people there. To be honest it was just packed. I can't even say how many people there were there. No one had any of their things, people were wearing whatever they had managed to get on, they had been moved at night by the soldiers. People grabbed their children, just saved themselves ... At the club they arranged for free food and a kitchen was set up—they did what they could for the children, for the Armenians.

There were very many people there who had lost relatives and those dear to them. But it was hard to ask people about, without causing them further trauma. They hadn't yet managed to return to their senses. One woman ran up, her husband had been killed. Of course there was all kinds of talk, but it was all so monstrous that you didn't want to believe it. I listened, thinking that maybe it was exaggerated, maybe they had somehow escaped. But now I think that really is what happened.

On March 2 we saw my daughter's family off on a military vehicle. They had to go to Chelyabinsk, she's in school there. On March 3 we set out for Baku. They managed to evacuate us in seven buses with soldiers and machine guns along with us, accompanied by two tanks. All the people were Armenians. There was a tank in front of the convoy and one behind it. In our bus, for example, there were four soldiers with machine guns. We reached Baku. My husband went to Yerevan, and I flew to Moscow, that was on March 4.

In Moscow I went to the offices of the Armenian SSR and met a family there, Pavel Manvelian and his wife, Greta Andreyevna. Their daughter Lola [Avakian, resident at Building 10/13, Apartment 37, Block 45, Sumgait] had been killed. They were from Sumgait. We met for the first time there in Moscow, and got to talking. They were giving depositions. She was a teach¬er at Secondary School No. 11, and he was an engineer at the Khimavtomat plant. Their daughter had been pregnant. He, the father, personally told me that he had been in three morgues, in Sumgait, in Baku, and in Mardakian, 65 miles away, and there in Mardakian he found his daughter's body, he only recognized her little toe, that's how disfigured the corpse was, and she was number 71 of the unrecognizable corpses. That toe, her little toe, was shorter than the other one, that's the only way he could identify her, so dis¬figured was her corpse. And he said, "I guarantee, I'll answer for my words: I saw stacks of corpses, I can say there were 300 of them there." In three morgues. He found her, they made them sign a paper saying he wouldn't open the coffin, and with tremendous difficulty they buried her. They buried her in Baku and immediately flew to Moscow. I got these numbers from him, and I'm giving his last name, he'll corroborate this himself. In Moscow he gave eyewitness testimony and signed it. That is the absolute truth.

Their daughter's husband was involved in sports, in judo; I don't know his last name [Aleksandr Avakian], he was in Baku in neurosurgery because he had received skull traumas, and now he's in Minvody. They didn't have any children, they were expecting a baby . . .

During those days in Sumgait I wouldn't permit my family to go out on the balcony. Only I went out there, I thought maybe they wouldn't bother a Russian. I went to the store and saw smiles on people's faces. Smiles. They were somehow contented smiles, it was hard to look at them. All in all it seemed that they were contented. I don't know why, but I saw it that way . . .

Now I think that the Russians were treated as always. But when I was taking food to the SK, the Armenian men warned me, don't go out, because we know for sure, the Azerbaijanis were saying that when they finished with the Armenians they were going after the Russians, don't risk it, don't go out. I kept going until the end, until they frightened me, when they start¬ed throwing stones at me. My daughter's mother-in-law didn't even turn off the television or the refrigerator when she left her apartment. At the SK she asked me to go turn off their appliances. She said that if the windows were broken I shouldn't go in. When I turned off Lenin Street into Block 4, that's downtown next to the Post Office, even the soldiers there were Russian . . . when I turned off there were two big Azerbaijanis coming toward me, and I knew intuitively that they would do something to me or say something . . . They were over 40. I thought they would say something insulting, although until then nothing like that had happened to me. I wasn't wrong, they said something rude to me and I turned, they were winding back to hurl rocks. . . I no longer even remember running . . . They threw the stones. I don't recall where I ran, but they didn't come after me, they just threw the rocks and that was it. That was an attack on a Russian, they know exactly who's who. That happened on the morning of March 2. We left the next day. Even though I honestly had never thought of leaving town, after that incident I realized that there was no sense in staying ...

All the same I thought that they had always hated the Armenians. I am not mistaken. Apparently, in the course of my life and work—26 years is no small amount of time—I came to understand their psychology. Why it was like that I can't say, I don't understand it. It was just accepted. An atmo¬sphere of animosity, to put it mildly. But nonetheless I couldn't imagine that the Armenian population would be treated with such brutality. Before the 27th no one could, not even the Armenians, let alone the Russians ...

Of course all of this must be understood, interpreted. What is Nagorno Karabagh? It has its own demands, they affect the Armenian population of Nagorno Karabagh, and in no way should reflect on us, at least. If we had held rallies in support of Nagorno Karabagh I could understand how they would start to hate us and want to seek vengeance, but no one had any idea.

I think it was planned. There was a system to it, a system of looting homes, of burning, killing, smashing, cutting off the telephones, the power, it couldn't all come about in just one evening. You can throw a stone in someone's window if you hate them, but you don't kill them, you don't rob them, you don't violate the women. In the press they say that there were 12 rapes, which is utterly incomprehensible, even assuming that the figure is correct. Even if you accept those figures, that there were 12 rapes and 26 Armenian deaths, even those are awful figures. I consider the murder of even one person unthinkable. At the SK I heard that one woman who had been raped managed to escape; she was right there in the Club. There was terror everywhere, everyone spoke of their neighbors being killed. And one woman told an incredible story: her neighbor gave them 300 rubles and they didn't touch her or her grandchildren. They pointed her out to me. She gave them 300 rubles and said, 'This is all I have, just don't kill my grandchildren.'

They stole everything. I don't know which they did first, kill or rob, which was more important to them, the murder or the theft. It's hard to judge. It seems they killed the people who put up resistance, and that they had perhaps gone into the Armenian apartments above all to rob them. They took money and valuables, and the televisions and crystal they threw out of the apartments. They took everything. When I was talking with the Manvelians, the wife asked her husband this question in my presence: "What's left in the apartment, Pavlik?" He said, "They took everything, even the rugs were torn off the walls." This the husband was telling his wife, apparently before then they hadn't had a chance to discuss it. They were just thunderstruck, those people, you could understand their feelings, and I couldn't even ask them a single question, it was too awful. They told me what they considered important to tell. I think one such testimony is enough to hold those people up to shame for all time.

And here is something else that surprised me: when I was walking down the street and there were those looted apartments, it was obvious that they were Armenian. It was the accuracy with which it was done. If this is going on at night, and the crowd is reckless, there aren't any signs on the doors with the occupants' names on them, not every entryway has a directory of apartments, then how did they manage to hit the Armenian apartments so precisely? When we were at the SK, now I'm talking about what other peo¬ple said, Lieutenant General Krayey announced that they did have some sort of lists of Armenian apartments. This my daughter's father-in-law told me. He spoke with General Krayev, and Krayev told him that the matter would be investigated.

April 6, 1988

Yerevan

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- GURGEN ZAKHAROVICH DAVIDIAN

Sumgait Resident

On the night of February 28, there was a pogrom in the apartment block and all over the city. I saw this massacre with my own eyes.

They wanted to attack our house. By some miracle the danger passed us by, and we escaped with our lives. But I thought of my relatives: "What will I hear in the morning? Will they be alive? Will they have been murdered?" It was about quarter to four on the morning of the 29th. It was already quiet in the apartment block. I went out into the courtyard, carrying an axe. An Armenian neighbor caught sight of me from the balcony of a nearby build¬ing and said, "Where are you going?" I said, "It's a little calmer now; I want to find out whether our relatives are alive." These were distant relations, but we were on close terms with them. My relative was living with his family and his elderly mother. I said, "Probably they've perished, but maybe some¬one is alive, maybe I should help in some way. I want to go and find out." He said, "It's dangerous; don't go. Thank God you're alive yourself. Turn back." I said, "No, I can't. If something has happened to them, my conscience will always trouble me." He tried to persuade me but, seeing that he wasn't succeeding, he said, "Listen, we can't sleep easily either. You wait, and I'll send my sons with you." The three of you go together, you'll have less trou¬ble that way. Maybe some of the thugs are still out there, and you may meet one of them." I said, "Well, it seems quiet, there's no one here." He said all of this from the balcony. There was no one in the courtyard, and I answered him calmly. He said, "Forgive me, I could come down too, but I have grand¬children, and as long as I am alive, I have to protect them. But let my sons go. Be careful, go and look around, help however you can, and then come back quickly." I said, "All right." His two sons came down. I had the axe, and they had long, old-fashioned daggers; in many households we keep daggers like these as souvenirs, as a remembrance. The boys were already grown up, they had served in the army and gotten married. I wouldn't say they were very strong, but they were brave boys. I myself am a former sportsman, and I've seen everything in my life; I've been in difficult situations, death has looked me in the eye many times, and I have many scars. But I was never afraid on my own account. I don't know, maybe it's even a strange thing, but I've never felt fear for my own life.

So, the three of us went to the building where our relations lived. It's in the same apartment block as ours. Forty or fifty meters away from their house, we saw a group of 18 or 20 people coming. They were headed for another building, where an Armenian family was living on the fifth floor. The head of the family was named Nikolai, I knew him very well. I thought that, since they were going toward that entrance, they wanted to attack Nikolai's apartment. They were carrying pieces of armatube in their hands, and other things: bags, coats. I realized that these were stolen. I told the boys that there was no need to go up to the entrance of my relatives' house—no one was there. I said, "Let's stop them." We stood in front of the doorway and blocked their way. When they came within 5 or 6 meters of us, I shouted in Azerbaijani, "Don't come near here, we won't let you through." They stopped, and one of them said, "Don't be fools, let us pass." I knew only one thing: An Armenian family lived there, a family with many children, and I couldn't let these men by. The man said, "Don't be a fool, get away from the door and let us pass." They didn't realize that Armenians were standing in front of them; they thought that we were Azerbaijanis, and this is why this conversation went on. The two brothers' didn't chime in; I was the oldest and that was why they were keeping their mouths shut. Before then, I had said to the brothers in Armenian, "Kolya lives here, they could kill him and his family, we mustn't let these men pass." And their father had told them, "If they attack, fight to the death." This was the farewell their father had giv¬en them.

This Azerbaijani said to me, "If you won't help, at least don't interfere." Probably he meant that if I wouldn't help kill them, I could help steal. He said, "What are you doing, you pig? Why are you blocking our way?" Seeing that peaceful means were getting him nowhere, he waved his piece of armatube and shouted, "Beat them!" All of the 18-20 people flew at us, and a fight began.

Well, I let my axe fall. Everyone of the attackers fought furiously, but technically they weren't prepared. I could deal with them easily; there were moments when I could have hit them on the head, neck, or chest, but I did not. I hit them on the arms, and just kept them off. I had just one goal—not to let them in the door. I didn't intend to kill anyone. I only wanted to drive them away. I hit them with the blade of the axe, but only on the arms and on their pieces of armatube. The brothers defended themselves excellently, they fought the way they should with those daggers, and they also wounded many of them. All of the Azerbaijanis were already covered with blood, and one of the brothers completely lost consciousness and fell. He had many wounds; they had struck him on the back and on the face. And when he fell, they started to kick him. I saw that he had fallen; I went wild and started to strike, without knowing where the blows fell. Then they started to flee, to run back. Then there was a moment . . . before then I didn't have any wounds. There was a moment when my axe got stuck in someone's chest. As I was pulling out the axe, I lost a second, and at that time I caught a blow to the head. It left a scar. I brought the bloody axe back with me to Armenia. Someone even said to me, "You should keep that axe in remembrance." I didn't give the axe to anyone, I still have it, I use it in my home-So, anyway, they hit me on the head. And then some Azerbaijanis came out on the balcony and shouted, "That's enough, we're fed up, what do you want, you've been making noise all night!" And about seven or eight people came down. But the other group shouted, "We want to leave, but these peo¬ple won't let us, they've closed the doorway." Only then did we understand that this fight wasn't over Kolya. It turned out that they hadn't thought of attacking Kolya's family, and we were the ones who though they must want to attack Kolya's apartment. But all the same, I don't regret that fight, because they had stolen things. We thought that we were defending Kolya, but they had just wanted to get out onto the street with their stolen goods. That doorway was to a passage way, after all. And then, as we found out lat¬er they had agreed among themselves to withdraw at four o'clock. And so these men wanted to go away with their stolen things to catch the streetcar.

The neighbors who had come down separated us. They held us, and shouted that we had killed a man; one of the brothers was lying on the ground. "Enough," they said, "You've already killed him, you've beaten them all, go away." The others understood now that we were Armenians. They said, "We wanted to leave, but they attacked us, they stood in our way." And they were all swearing. They roared, they shouted, "These bastards blocked our way!" The one that I had struck on the chest was rolling on the ground, they dragged him away with them. Some of them went away grimacing, holding their arms, their shoulders or their heads, covered with blood. Some went away without the things—they couldn't carry them away. The second brother and I were still standing on our feet. They went out onto the street and started to walk away quickly, and then those neighbors also started to threaten them.

A few of these Azerbaijani neighbors knew me, of course. They didn't know me by name, but they knew my face. Even though it was dark and no one spoke to me, I felt that they had recognized me. Later I saw some of these neighbors in our courtyard, they watched us suspiciously, as if they wanted to say with their eyes that they knew everything, but they kept qui¬et. Maybe they were afraid—the devil only knows. They saw how fierce I had been, and they were afraid.

The father of the brothers got very angry with me, he went to the investi¬gator and demanded that nothing be written about his sons. He quarreled with me, and said, "You're a crazy man, they didn't attack anyone, but you got my sons mixed up in a fight, one of them was almost killed." That son Was in a very serious condition, he was unconscious for several days. But they treated him and, thank God, he survived. His father said to me, "You're a murderer, you almost killed my sons. You got them into a fight, you Weren't defending anyone, you were just fighting for no reason. You weren't Protecting your relatives, you weren't protecting anyone. They weren't after Kolya, it was you who imagined that they were attacking Kolya, and I almost lost my son."

During that fight there was such confusion that there was even a moment When a Turk struck another Turk. He wanted to hit me with a piece of armatube, but in the darkness the blow fell on his comrade, he hit him right on the head. Many of the Turks fell in the fight. One of them fell for good, the one that I had struck on the chest.

But I'll say again that I don't regret that fight all the same. How could I regret it, if they were destroying, killing Armenians and making off with stolen goods? What difference does it make whether they were after Kolya or other Armenians? By the way, I couldn't meet up with Kolya after that; he had gone away to Central Asia.

I went to my own microdistrict after a day and a half. The neighbors did not know anything yet. But after a month or a month and a half they told me not to come there. They warned me that someone was looking for a certain healthy man. "Because," they said, "there was a fight, Armenians killed one Azerbaijani and wounded many others. The relatives or the friends of the dead man have come back to look for the person who killed him. I said, "What has that got to do with me?" They said, "The description is like you, it was a healthy man with a moustache, they may think it was you." I said, "I don't know anything." They also said that everyone who came near was amazed at how this man fought. They said it was a good thing he was get¬ting on in years—imagine what would have happened if he'd been young!

It's a shame that I didn't know at the time of the fight that they were killing Armenians in the city. If I had known, I would be with the angels now. I wouldn't have let them go like that, I would have set off after them, I would have beaten them all. Until I died myself, I wouldn't have rested. If I had known that nearby they were killing Armenians, raping them, throwing them off balconies, I wouldn't have returned from that fight.

We sportsmen take an oath never to use our strength against a person. I didn't train for so many years in order to beat people and kill them. I was raised to believe that I mustn't either beat of kill people. If I had meant to, then maybe I would have sent many of them off to the other world. It wouldn't have been hard for me.

It isn't true that the Armenians in Sumgait didn't defend themselves. I know that where it was possible, Armenians fought to the death. If we had known an hour or two hours ahead of time that they were going to start killing us, we would have behaved completely differently. For example, they came into our entrance way, and miraculously, nothing happened. But if I had known, I would have opened the door myself and attacked them first. Before that I would have called all my Armenian neighbors, gathered them in one apartment, and taken the women and children to a separate room. And we would have fought off anyone.

But we didn't know anything. We relied on Soviet power, or the militia. But Soviet power and the militia had already been sold in Sumgait. What Soviet power! The militia was bought, the City Committee was bought. Who was there? We saw that no one was helping us. Besides the militia, there are so many factories in Sumgait, and there's an armed security force at each factory—so many people with weapons! What, couldn't they have defended us? So many patrols! They couldn't have protected us? No one lifted a finger. They created the conditions themselves.

October 12, 1988

Yerevan

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- GIULCHOKHRA GRIGOREVNA ARUSTAMIAN

Born 1957

Mathematics Teacher

Sumgait Secondary School No. 15

Resident at Building 25/63, Apartment 47

Microdistrict No. 2, Sumgait

On February 27 I was coming home from work with my child. It was after three o'clock. In the bus people were saying, "The poor Armenians, we'll have to hide them." People were anxious even then. I got off near the Sputnik store and was headed for the bread store and saw that the entire store had been demolished, all the windows were broken. I didn't want to go in, figuring I'd be called as a witness. On the way I saw demonstrators with flags and signs: "Armenians out of Sumgait!" and "Karabagh is ours, we won't give it to Armenia, it was part of Azerbaijan and so it will stay!" When I heard that I realized that it was the nationalities issue and didn't continue down the street, but went through the courtyards instead. The situ¬ation there was even worse. Near the building across from the Znaniye Bookstore, No. 21 or 23, I'm not positive which, I saw a mob of bandits and hooligans, and all the entryways were surrounded. I saw things being thrown off the balconies. On the fifth floor someone was being beaten, and the people nearby shouted, "They've thrown someone off!" and I heard the person slam onto the ground. That happened behind me. I didn't turn my head to look, for they were doing violence to Armenians and I wouldn't have been able to take it and would have started to cry. Also, they would have immediately seen that I was an Armenian.

So they threw someone off the fifth floor. I could be wrong, because I wasn't looking the moment the person fell. But from what I heard it seemed that's what happened. There were many, many people around me, so many you couldn't breathe, and it was loud. The building was surrounded. The hooligans were going up floor by floor, and people stood around laughing: that's what the Armenians deserve.

I went home on the double, not taking in anything because I was so frightened. I was afraid to knock on the neighbor woman's door because she might be attacked, too, and started getting my child's things together thinking I would stop a car and asked to be taken out of town. Five minutes later the neighbor girl and her mother came by telling me to come downstairs Quickly to their place, had I taken leave of my senses staying home at a time like this? I got my son, he's small, and went downstairs. I lived on the third floor, and the neighbor, on the second, in our entryway. And we hid the whole time at their place. The neighbor's brother-in-law was there he had come from Baku, her husband's brother from the Kubatlin District, she had warned him not to bring anyone over because they would see that they were hiding Armenians and it would go badly for them. He asked if my husband or his mother were at home, they should be told to hide, too. Even though we lived in the same apartment, my husband and I were divorced. I say "How can I go up there by myself? Come with me." He stood in the entry-way and I went upstairs and warned them. Mostly military people lived in our building, many Russians ... the Russians hid them, my husband and his mother, in two different apartments. The thing was that even though they were burning only Armenian apartments, other apartments could catch fire, too. They were afraid themselves, that's why they hid us.

The hooligans came up to our building and asked if Armenians lived there. They were told, "Only military people live here, there are no Armenians here." From where I was on the second floor I heard a chorus shouting, "Where are the Armenians here?" Then one shouted that the Arustamian family lived in Apartment 47—that was us. I don't know how they knew. Previously our neighbor had nailed a name plate reading "Shirinov" on our door, and removed the directory from the entryway. He made the name plate himself, put it together himself so our apartment would be left alone.

1 heard more shouts that the Arustamians lived there, but the neighbors told them that we had moved a long time ago, Russian neighbors, Leskova and the Frantskevichs. But they didn't believe them and started knocking on doors. One of the Azerbaijani neighbors opened the door and said, "I live here, my name is Shirinov." They seemed to believe him, and left. But our building remained under suspicion.

Meanwhile I had taken my child into the closet on the balcony. They burst into the apartment and were checking. The neighbors had two con¬nected rooms, and there was nowhere to hide. The neighbor had put up a board and put potato sacks and 1 don't know what else on top of it.

They came into the apartment where we were and were cursing at one another . . . The husband and the husband's brother were there, and they were shouting at them, just what kind of Azerbaijanis are you, you aren't out killing Armenians. They answered, "For shame, that'll be just about enough, how many years we've lived with them like brothers, like one big family." And they told them that Armenia had insulted the Azerbaijanis of Kafan and that they had come to Sumgait seeking revenge. They were spreading rumors like that.

When 1 went to the neighbors' my son was already asleep. But in the clos¬et he started to whine, and I told him, 'Mamma's sleeping, you sleep too, or a mouse will come, the bogeyman will come.' He fell asleep, thank God When it was clear that they had gone off to another building, 1 climbed out of the closet. There was no air in there, 1 was suffocating. We hid the child under a metal bed, made a place for him to sleep down there, the bed-frame? was a tall one. But if anything happened 1 was supposed to go back into the? closet to hide. Then someone apparently gave us away. They came back again and knocked. This was on Sunday, the 28th. My neighbors said, "What do you want, you were already here once, what do you want, go away!" The hus¬band was quite angry. "Who are you, that you can come into my apartment? You're an Azerbaijani and I'm an Azerbaijani. My child and I were again hiding in the closet. By the way, they looked under the mattresses, too. Later I saw that the bedspreads had been thrown off. There were suitcases down there. The family wasn't well to do, they had just moved in and didn't have anything to put their dishes in yet. They had long been tenants, and the mother kept the dishes under the bed so their small children wouldn't break them. The gang came out onto the balcony, too, but we were in the closet behind the bags and they didn't think to look for anyone there. I was so ter¬rified I couldn't breathe.

I forgot to mention that on Saturday evening the husband's brother had brought company, and she had started to shout: her brother was sick and now guests had appeared, she had asked him not to bring anyone. But he, it turned out, had brought policemen with him. The neighbor asked, "What's happened?" Her husband works at a plant, she got scared that something had happened to him. The policeman said, "Don't worry, we have to help two people." On the first floor the Russians hadn't opened their door, they were afraid, and the husband's brother stood outside and guarded the entry-way. The neighbor said, "Giulchokhra, come out, don't be afraid." I came out. The three policemen were from the Kusar District, that's in Azerbaijan; they were brought to Sumgait to restore order until the soldiers arrived from Russia. One of them had blood on his forehead, and the other was uncon¬scious, there was fresh blood on his neck. He couldn't walk by himself, and the two others held him up. One of them was unharmed, and two of them were wounded. They asked for help, even though the regular hospital and the Emergency Hospital were right next door. They couldn't go there, though: everything was out of control on the streets, they were killing peo¬ple.

The policeman asked for some medicine. 1 didn't understand the Azerbaijani, I couldn't get a word out for fear, and started to stammer. The neighbor said, "Giulya, you have medicine at home, go upstairs." The police¬men accompanied me up to my apartment, I got alcohol and iodine and everything they needed. I asked my ex-father-in-law for the heart prepara¬tions, they were still in our apartment, they hid after that. On Saturday the policemen stayed with us. We tended to them, all night the policeman who was unconscious was in our apartment, in the neighbors', that is. 1 wiped off the blood and started applying cold compresses, the wounded man opened his eyes, but wasn't taking anything in. He had been hit with a rock, the hooligans had armature shafts in their hands, and they beat him with those, too. The policemen said that the hooligans had burned a bus, they didn't knew how they would get where they had to go ... They burned the bus right there on the street. The bus was standing there empty, and the police-men had been called in to restore order.

In the morning, when the surgeon came, at first he didn't know that I was an Armenian, the neighbor woman told him, and he said that I shouldn't go anywhere, that they should hide me. On Monday I stayed at their apartment too, the situation had further deteriorated. Soldiers had entered the city. An armored personnel carrier stopped before our building. The soldiers were shooting, and the hooligans were running away. The bullets were blanks. The bandits had bottles of gasoline in their hands. They threw them on the armored personnel carriers and set them aflame. They had pint bottles of gasoline. One armored personnel carrier ran over four hooligans, but they didn't scatter away from it all the same, they jumped on top of it. They start¬ed burning the armored personnel carriers.

So I was watching this out the neighbors' window. School No. 3 is right across the way, the square is a large one. They'd chase the hooligans off and the hooligans would come back from another direction. The soldiers had helmets on and had weapons, but it's a fact that they didn't shoot. Rather, they shot blanks. The hooligans finally caught on and became more auda¬cious.

Those who fell under the wheels of the armored personnel carriers didn't get up. Then the police removed the corpses. Right then, just a moment later.

While all this was going on the neighbor woman was crying and saying, "Look what's happening out there, my child is seeing all of this, tomorrow he'll be doing the same things." She wouldn't let her children go outside . . . Her son was five, and her daughter would soon be going to school, but the third was still quite small. The boy said, 'But Aunt Giulchokhra isn't an Armenian, she's an Azerbaijani, she always comes to see us.' Their mother had forbade them to tell strangers that 1 was an Armenian, and even after saying those words she smacked him on the lips. She locked them in the bathroom and said, "Don't look, you're not allowed to see." She hadn't let her children outside since Saturday so they wouldn't blurt out about us. There were four other Armenian families in the building besides ours.

On Monday after three o'clock I heard shooting. Before this there hadn't been orders to shoot. We asked the policemen from Kusar why they didn't shoot, and they answered because it was peacetime, we were building Communism, how can we kill them, it has to be done peacefully. But on the 29th they started shooting.

On Tuesday I was evacuated from the area of the disturbances. Our neighbor's friend, he works at the plant, took five families out in a bus, two of them were sent to Rostov, where they wanted to go ... I didn't end up in the SK club, I didn't even know that the Armenians were being gathered there. I was taken to Baku, and they were evacuating all the Armenians from the SK club and the City Party Committee under guard. My ex-husband and his father were rescued, too. When Mamma's brothers wound up in the club, they saw them there. My husband was asking about his son . . .

From Baku, where I stayed with my aunt, I had to go to Sumgait to extend my sick leave. The doctors were accommodating with us, they extended our leaves not for three days, as they are supposed to, but for ten, so we didn't have to go often. The pediatrician even asked, "Is your child alive?" I said yes, but that he was sick, I would take care of him in Baku and wouldn't bring him back to Sumgait. I went to see what had happened to our apartment. The door was broken down and some things had been taken, what I can't say exactly, I wasn't up to dealing with it. I was accompanied by soldiers. There was a basement in our building, there were hooligans hiding down there, they were running the hooligans down little by little, and I asked the soldiers to go with me.

I didn't have a sideboard, and my service of Czech crystal and some other things were in three boxes on the balcony. I had thought that at least they wouldn't notice them, they'd be there for hard times and I could sell them to buy something for my child. They took all of it. And our clothes . . . But I was in a hurry. I went in second, after the soldier. The furniture was still intact...

What else can I tell you? In Sumgait they had tried to kill my uncle, Mamma's brother, he's in the hospital now in Baku. When he was coming home from work on the plant bus, there were two Armenians on board, the mob stopped the bus and demanded the Armenians. One of the workers said to my uncle, "Aramais, are you deaf? Aren't you an Armenian or what? They're talking about you ..." Besides my uncle there was an older Armenian man, they attacked him too, and they started stomping my uncle, he hit them once, but they hit him 50 times. They stomped on him with their feet, beat him with their fists, hit him all different ways.

I saw Uncle Aramais after March 5. I was staying at my aunt's. On the first day I couldn't talk at all, I just stuttered. I could only wave my arms. The second day they started giving me injections, and then I was able to tell everything.

My uncle was wearing hospital clothes, they gave us his clothing to wash. His underwear was completely torn and was all bloody. Only tatters remained of his outer clothing, we didn't even take it. They hit him on the head with an armature rod and he lost consciousness; they thought he was dead. That's why they left him. Then an ambulance came for him, apparent¬ly someone had called one. When they first brought him to Baku he was unable to say who his relatives were, but later, somewhere around the 3rd or 4th of March, he said that he had a sister in Baku, he couldn't give them an address, just the last name. We got a phone call and they asked who Aramais was, and I told them that he was my uncle. That's how he turned up. They asked us not to cry when we saw him. He hardly recognized us, he was completely covered in bandages, his whole face . . . His whole face was bandaged, you could only see his eyes. My uncle said he couldn't feel any¬thing.

Before I flew to Yerevan I went to see him again and he said his body hurt all over. People from the Procuracy, the chief engineer from his plant, and People from the personnel department all went to see him and brought pho¬tographs of many workers with them. They asked him questions and wrote things down. They said don't be afraid, tell us honestly who did this, that is, who gave him away, but my uncle told them he would recognize his face but didn't remember his name. They were supposed to bring workers for him to identify. But what came of that I don't know. I couldn't stay there any longer. I took my child and came here ...

April 6, 1988

Yerevan

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■ GARNIK SHAGENOVICH NERSESIAN

Born 1957

Driver

Azerbaijani Tube-Rolling Plant

■ ZHANNA RAZMIKOVNA NERSESIAN His wife

Born 1961

Chemist-Technician

Left the work force to care for the children

Residents at Building 2, Apartment 54

Block 2 Sumgait

-Zhanna: I have often heard and read in the papers that young children did not suffer in the slaughter. I'm not sure, maybe they suffered, maybe they didn't—people say different things. I have heard from relatives and loved ones that they didn't, and I can't speak with certainty. I can only attest that they tried to poison my child of two and a half.

It happened on February 26, somewhere around two o'clock in the after¬noon. My boys—the older one, David, is five, and the younger, Christopher, is two and a half—were outside in the yard. There was unrest in the city that day. We live downtown, right near the City Party Committee. People were starting to go around in groups shouting, "Karabagh is ours!" Who would have thought that soon they would start killing? At the time they only went around shouting. How could I know what they were capable of and that I mustn't allow my children to go outside? Every five minutes I went out on the balcony and looked, and the children were just playing. Then I started doing the wash. I went out onto the balcony and saw my youngest lying on the pavement in the middle of the street. I ran downstairs and took him into my arms, and he was barely breathing. He's sleeping, I think. Well I thought that he had just tired himself out running around. I brought him into the house, undressed him and put him to bed. An hour goes by, then two, then three, and he still didn't wake up. Meanwhile my mother-in-law had come over. I said, "Mamma, there's something suspicious here, the child is sleep-mg and won't wake up. I try to waken him and can't rouse him." She became anxious: "What do you mean?" Together we try waking him, slapping his cheeks and lifting him up; he doesn't move, he's like a noodle, and we open his eyes, and they close again. His pupils were so big you could only see the whites of his eyes.

We called an ambulance and they took the child to the hospital. I stood crying at the admissions desk with him in my arms, and my mother-in-law was crying, too. The doctor, a young Azerbaijani woman, was in Admissions. She showed me a small room and says, "Go in there and wait." She came back ten minutes later. They wouldn't let my mother-in-law in with me, they told her she had to wait in the hall. I had given them my pass¬port, the doctor knew we were Armenians. Every few minutes I would walk out of the room crying, "Doctor, my child is dying, do something!" She answered, "Go in there and sit, it'll just be a minute." I sat there for nearly half an hour and she ignored me completely.

I sat there with my child in my arms crying, not knowing what to do. Finally the doctor asked the orderly, "Where is Movsesian?" There is a good Armenian pediatrician in that hospital by the name of Movsesian, everyone goes to him. He was on the third floor. The doctor tells the orderly to get him. She herself, apparently, doesn't know anything. She started irrigating his stomach, and she didn't even know how to hold the needle. She got a tube and stuck it into his nose. She tried to put in a manganese mixture with the syringe, and she couldn't do it. A doctor! This was passing for a doctor! I can imagine how she managed to graduate from the medical institute. The orderly—an older woman who had obviously worked for a long time in the hospital—took the needle from her and started the infusion herself. They give him five syringes full. He was still unconscious. The doctor said, "He should vomit, but he can't." Then they put a tube into him, and fluid started backing up the tube. Really clear fluid, there was nothing else there. She said, "Take him to Baku. Find a taxi and get him to Baku."

It was already midnight. I say, "Where will we find a taxi at this hour? How will I get him there? Something will happen to him before I can get him there." And she says, "And us? What can we do? Go look for a taxi." My mother-in-law said, "Call an ambulance." "No," she said, "no ambulance will come."

Just then Movsesian arrived. He came and started to examine the child. My mother-in-law pleaded with him [to do everything possible to save the child].

He says, "I understand, let's see the child." He examined him and said, "1 am 90 percent sure what he has been poisoned with, but 1 don't want to risk it. Take him to the main hospital in Baku, let them examine him and do a blood analysis. We don't have the proper medications here."

We have our own car, but my husband was at our dacha. My mother-in-law cried, "Where will we find a car in the middle of the night?" And Movsesian says, "Why do you need a car? I'll call an ambulance." And we said, "The doctor told us that we had to find one ourselves." He said, "Nonsense, sit here and I'll summon one immediately." Movsesian gave us shots to calm us. "Don't worry," he said, "nothing will happen to the child in two hours."

About half an hour later the ambulance arrived. Our way happened to take us right near our dacha. My mother-in-law said, "Please stop there, I'll get out and tell my son." Garnik ran up and we all went to Baku together.

-Garnik: Mother didn't want to tell me that something had happened to the child, she said that my wife had cut her hand and had to be taken to Baku immediately. I came out and looked and my wife was sitting there with something wrapped up in a blanket. "What's going on? How did you cut yourself? What have you got all wrapped up there?" She says, "Our son." "What do you mean, our son? What's wrong with him?" "He's been poi¬soned, they can't treat him. 'Take him to Baku immediately,' they told me." I said, "What do you mean poisoned, with what?" I touched the child and he was cold and pale. I held his head and raised it up slightly, and he was limp, like a rag. "Go quickly," I tell the driver, "pour on the gas!"

I drove in our Moskvich. The trip took about half an hour. We arrived in Baku, at the Semashko Hospital, Toxicology Department. It was late—one o'clock or one-thirty in the morning. It was already February 27. I say, "Here's what happened: the child has been poisoned. Please, I beg of you, help him!" They looked at him and said, "Yes, yes." I spoke with them in Azerbaijani because the situation, you know, was bad. The nurse started signing him in. She wrote down, "City of Sumgait, Block 2," well she wrote down our address. As soon as I said our last name—Nersesian—the young woman suddenly said, "Why did you bring your son here? Why didn't you take him to Yerevan for treatment?"

-Zhanna: She said, "Aren't you afraid that we'll kill him?" Just like that. And my husband said, "What do you mean, kill him?! And are you going to take responsibility for it later?" She says, "The child is in serious condition." And my husband says, "If you harm one hair on his head, just one, I will blow up this place. Nothing will be left of this hospital." And she says, "Now why are you taking all this so seriously?"—she smiles—"I was just kidding." And my husband says, "You're just joking and I'm telling you straight: the life of my child means more to me. If anything happens to him, it's all over!"

-Garnik: I didn't have time to fool around with that nurse. I had her sum¬mon a doctor. The doctor on duty came and said the same thing, "Aren't you afraid to bring an Armenian, all the more so a child, to this hospital?" I said, "What are you saying? How am I supposed to take that?" I just lost it and was ready to hit him or do something to him. But I got myself under control and put up with it. I took him off to one side. I started to threaten him: "If you don't give my child back to me alive, you won't walk out of this hospi¬tal." Then I asked, "When will you return my child to me?" He said, "I'll return your child to you alive in three hours." I say, "If you give me the child back alive I'll know to thank you and do everything that should be done. But make sure that nothing happens to him." He said, "Don't worry, every¬thing will be fine."

Three hours passed and he came and said, "It can't be done that quickly, We need more time." I say, "How much?" He answers, "Till morning."

-Zhanna: When we arrived in Baku the boy's condition was like before: he didn't respond to anything, he was almost dead. He was virtually uncon¬scious for three days. They couldn't bring him around for three days. He was on an IV, they had him on artificial life support. They cleaned his blood for three days. The entire time we asked, "How is the child?" and always got the same answer: "In bad condition" or "In serious condition." Only after three days did they tell us, "Slightly improved."

-Garnik: They wouldn't allow me near the child. That's understandable in cases like that they don't even let the mothers in to see them. The boy was in intensive care on the first floor. They said, "As soon as his condition is bet¬ter we'll move him to the second floor."

-Zhanna: On February 27 we left the child in the hospital and returned to Sumgait, planning to go back to see him the next day. We drove into town and saw a raging crowd and four fire trucks. There's a big artistic composi¬tion there, and the emblems of the 15 republics. And I look and see that insane crowd pull down the Armenian emblem and tread on it with their feet, pick it up, and hurl it to the pavement. They threw rocks at the firemen who were standing there. At this time they apparently hadn't yet thought of the passports, of checking people's documents to see if they were Armenians or not. It was later that they stopped people and checked. Well we just slid through, through that crazed mob, to our house.

-Garnik: When we got home I called the City Party Committee. The per¬son on duty or someone, I didn't ask the name, answered the phone. I called them up and said, "Listen, what's going on? It's peacetime and there are all kinds of atrocities going on. Just where is the Soviet government, what is it doing? All the police are just standing around, they're huddled in groups, and no one is doing anything. Something has to be done so there are no vic¬tims in Sumgait. There's swearing, wrecking, and shouting going on every¬where. I have a suggestion," I tell them. "What's your suggestion?", they ask. "I suggest that those fire trucks that are standing there hose down the mob with water, it's winter time and they'll all run home." And he says, "What age is this that we hose people down with water?!" I say, "What age is this that in the Soviet Union something like this is going on in peacetime in our city?! What are the police doing?"

-Zhanna: He said that they were doing something, that it was none of our business. He hung up. And on the 28th, at five o'clock in the morning, we left for Baku again. It was quiet at five, we were able to leave without any problem. The gangs were probably taking a breather. They had carried on the whole night and probably decided to relax for an hour or two. That was the day our child finally started to get better.

What had happened to him? He was poisoned in our yard. My oldest son, David, was right there with him. He's five, he's still a child. He cant say exactly what happened. First he says that there were people there who came up to them. Then he says it was Christopher who went up to them himself. You can't get it straight—he's a child. Apparently they figured out he was an Armenian child. I already said that there were crowds going about town. Apparently one of those groups of animals came into our yard, found out that he was an Armenian, and gave him some tablets. In the medical report it says clearly that he was given narcotic tablets. Narcotic tablets are not something a child can pick up on the street. Our neighbors said, "Maybe he picked them up off the ground." Who throws narcotics onto the ground? Addicts pay fantastic sums for them. Do they throw them on the ground?

No-

(David's account: There were some men in the yard. They said it was can¬dy Kidato [Christopher] takes them, he took them and ate them. Then I told him, "That's bad medicine." He said, "No, it's candy." Then he ate them. And later, later he lay on the bench and slept.)

(David's later account: Those men had yellow medicine. They said, "Kida, come here." He ran over and said, "What?" The man said, "I'll give you some candy" And he said, "Give it to me!" And he gave him the medicine. Then he took it and brought it and showed it to me, here, the man gave me some candy. And I said, "That's not candy, that's medicine, it's yellow and round." He said, "No, it's candy," and ate it right up.)

-Zhanna: At first I had doubts, how could he take medicine and eat it? He must have known that it was medicine. Maybe it's my fault: we often bought the children vitamins from the pharmacy, yellow ones, white ones, vitamin C, for their appetites, and they got used to taking them. Maybe the boy thought that's what they were, the color was probably the same. If I hadn't taught them to take vitamins, maybe he wouldn't have swallowed them, wouldn't have taken them. I don't know: could they even kill a child? It's just so farfetched. I just can't get it through my head. A small child, two and a half years old. What does he know? What did he do, bad or good? He's just started his life. How can you kill a child? But on the other hand, of course, we want to thank the doctors. No matter what they said at the begin¬ning, that he was an Armenian and we should take him to Yerevan, all the same they saved the child. We didn't have any faith that they would save him. We thought that's it, we're going to lose him. We cried from morning to night. But nonetheless, great thanks go to those doctors. An Azerbaijani poi¬soned him, and Azerbaijanis saved him.

-Garnik: I left my wife in Baku because the situation in Sumgait was bad, and went home. I found out that everyone in our families was alive and well, and spent the night there. The next morning when I was leaving I could only think of getting to where my child was as soon as possible. Driving away from the building I saw that a crowd had already gathered. It was impossible to even drive out onto the road. There was only one way to get out. Then I found a way to make my way out through the courtyards, so as not to land in that crowd. That was on February 29.

I wanted to drive out past the old railway station, where the commuter trains used to go, and saw that they were checking people. That mob of ani¬mals was stopping cars and checking documents. If it was an Armenian they burned the car on the spot, beat the people on the spot. Then I wanted to drive toward the Sputnik, and come out on the lane near the knitwear facto¬ry' but that was blocked too. There was one light left before I was out of there. There were three cars ahead of me: the first one I noticed was a Zhiguli, they had set it on fire, it was already aflame, and they had stopped the other two and were checking documents to see if they were Armenians.

When I noticed that I didn't lose my head, I turned the car around on the side of the road and went back the other way taking turns so as to get away from that crowd. I think, I'll go through Saray. But before I had reached Microdistrict 8 I see that there's another crowd there, they had surrounded a woman and were tormenting her in different ways. She was lying right out in the street near the bus station. I had one thought in my mind: to escape that mob. I thought I would turn around, but it was already too late. I thought I'd go on straight ahead. There were two buses there, they had been stopped. They got onto the buses and started checking for Armenians. There was some space between the buses. I drove up very slowly and then took off sharply, punched the accelerator and roared out ahead. I drove through Microdistrict 9, but before I reached No. 12 I saw another crowd had formed, they were smashing up cars and overturning them. I turned around to go the other way, toward the sea, thinking I would try to get through via Nasosny. I drove fast down Samed Vurgun Boulevard, and there were peo¬ple there too, but not many. I no longer cared: if anyone tried to stop me I wouldn't surrender. I drove at top speed. I reached the taxi lot, there the road turns off toward Kotteja. There were two streetcars there: the first, which goes toward Sumgait, was destroyed, completely smashed, and the second was on the tracks. They had left some space left between them so that drivers approaching the streetcars could be stopped and checked. And what they did when they found Armenians—I had just seen that myself. Now this time, to be honest, I didn't know what to do, and was getting ready to turn around and then I looked and saw that there were already crowds ahead of me and behind me. No, I thought, that's the only way out, between those streetcars. I stayed stopped for a moment and then I saw a fire truck coming. There was a chance: I could drive through on its tail. The fire truck was driving through at top speed, and I drove up right behind it and raced through without stopping. I noticed that one car on the side had already been overturned, and was lying there smashed. Having escaped I set off for Baku, to my child.

June 7,1988

Shushan Boarding House Near the Village of Arzakan Hrazdan District

APPENDIX TO THE ACCOUNT OF GARNIK AND ZHANNA NERSESIAN

MEDICAL REPORT

Name: NERSESIAN, Christopher Garnikovich Age: 3 years

Date of Admission: February 26, 1988 Date of Discharge: March 13, 1988

Clinical Diagnosis: Acute oral poisoning with psychotropic substances

Condition upon admission was serious. Stupor was alleviated, cries in response to noxious stimulus. Pupils equally round and reactive to light and accommodation . . . Child released in satisfactory condition, symptoms of acute poisoning passed. The child was discharged. There were no complica¬tions of infection.

Department Head: A. A. Ibragimov [signature] Attending Physician: A. N. Bagirov [signature] [seal of Semashko Clinical Hospital No. 1]

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■ VLADIMIR YAKOVLEVICH MARUTIAN

Born 1957 Ambulance Driver

Resident at Building 13, Apartment 14

Block 42

Sumgait

On the evening of the 27th, after playing hockey, somewhere around sev¬en o'clock I was leaving town in my car and saw that a number of people had gathered. I thought there had been an accident and was going to take another road, but I looked and saw a mob that was breaking things and beating people. Two people stopped me as though nothing were happening, 1 hadn't yet figured out what was going on, they stopped my car and asked to be taken to the bazaar. They got in and in Azerbaijani I asked them what was happening. They told me they were killing Armenians. There were two of them, and I was silent. I'm driving along and they say that the Armenians were selling potatoes at the bazaar and they chased the Armenians all away. I see one of our ambulances, and they're smashing it, too. I dropped them off and drove home quickly and parked the car in the lot.

My shift started on the morning of the 28th. On the road I saw that all the booths there were broken: a newspaper kiosk, an Armenian had worked there; the boot repair booths; and the beverage and juice place. When I got to work they told me, "The Armenians are supposed to go home, they're not being allowed to work." I say, "What do you mean, go home, just why should I go home? I'm supposed to work today." "I'm telling you go home! That's it!" Well I got my family and went to my father's place. He lives in Block 3, Building 5, Apartment 27. There's a good view of the square from there. We heard shouts and cries: "We won't give up Karabagh!" and "Armenians get out of here!" A woman was speaking and she started shout¬ing, "They're stripping, raping, and killing our people. Aren't you men? They're killing our people and you're here not doing anything!"

We went to bed. Imagine, that night we didn't hear a thing, just dogs barking.

The next morning Father went to work, I was still in bed, it was 8:10. My wife woke me up, crying: "Get up, they've set our building on fire!" Well, kind of jokingly I said, "Well so what, they've set the building on fire. "My father was standing downstairs, crying and calling my name: "Come down¬stairs." He had come back with one of his pals, an Azerbaijani. He had gone to work and they asked him, "Is Vladimir alive?" He says, "Just what do you mean alive? He spent the night at my place." They told him, "His building was set on fire." And so my father came to get me. So we went to my place. see that all the windows are broken, the curtains are lying on the ground the children's things, our things, the couch, the mattresses—everything is on the ground outside, much of it is burned. The building manager was stand¬ing there. We went upstairs to the apartment and the door was broken down, we went inside . . . well you certainly couldn't call it an apartment any longer, everything was smashed. And the tape recorder, my coat, and many other things were gone completely. Well I thought we'd go report it, not touch anything so they could take fingerprints. We went to the City party Committee and it was so crowded you could barely get in. There were so many Armenians, it was packed, there were even people in their slippers, some had fled there right from work. The family of a friend of ours had fled there during the night; her small daughter was wearing nothing but a jump¬suit, and the neighbor was wearing only a robe. She was crying. People started shouting, "Give us an airplane to Yerevan! We don't want to live here! Let us leave!" And the authorities were trying to calm people down: "Everything will be fine, everything will be all right."

There were many beaten and injured people among them. I ran into Valya, she's my third cousin. She was crying: "They killed mother." My mother-in-law, that is[apparently Emma Grigorian.] And the people in charge were walking among us, addressing us as akhper [literally "brother," Armenian equivalent to "buddy"] in Armenian. "I'm not your brother!" one man said, "They raped my wife and my child, you're no brother of mine! How am I supposed to go on living?!" Everyone was in a panic, the feeling of terror had not yet subsided.

My father and I went home and my children were shouting, "Germans! Germans! They're killing us!" I hid them under the bed. I tell my father, "Let's get out of here, let's get out of here," I say, "Let's go to Yerevan."

We went upstairs to see some Armenian neighbors: "Let's all go together." And our neighbor said, "No, everything will calm down." I say, "It's danger¬ous to stay here." He says, "So they set a building on fire, nothing all that bad's happening, and if they killed someone it was probably accidental."

We went to get my aunt's family, she's my father's sister, I knock and no one comes to the door. I shout, "Aunt, Aunt, it's me, Vova!" And only then did they open up. My aunt said that the neighbors, Valerik and Alik Avanesian, had been killed. I had known Alik well. And even though my aunt was trembling with fear, she refused to leave: "They'll kill us on the way ..." A neighbor of mine, Boris Abramian, lived there. Borya and I had been classmates together, and he and I decided to leave town together.

I got the car from the lot. I drove right up to the entryway with Boris behind me in his car; he had gotten his whole family. My family was getting ready to get in the car and my father's neighbor shouted, "Hey, Armenians, where are you running off to? I'm going to kill all of you!" He raced toward us. I had an axe wrapped up in a rag, for self-defense. I pulled out the axe, and my father got a tire iron. The neighbor's daughter—the neighbor's name is Adyl Shafiyev—threw herself between us and cried, "Papa, don't!" And he shouted, "I'm going to kill them!" Other neighbors were standing there as well. I thought, if he attacks us and I kill him, the rest of them will come at

us. But the neighbors seized him. Normally he was scared to death of me but now . . . Anyway, he broke away and fell down and smashed his face bloody, and became completely enraged. My family was already in the car, and I started off. He went at Borya. Borya stepped on the gas and was going to crush him against the wall with the car, but at the last second managed to restrain himself. We left. We filled our tanks in Nasosny and drove to Derbent without stopping. We were stopped twice by the State Motor Vehicle Inspectorate to see who we were, and went on. There were nine peo¬ple in my car—nine people in a Moskvich! Four of them were children There was a nursing infant, only eight months old, he was crying and had to be fed, and we hadn't brought much of anything with us. When we got to Derbent there were no vacancies at the hotel. As it turns out, there were oth¬er Armenians from Sumgait there already. What could we do? We drove on. Anyway, by morning we arrived in Orjonikidze, and were going to take the Georgian Military Highway to Armenia. The road was closed, they weren't letting anyone through because of landslides. We went to Pyatigorsk. We passed Borya there. We left the car with relatives there and went to Armavir. From there we took a train to Yerevan, to our Armenia.

How happy we were on the way—it was over, thank God we were alive and well, we had escaped. But getting out of Sumgait! Right when we were leaving some 150 people tried to cut off the road ahead of us. They guessed that we were Armenians. We were lucky, there were armored personnel car¬riers there, and we just raced between them at an insane speed. There were probably no more than two feet between my car and the armored personnel carrier.

On April 9 the investigative group from the USSR Procuracy summoned me to Sumgait in conjunction with the case of the pogrom of my apartment. In Sumgait people asked, "How are things in Yerevan? Have they revoked the curfew yet? They say no one is even going to work there." They had no idea of what was happening in Armenia, false rumors were making the rounds in Sumgait. Copies of "Emotion and Reason" [a provocative anti-Armenian article printed in Pravda (March 21, 1988) and reprinted in Kommunist Sumgaita] was plastered up on walls and store windows through¬out the city. But the city was dead. I met only two Armenians there, and even that was in the military registration and enlistment office, and they too were completing their paperwork so they could leave. The Azerbaijani were saying that the events were a wind, and that the wind had passed through, some wave had passed through, and was gone, it was over, and now everything would be quiet and fine, nothing more would happen.

April 15,1988 Yerevan

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■ ALEKSANDR MIKHAILOVICH GUKASIAN

Born 1950

physics Teacher

Sumgait Secondary School No. 23

Resident at Building 5B, Apartment 27

Block 41A, Sumgait

After the tragic events, I mean the massacre of Armenians in Sumgait, my life was divided into two parts: Before and After. I don't know which is more painful, to see those atrocities or to remember them all later. But for me the pain is doubled. Before, I had my home and a job I loved. I can't say that things weren't going well for me; on the contrary, I had good relationships with my pupils, their parents, the other teachers, and my friends. And what's more, I felt and valued their love for me. The habit of working until the wee hours, struggling with sticky problems, preparing my lesson plans and struggling with an excited mind that won't go to sleep. Now I can't sleep for an entirely different reason: the thoughts, the bitter and dismal thoughts, the doubts and questions, questions which, or rather, not all of which, I can answer. I see the scenes and images constantly, they won't go away.

To get an understanding of the horror of what took place it suffices to recall March 2. On that day we were in the Sumgait City Party Committee where more than a thousand Armenians, citizens of Sumgait, had gathered. The City Party Committee was divided into two sections: on the left half was the military, where they did the job of rescuing the Armenians from their apartments . . . and on the right was a terrible sight. In a building not designed for people to live in, which had offices on its floors where the City Party Committee instructors worked, in all the rooms and on all the floors, stairway landings, and stairs were people, Armenians: young people, old People, children. Many of them were injured and bandaged. Wearing what-ever they had on at the time; many were shy, while others simply forgot that they were wearing only their pajamas, because they had to flee their apart¬ments without a thought as to what they were wearing.

On March 2, in the evening, there were very many people in the foyer— men, largely, for the women were in the rooms on the various floors with the children. The men smoked nervously and each told of the horrors he had seen himself or those that had befallen his relatives and neighbors. Members of the government came to the City Party Committee building. The head of the delegation was Pyotr Nilovich Demichev, a member of the Central Committee Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; along with him were the leaders of the Azerbaijani Republic, Bagirov [First Secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan SSR] and his deputies. The went upstairs, and the news of their arrival quickly spread about all four floors, which were packed with Armenians. People demanded that the government officials come to see them. The huge foyer of the Sumgait City Party Committee building was overflowing with these people, their eyes filled with horror and terror. It was announced that the government officials would see us. Demichev came. People started to clap, to applaud, applaud-ing not him personally, but more likely the Russian people, the Russians instead, for it was they who came to our rescue. People were crying. They demanded to be evacuated immediately, right from that building. They demanded that helicopters land right on the square and take them all out of there. And probably not yet having a complete grasp of the entire situation Demichev addressed all the Armenians: "Don't worry, everything will settle down, you'll be able to return ..." He didn't get to say "Home, to your apartments," because a tremendous number of hands shot up and everyone, in one voice, shouted, "No! Never! We want to go to Russia! We want to leave this hell!" It was then that he lowered his head, realizing that some¬thing truly terrible had taken place. People, particularly women, came up to him, pulled on his sleeves, and pleaded and begged: "Look what they've done to us!" He asked everyone to try to calm down, and left.

And one more episode. When the danger of keeping such a huge number of people in a building not designed as a residence became clear, for an epi¬demic of dysentery could spring up in a moment, evacuation began. People refused to go, they didn't want to leave, saying, we'll stay here, because they knew that the City Party Committee building was the only reliably safe place in the city, because that's where the government was, and so they would be safe there too. We tried to convince people all the same. Specifically, I too was responding to the appeal of Lieutenant General Krayev, who was then the City Commandant and who asked for assistance in convincing people to leave. He guaranteed our safety. And so we left the city. We were in a convoy of buses, led by two armored personnel carriers with soldiers, with two more in the middle, and another two bringing up the rear. There were four soldiers with machine guns in every bus, from the landing forces. Two sat up ahead, near the door, and two sat in the back or the bus, and they answered to an officer who was on the bus, a lieutenant, as a rule. That's how they evacuated us from the city. The convoy of some 3 buses leaving the central square, from the City Party Committee building, got under way. They took us to the village of Nasosny, which is a couple miles outside of town, where there are essentially only military units. We were transported safely.

At the military unit we were housed in barracks that the soldiers had given up for us. By the way, there is much to tell about the soldiers—our very great thanks to them! Sincere thanks! From all of us. From all the Armenian refugees whose lives they saved.

We lived in the barracks until March 11. After March 11 we were taken back to town, once again, under guard. After that we left the city of Sumgait forever. The largest number of people went to Stavropol, Krasnodar, and to Armenia ...

Recently I was in Sumgait again in conjunction with the work of the investigative team of the USSR Procuracy. I spent the night with friends. And my friend's daughter showed me a letter, one she had recently received from my daughter Gayane, she's 15. They still write to one another now. In her letter there are lines like this: "If only you know how much I wanted to go home, but I don't have a home anymore."

I'm not a weak person, but now that life has been divided into two parts, the images really won't let me sleep. I ask myself a great number of ques¬tions, but question number one, of course, is how could it happen? How?

I lived in that city 38 years. Thirty-eight years. The city of Sumgait. At the entrance to town there is a huge sign reading: "Sumgait is the living embodi¬ment of the ideas of Vladimir Ilich Lenin." I should say that I noticed here on this last trip that the sign had been taken down, probably out of shame, shame because of what happened there.

Yes, really the town was young, there were many Armenians living there, something on the order of 18,000. Mostly they worked in such places as schools and the service industries, such as stores, appliance repair, hair¬dressers, tailoring, and shoe and watch repair. And of course, a tremendous number of Armenians worked at the plants. These were highly skilled spe¬cialists, all of whom knew their jobs well and loved them. The total popula¬tion of Sumgait was about 260,000.

If we were to speak of what people did besides their work, the spiritual and cultural side of life in the city, even if it wasn't tremendously sophisti¬cated—nothing's ideal in our country anyway—in any case, it was well organized. We had many clubs, and recently—now I can't say exactly, proba¬bly it's been going for a couple of years—we got the big Khimik cultural facility, a huge, beautiful building erected between the ninth and fourteenth microdistricts. My family and I went to all the concerts, there were appear¬ances by performers from out of town, the satirist Ivanov was there, the one from the show "Laughter Everywhere," and actors came too, Karachentsev and Zbruyev were there, and ensembles from Leningrad would come through on tour. The last performance I saw there was a concert by Laima Vaikule. There were decent sporting events there too. Anyone in town could sign up for whatever they wanted, soccer, weight lifting and wrestling, track and field—there were qualified instructors. In particular, on Primorskoy Boulevard, for example, there were groups of weight lifters. Primorskoy Boulevard is a beautiful place, the city itself is on the shore of the Caspian Sea. And recently a wonderful sport, tennis, had become popular, and a group from our town traveled around the Soviet Union. I can say that all in all, if you look at the whole picture, spiritual and everyday living, the town was well run.

And again you have to ask yourself: How could it happen? How? If you think about it there shouldn't have been any prejudices. But now that I'm here, analyzing all the events, I come to the notion that in the end there probably was a pattern [prejudice, discrimination.] When and how did it evolve?

I think that the events were received impetus from incorrect policies on the part of the Republic's Leaders. All of us Armenians living in Sumgait despite the fact that we went to work, enjoyed the theaters and sporting events, nonetheless inside we always felt that we were Armenians, not just Soviet citizens, but Armenians. And when there was talk of who was to receive awards at work, then of course it would have to be Mamedov or some Alekperov [non-Armenian], for example. When a delegate was to be sent to a meeting, conference, or congress etc., then, of course, again it would be some Mamedov or Alekperov. I can now say with conviction that our rights were always encroached upon, and with the tolerance of the Republic's leaders. Always. We were aware of this, even if perhaps in times like the time of stagnation [the Brezhnev years] it really wasn't said out loud, and who would we have said it to, anyway? Who would have listened to you? We kept our misfortunes to ourselves: we'd talk about them, but what was the use, we'd just let it drop. And so it all went downhill. All the good positions, the good jobs, were usually held only by Azerbaijanis. In Sumgait I can't name—and that's because there weren't any—a single plant director or school principal who was an Armenian, nor were there any in the town leadership. That's probably the pattern, the root of it all.

Having lived in the city for 38 years I had somehow imperceptibly become accustomed to the discrimination, as though it were a natural state of affairs. But here in Armenia, both my family and I sense a new value in ourselves, we feel liberated. To be sure, from childhood on we had grown used to being called Armenians. There isn't a special pejorative word like Yankee, spic, or yid: the word "ermeni"—"Armenians" was often imbued with such hatred and loathing that sometimes we couldn't restrain ourselves and we would defend our dignity. Among young people such insults often led to fistfights. Imagine this situation: two Armenians are on a bus, stand¬ing in line, or meet on the street, and, naturally, are speaking their mother tongue, and suddenly a complete stranger comes up to them and demands that they "speak like human beings." I suspect that something like this hap¬pened to everyone who lived in Sumgait.

I can pursue this idea from another angle: there never was an Armenian school in Sumgait, there was only a small Armenian-language section. It still exists now; roughly put, it's a sort of appendage to the larger picture in the city. This appendage never grew for one reason: everyone tried to continue their education, tried to obtain a higher education so at some future time they could work in a field they loved, but it wasn't possible. Why not? The answer is quite simple: there wasn't a single educational institution, or sec¬tion, or even a small group in the city where advanced studies were conducted in Armenian. That is to say that a person who had graduate from the Armenian-language section could not continue their studies in Sumgait in their native language. The same is true in Baku: there were only the mathematics and physics departments at the Azerbaijani State pedagogical Institute, of which I am a graduate, and those two departments were later eliminated. Incidentally, more than 200,000 Armenians live in Baku, and there hasn't been a single Armenian school in how many years.

Such was the gross discrimination of national rights that, as a rule, fueled the nationalist element in the Azerbaijani people.

In further discussing the origins of the Sumgait tragedy one cannot ignore the nakhaltsroy [shanty towns]: hundreds of cardboard, tin, and ply¬wood shacks—virtually entire settlements, slums, on the edge of town, basi¬cally part of the industrial plants, inhabited by thousands of people who had come to Sumgait from different parts of the Azerbaijani SSR. It's not all that hard to imagine the situation in these slums: dirt, unsanitary conditions, a lack of cultural sophistication, hooliganism, and drug abuse. It's no coinci¬dence that these slums were the main "supplier" of manpower for the Sumgait bands: Why not solve one's material and housing problems at the expense of those "ermeni"?

Now I'll tell of how the tragic events touched me—how I learned of them and how I saved myself and my family.

I hadn't been to work since February 24 because I had a bad cold. I was ill and took sick leave. My sick leave was to run out on March 1. I was going to return to work on March 1. On February 28 I was feeling a little better, and since my family and I don't live with my mother, who lived in a different part of town, in Block 9, on Pushkin Street, I decided to visit her. She had recently had an operation. This was about 4:30, after the noonday meal. As though in spite, the weather was perfect. The sun was shining. Spring in Sumgait passes quickly, unnoticed. I left the house. I stood at the bus stop and when the bus didn't come for a long time, I decided to go on foot. Having walked about 150 yards—the streets, for some reason, were empty, I saw only two people, young ones—I saw a woman coming in my direction. As I later found out, she lived in our block and knew me, since I'm a teacher a lot of people know who I am. She started coming toward me. There were two children with her. She, an Azerbaijani, came up to me and said: "Please turn back, go home." Well I was of course quite surprised: out of the blue a perfect stranger comes up to me and tells me to go home. I ask, "What's going on? What happened?" She says, "Near the Sputnik store I just saw two Armenian men thrown off a balcony." And then: "Downtown, right near the store and the bus station, a huge, wild crowd is smashing shop windows and beating Armenians, they're beating and killing them." Without saying a word I turned around and went the other way. On the way home thoughts were creeping into my head. Automatically I started to recall the stories my grandmother had told me, she lived through the slaughter of 1915. And all of a sudden I saw it all sharply and clearly: a massacre had begun. I remem¬ber exactly that that was my first thought, that a massacre had begun. Before I reached home I realized that we would have to flee, we'd have to hide. I decided to buy bread because we'd need it for the road. I bought the bread and went home and rang the bell, and my wife opened the door. I went in and closed the door behind me. She was surprised: "Back so soon? What's up?" I was silent, I didn't answer her. My son, Grant, he's not yet 17, was in the hall by the door, getting ready to go out. I tell him, "Take your clothes off, stay at home." More questions. I drew my wife off to the side and quick¬ly explained what was happening, and we started to think of what we should do, what steps we should take. I said, "Don't rush, we have to think it all over." Our first thought was to flee. But of course if there was unrest near the bus station, the way was cut off, we couldn't leave by bus.

This was on Sunday the 28th. It had already started getting dark. I began looking off the balcony into the yard, trying to find one of the neighbors so we could find out more. But they were too far away, and I didn't want to shout or go out of the building. Then I saw a neighbor woman approaching, she had an empty bag in her hands, she was holding her head and saying something to the other neighbors. When she came closer—we live in the same entryway - I told my wife, "Go ask her what's going on." My wife went out to talk to her, and the woman told her, "Please, take your name plate off the door." When my wife started asking, "Well what's going on, anyway?," she said, "It's awful, I was going to the bazaar near the bus station, near the Sputnik store, and there was a huge, terrible mob, several thousand people, and there was frightful, frightful fighting, they were burning cars and turn¬ing them over, looking for Armenians, going into apartments and throwing things out..." Then another neighbor, a man who lives in our entryway on the fifth floor, came by. He has a Moskvich, it's an old one. I asked him if he would take us to Baku, to the railway station. We wanted to leave, to get out of Sumgait. He said that his engine was misfiring and he couldn't go very far; moreover, it was dangerous to leave town because there were gangs on the roads everywhere, stopping cars and checking documents.

We realized we couldn't leave that day. Well we couldn't sit at home qui¬etly waiting for them to come and kill us, either. I started getting things together to mount a resistance. I spear fish, and I got my spear gun and loaded it and put it on the balcony, and got an axe and my father's old dag¬ger. Then I thought awhile, assessing the situation. We lived on the first floor and had two balconies. My son and I—my son is of course inexperienced, he's a sophomore in high school—what could we do? And I decided all the same that it would be better if we left the house. There were four of us alto¬gether: my wife and I and our two children. Our son and daughter, our daughter was soon to be 15. We decided to leave, but to where? We had sev¬eral options. The thing is that our block is far from downtown, on the edge of town, and the only way through the rushes and the open spaces was on the Baku Highway. That was my first thought. My second thought was to go out through the factories on foot and hide in Nasosny with the military. Our third option was to hide in the basement of our building. The fourth was to hide on the roof, and the fifth was to try to find a special vehicle, like an ambulance or a fire truck. At that time I still naively supposed that official vehicles would be left alone, that no one would bother them. It was only afterward that we found out that both ambulances and fire trucks had been stopped and burned. It's a good thing that isn't what I chose to do. My wife suggested we do the following: In the neighboring entryway on the second floor was a quite educated and intelligent family of Azerbaijanis. The man of the house, his name is Nusret, he worked with me at school, and so did his wife—by the way, my wife teaches mathematics—and she proposed that we go to their place and ask to spend the night there. I went to their place and knocked. The wife opened the door—her name is Zumrud—and I asked her. I was so embarrassed, it was uncomfortable to have to ask out of fear for the fates of my children and my wife. She immediately said, "Yes yes, come in, come in! Come quickly!" We spent the night in their home. We couldn't eat a thing, even though Zumrud laid out a full table. We drank some tea. We couldn't sleep the whole night, all of us watched out the window and off the balcony to see if they were coming or not. That night no one came.

In the morning they went to work, and we went back to our apartment. We started thinking, how could we go on? What should we do? A neighbor came by, a different neighbor, from the fourth floor. I asked him to go out¬side and try to stop a car on its way to Baku. And I said, "Don't worry how much it costs, a hundred rubles, two hundred, three," even though at other times a few rubles would have been plenty. He went out and stood for a half an hour, an hour, and came back and said, "Sasha, not a single car stopped, they all go right on by, no one wants to stop, and I don't know anyone who is a driver."

I was still counting on a friend who worked with me. I had called him on the 28th and asked him to find a car and come get us, and in the worst case, to give us shelter for the night. So we were waiting for him. At about eleven o'clock his wife came over, she worked at a school too, she's a math teacher. No sooner had I closed the door behind her than she dropped her purse and started to cry. I asked, "What's the matter?" She worked in School No. 13, in Microdistrict 3, not far from us, seven or eight minutes' walk. She says, "It's awful! It's so awful! What I saw! I went to work and there were things strewn on the ground everywhere, around the buildings there were mat¬tresses, blankets, furniture, television sets, refrigerators, all thrown outall of it lying on the ground. In one of the courtyards there were two corpses ..."

She told us everything and cried and cried, she couldn't stop weeping. It was all completely clear now. A full-blown massacre was under way, in all its terror, a massacre of Armenians, and not like what they were saying on Central Television: "People of various nationalities have died." These weren't convicts, and they weren't hooligans, either: it was a gang of nationalists. Who had organized it all, I thought, would become clear soon enough, but for me it was no secret that it was being done first and foremost by the Azerbaijanis and that it was directed against us, the Armenians.

Well I'll go on with my story. She proposed that we go to her place on foot. She said, "I just came over, everything seems quiet, no one stopped me, although there were some people out there. Maybe we can use a roundabout way, through Microdistrict 8?" We put our coats on. Honestly, I had my doubts all the same, I didn't want to leave the apartment yet, I hadn't made up my mind completely yet, but my wife was urging me.

So they all went out into the entryway, with me following after them, and literally in the doorway of our entryway I ran into our building manager. The manager of the buildings in our block. An Azerbaijani. He asks me, "Where are you going?" I say, "To see a friend." He says, "Don't go anywhere, it's very dangerous in town, they're stopping cars and checking passports for Armenians—they might kill you." I said, "Well, we're going to go by the courtyards, we're not taking the streets." "No," he says, "don't do it, please, go home." I only now realize why it was he wanted us to go home: because of all the Armenians who were sincerely told to hide and save their lives, none of them was told to go home and sit, on the contrary, everyone said leave the house, go anywhere, go to your neighbors', just don't sit at home. You couldn't stay in an Armenian apartment! But this scum, this creep was sending me back to our apartment, and would be sure that I would be sit¬ting at home and he would probably bring the hoard with him, which, by the way, is probably what happened.

My friend's wife left alone. Around noon my wife and daughter went upstairs to a neighbor's to call and find out what was happening in town, and to try to somehow arrange our departure. The thought—leave, leave, leave this town—stayed in our minds. My wife and daughter were gone too long, already ten minutes had passed and they hadn't returned; the main thing for me at the moment was that we stay together, because if there were an attack on our apartment I would be separated from my family. I became quite upset and went upstairs to our neighbor's myself, and see my wife—it was quite interesting actually—my wife and daughter standing in the hall next to the telephone, not calling. I ask, "What's going on?" She says, "It's busy, we called a friend, wait a minute, we're getting ready to try again." So my son and I are standing there in the neighbor's entry hall, at any other time he had always said come in, come in, he'd invite' us into his apartment to sit down, have a cup of tea and wait for the phone to be free. But this time he didn't invite us in, and I immediately sensed that he was afraid that we would get caught in his apartment. When I realized this I became angry and told my wife, "Let's go home." She says, "Well let's try once more." I repeated what I had said and emphasized the word "home" so that he would think we were going home, although I was thinking something entirely different, but I didn't want him to know where I was taking my family. If a person doesn't invite me into their home and offer me shelter at their place, it means that they could give away our whereabouts at any time.

We went downstairs to our apartment. I asked my wife when the neigh¬bors where we had hidden the night before were due home from work. She says, "The wife promised to stop by at three o'clock." Now this was at noon, twelve-thirty at the latest. And literally 15 minutes later our neighbor came by, the one I had asked to drive us to Baku, the one with the car. He says, "Sasha, I was just downtown, there are terrible things going on, they checking absolutely everyone, they're checking all the passports, burning cars, and wrecking apartments. The only way I can help you is to keep you informed about what's going on in town."

He went out and then came back and said that the disturbances were con¬tinuing. Then the doorbell rings. I open it and there is the woman in whose home we had hidden. She had her daughter with her, she had already come home from work. She says, "Haven't you left?" I say, "No, we couldn't find a way out of town." And I instantly added, "Can we come to your place again?" She said, "Of course, let's go." I say, "No, you go on, we'll come later." I didn't want anyone to see that we were going to their place, I was in con¬stant fear that someone would give us away. She left and then the other neighbor came back 15 minutes later and said, "Sasha, get out of here, leave, they're coming to our block!" "Who are they?", I ask. He says, "A huge crowd, they turned at the light, they're coming our way." I told him, "Go out and look in the entryway and in front of the building, see if there are any strangers out there." He went to take a look and said, "The coast is clear—run!"

We left. We had gotten suitcases and traveling bags together. I told my wife, "Take the most valuable things, basic clothing, and the newest things, the best ones." In the suitcase she packed jeans, running shoes, shirts, the Panasonic tape recorder that had been my father's, about 25 cassettes, and even a package of tea and those two unfortunate loaves of bread that I had bought. We hadn't eaten them that day or the day before.

When we were leaving the house my wife said, "Let's at least take some¬thing of our things." I say, "No, don't take anything." It was humiliating somehow, you know, I don't know how to explain it ... to run somewhere with our things . . . and before whom should we feel humiliated? Whom?! I became furious. I said, "To hell with all of it, let them choke on it!" I was also thinking that if we were carrying things we could be caught easily because we'd really stand out. So I decided that we wouldn't take anything with us.

We put on our coats and went out. Again we cautiously made our way to the neighbors' entryway: I came last, looking around to see if anyone saw us. It seemed we were unobserved. We went upstairs to the neighbors. The husband wasn't at home, only the wife and daughter, the daughter was the same age as my own, they still stay in touch with one another.

We were sitting in their apartment and I couldn't calm down, I couldn't sit still, or walk around, or stand, or talk, we were just waiting, waiting for something. Death, probably. Fifteen minutes go by, thirty, and suddenly I hear the sound of breaking glass. Our buildings were 5-story buildings, they stood parallel to one another, and it was dangerous for us to go to the win¬dows: we'd be seen from the neighboring balconies. Meanwhile, people who were just curious and were watching what was going on were standing on their balconies. And to this day, when I see those images in my mind, I ask myself, watch what? The killing? The brutal slaughter, the axe murders of adults and children? Once I heard the sound of the glass I instinctively went to the window, and the neighbor woman went out onto her balcony; nothing was threatening her, it was her apartment and she was an Azerbaijani. She said, "There's a gang in the courtyard."

I couldn't stand it and peeped out from behind a curtain. There was a large crowd, between 100 and 150 people. They all had axes and knives in their hands, and they were kitchen knives, big ones, and some sort of metal rods, and there was a car down there, I didn't get the license number, like a Zhiguli with a police siren on it. That siren, by the way, was a bit confusing to us at first. We thought, "At last!" I'll tell you about the police in a minute. The crowd was carrying flags, large silk flags, I saw two of them, they were the flags of Azerbaijan.

Armenians lived on the first floor in the building across the way. There were young men in coats there, aged 17, 18, and 19, having a field day throwing things off the balcony. The mound of belongings under the bal¬cony was growing. There were end tables, chairs, and lamps. Then one of them went up and poured gasoline on them and put a match to them. The fire took hold. Armenians lived on the third floor, too. I looked and saw the windows being broken, they had come in from the entryway, which was on the opposite side of the building, and I could only see the balcony facing the courtyard. Things flew out of there and then there was another fire. Meanwhile you could hear someone talking through a megaphone. I could not see him, he was standing near the building, but you could hear the voice clearly all over the block. A man speaking Azerbaijani, good, educated speech. The things he was talking about—he was a good orator, but maybe it would be more appropriate to call him a Master of Ceremonies, an MC. An MC who inflamed the crowd with his words, because he began—I speak Azerbaijani well—by saying that they had come from Armenia, from Kafan, where the Armenians had beaten them badly, had raped their women, raped their young girls, cut their breasts off, and on and on in that vein. And he raised his pitch higher and higher. At the end he howled out: "Give us the Armenians! Show us where they are! We will take our revenge on them, we'll carve all of them up, too!" And after he said that there was whistling, noise, shouting, and a howl. . . well animals, they were exactly like animals! It made you .. . I'm not a weak person, but when I heard that speech I just... I don't know, my fear, of course, was not for myself, it was for the safety of my family, my daughter. I imagined what would be happening to us had we been in our apartment . . . And the man in the mob was still talking, and some boys separated off from the mob and raced into the neighboring entry-way and started wrecking an apartment.

I moved away from the window. I thought, suddenly they would come through . . . It's such a bourgeois feeling, fear for one's home. I thought, they'll be getting to our place. Then I thought, burn, fire, burn, let them choke on it all, but at the same time I asked the neighbor, "Well, have they left?" She says, "Yes, they left, they went to the next building." And thought, maybe they wouldn't go into our home. But then she went out on the balcony and said, "Oh no, they're coming back to our building! And right then, immediately after she said those words, I felt them going into our apartment.

I can't find the words to express it. I only heard the shout and the howl as they broke in through our veranda and the windows, even though we were on the second floor, and our apartment was on the first floor and one entry-way over, but the walls in our building were thin and you could hear very well, all the new buildings are like that. You could hear the blows of the axe, the sound of glass and dishes breaking in the apartment, the tramping of feet, and the din. Our neighbor couldn't stand it, she said, "Go into the small room and hide." I realized that at that moment she had started to fear for herself, too, because someone might give her away, and maybe they would not be spared, either. We went into the next room, a small bedroom, and sat down on the floor near the beds. Just then there was an awful crash. My wife asked, "What's that?" I had figured it out, and said, "They threw out the television." Then axe blows rained down on the piano . . . The bastards! We had a Byelorus piano, our daughter was taking music lessons, and our son had graduated from a music school. Our daughter started to cry, "They're smashing the piano." Toward the end we clearly heard one of them outside call his pal inside, "Enough, let's go." And his pal answered, "Just a minute, I'm not finished playing yet," and again we heard the axe hit the keyboard.

They spent a long, long time wrecking our apartment, the crashing went on for about 40 minutes. And I was thinking, "Don't let them find us here in someone else's apartment. Don't let them find us here in someone else's apartment." I was afraid one of those scum had seen us and would give us away. I feared for my family and for the family that was hiding us. Not counting our son I was the only man there, I was their only hope.

Probably the last horror we had to endure then was the tramping of feet in the entryway where we were hiding. Suddenly you could hear loud tramping, a terrific number of them had burst into the entryway, and I thought that was it, that we had been given away. But the tramping went past our door, upstairs. My wife nudged me and said, "Upstairs there's . . . the man is an Armenian and the woman is a Georgian, they're probably going for them." But it was quiet. Then more tramping, down the stairs, past our door.

Then our neighbor's wife came in and said, "They've left our building." We went out of the bedroom into the hall and then into the kitchen, a large, bright kitchen. The mob skirted around our building—you could see the whole block very well from the kitchen, all the buildings around the open space. I started watching: the mob and its flag, waving their axes and knives, went into the neighboring building, into the entryway, and 1 saw them carry a man out the door and throw him about ten yards away. There were Armenians living on the third floor in that building. And then out flew the belongings and furniture, and more fire. Then the mob went on to the neighboring building, it was parallel and next to ours. They only wrecked one apartment there. By the way, they also smashed up Valery Oganian's apartment, he was with in the boarding house, his family's here now, too. And in that same building where there was a pogrom of Oganian's apart-ment, there was another Armenian family, the husband was named Valery, too, and his wife was a colleague of mine, we worked in the some school, and now she's on maternity leave, their baby will soon be a year old. So from the kitchen I see Valery just standing there on the balcony. And I could not shout "Hide! It's a pogrom!" But he couldn't see the mob for our build¬ing. And then when the mob rounded the corner of our building he saw them, he saw them and hid. Well, I'm thinking, they also went to hide at the neighbors'. Later I ran into Valery in the Khimik cultural facility, we call it the SK: he didn't trust his neighbors and they hid in the basement of the building: he, his wife, their older daughter of six years, and the grandmoth¬er, who's about 80. They hid in that basement, up to their waists in water, the whole night through until morning. That's how they survived.

Then the mob went on to Building 2B and were there a long time, about an hour and a half. It was only later that I learned how they had slashed up a whole family, the Melkumians.

When they had finished their atrocities in that building the mob left our block shouting, "Long live Azerbaijan! Death to the Armenians! Long live the Azerbaijanis of Sumgait!"

After the mob had gone our neighbor's husband came home from work and we discussed ways to save ourselves. I was afraid that the mob would return. I later found out they had been to Microdistrict 3 three times! They were hunting for people hiding in the basements . . . Judging from what we had seen they hadn't killed anyone in the apartments they had wrecked in the building across from us: probably the Armenians there had hidden, like we did. I knew that they would figure out that the Armenians were hiding here somewhere, and would of course come back. I was sure that they would start checking Azerbaijani apartments. That was what I feared most of all.

All night we discussed what we might do, how we could get out of there. Somewhere in the early morning, around five o'clock—it was winter, and was still dark—we saw large vehicles drive into the yard. When they got close to the streetlights I saw that it was a panel truck, the back was down, like during funeral processions. A flatbed truck. It drove up to the man who had been killed in front of his own home. He had been there all night, all night long. When it was light the mob passed by him, looked at him and passed by, and some people didn't even look, as though it were a dead cat or chicken lying there instead of a person. They were utter animals, do you understand?! He was lying there and two guys came up to him, those two creeps kicked him with their feet, turned him over, and left. A dead person!

Some people got out of the truck, at that distance I didn't see their faces, and picked him up and tossed him in the truck, and the truck drove off-realized they were gathering up the corpses. I had seen one corpse, and there must have been more elsewhere. They were driving around the microdistrict before dawn, when everyone was still asleep, and removing the corpses. I don't know the name of the man who was killed [Artaha Levonovich Arakelian, resident at Building 5A, Apartment 9,Block 41A] Our building is on the inside of the block, and the one he was dragged our of is on the edge of the block, perpendicular to ours.

After the truck had gone, somewhere around five-thirty, two more vehicles appeared. I honestly didn't know what they were at first, but our neigh-bor said, "Those are military vehicles." Then I looked at them more closely: they were armored personnel carriers. There were soldiers sitting on them. They drove into our block and stopped right in front of the building where Valery, as I later found out, had hid in the basement. That was about 200 yards from us. It stopped in front of their entryway. Our neighbor said, "Look, the military! They're probably evacuating the Armenians," he said, "the ones who are hiding." And sure enough: down the stairs—there are lights in the entryways—down the stairs come children, and with them, adults. They get on the armored personnel carriers with the soldiers, and are preparing to leave. Then our neighbor says, "I'll run over to them and tell them that you're here, and you can go with them." I say, "Try, see if you can catch them!"

So he ran out of the apartment and downstairs. He got around the build¬ing and ran up to one of the armored personnel carriers, the other one was already leaving. But he caught the one and came back and said, "Quick, get your clothes on!" As a matter of fact we had never taken them off. The sol¬diers had said that their vehicle was overloaded and that they would come back in five minutes, and that we should come out. Our neighbor went downstairs with us, but we were afraid to go out of the entryway. We stood in the entryway, it was dark, and it was drizzling, this was the morning of March 1, it drizzled on March 1. We stood there, and the atmosphere was tense. We stood there for five minutes and the armored personnel carriers didn't return, and the minutes dragged on, it seemed that we had been there a long time. Our neighbor said, "OK, let's go back to the apartment." We went back up, but I couldn't stand it any more ... I felt that the soldiers were nearby, that help was close to us. "No, let's go." And with tears in his eyes he said, "OK, if you've made up your mind, go." We went out of the entryway and put on our hoods, and I told the children, "Hide your faces, put your scarves over them." And the four of us set out.

Neither my wife nor my children looked back at our apartment. But I did. In front of our balcony was a huge mound of things, all of it wet from the rain. And I turned away.

We walked about 300 yards and came out on the highway, it runs right by our building. It was quiet in town, we only rarely came upon passersby, peo¬ple who were going to work. I was surprised that anyone was still going to work. Suddenly I looked and saw a convoy of vehicles: two armored per¬sonnel carriers out front, military trucks behind, their beds covered with tarpaulins. I ran out into the road and stood in front of the armored person¬nel carriers, my hands crossed on my chest, pleading with them to stop. They stopped. It was raining, drizzling, and the hatch opened up, and an officer looked out of the carrier. "What do you want?", he said. I said, "We're Armenians." And that was it. I said but two words. He said, "Just a moment." He went back down inside, apparently they were discussing us. . . or something. Then he looked out and said, "There's no room left in here, get on the truck behind us." The military truck in the convoy. We went to the driver, he said, "Quick, quick, get on." We got onto the bed, there were mili¬tary officers in there, five people: colonels and lieutenant colonels. My wife started sobbing. We felt saved, at last.

They took us to the City Party Committee. When we drove past the bus station—our building was on the outskirts of town—I looked out the little window in the bed of the truck and saw a LAZ bus, entirely burned, and the square goes on a bit there, and all the fences had been torn down, the fence-posts were bent, and there was another LAZ, a yellow one, apparently also completely burned, its paint was all blackened, and it was facing towards a post, and there was a car, I'm not sure what kind it was because it was charred beyond recognition, overturned on the pavement. There were spots everywhere on the pavement, large black spots from fires. We passed on to the center of town and to the City Party Committee.

The Sumgait City Party Committee is a large, four-story building on Lenin Square. It's in the center of town, it's where are all the festivities and parades are held. There's a Lenin monument there, and a stage. Across from the City Party Committee, as I mentioned, is the Khimik building, we call it the SK. The first thing we saw were soldiers standing around the City Party Committee. In metal helmets, with machine guns, like landing forces. When we got out of the truck I saw others like us, getting out of the trucks and armored personnel carriers, all under guard.

That was on the morning of March 1. They led us into the City Party Committee building, where I had often been for teachers' meetings. I just can't find the words to convey what I saw there: a tremendous number of people, as it turned out they had been bringing people there since the 29th. They were all Armenians, and I knew many of them. There, in that building were my pupils, their parents, and acquaintances, colleagues, and friends. We immediately noticed that many of them had cuts all over their faces, scabs, and bruises, one man had a wound, a bloody welt on his head, and his shirt was completely spotted with blood. It was nightmarish. But all the while I kept thinking that we had been saved, the soldiers were protecting us. I didn't yet have an understanding of the scale of what had happened, and of course I couldn't concentrate entirely. Later, while talking with people and hearing their tales, the contours of the overall tragedy, the whole terrible picture of what had happened began to emerge.

As I said, I met many of my pupils, acquaintances, and friends there in the City Party Committee. There was pain, horror, and terror in the eyes of one and all.

After the government officials came, the next morning two fellows came to me—they were instructors in the City Party Committee—and asked, "Are you Aleksandr Mikhailovich, the teacher?" I said, "Yes." They told me, "You have been summoned to see Demichev." Well to be honest I was surprised... Off we went. Demichev, Bagirov, Lieutenant General Krayev, the First Secretary of the City Party Committee, Muslimzade, and other Party and government functionaries were seated at a table in a large room. They asked me to tell them what I knew, to give them information. From what I gathered they needed information from below, that is, they wanted to hear from us directly.

When I had finished talking Demichev asked me a question. He had met with the refugees the previous evening, and he asked me, "All the same, why don't people want to return to their homes?" That's the way the ques¬tion was put. Well I concluded that the city authorities must not have shown him our wrecked apartments. They had probably shown him areas that weren't hit by the pogroms, and so he didn't have a complete understanding of what had happened. I said, "How can you explain it if, at two o'clock in the afternoon when the sun is shining, you're sitting at home watching tele¬vision, or reading a book, or listening to music, it's Sunday, and suddenly—suddenly!—a gang of wild, frenzied people, whom you can't even call people, a gang of animals rather, pours into the apartment and starts to beat the husband and rape and beat the wife? How are you to take it? That's number one. Number two: All of this happened during the day¬time. Not a single policeman showed his face in our block! Whom should we trust? No one came to our defense. We would perhaps have agreed to return to our homes, but when we saw that no one defended us, no one, not one person! Naturally the terror penetrated into our hearts and literally down to our toenails." Well Bagirov starts to tell me, "Do you see, we just can't have everyone leaving town because then the hooligans who smashed all the apartments will say that they got what they were after." And I say, "You'll excuse me, but I personally will be the first to leave here, I will not stay here. I think that all the rest of the Armenians who survived feel the same way." Lieutenant General Krayev agreed with me. He got up, and addressing Demichev, said, "Pyotr Nilovich, Aleksandr Mikhailovich was correct regarding what he said about the police. When I arrived in Sumgait there were 850 policemen concentrated here. Eight hundred fifty! And no results whatsoever! The entire police force had scattered. It was a miracle," the general went on, "that I and my battalion survived there at the bus sta¬tion! A miracle! We barely got out of that hell, where torrents of stones rained down on my soldiers and me. They hurled rocks at us. The soldiers' shields couldn't withstand it, they broke apart! It was a miracle that I sur¬vived myself!" Demichev lowered his head and said, "Raising their hands against the military, now that's going too far! Get Seidov in here!" Seidov was the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Azerbaijan SSR.

When Seidov came in, he ordered him ... At first he said, "I request" but then he said, "No, I order you: put together lists of those policemen who were supposed to be near the bus station on the 28th and 29th, who was there at the time. Put the lists together and have them stand trial." He said this in my presence, while I sat there. And then he turned to Muslimzade: "And you?" he said, "What were you doing? Where were you?" So Muslimzade gets up, he had been seated, too, the First Secretary of the City Party Committee, the former First Secretary. "You see," he began, I ..." So on the 28th he flew in from Moscow, this is what he said, and found out about all the rallies. "I went out ahead of the crowd. I was thinking to lead the crowd to the sea. I appealed to the crowd, and went with them. I wanted to get them out of the center of town, to take them to the edge of towrn," he said. The City Party Committee is not far from Primorskoy Boulevard, and he had led them in that direction. He said, "I led the crowd that way. But the thing was that they followed me as far as Primorskoy Boulevard, but then they stopped following. They ignored me and turned around and went back into town." That is, they started pogroms of apartments. That was on the 28th.

I was advised to go among the refugees and calm them down. But Seidov turned to me and asked that I help him compile a list of the dead. When I left they gave me a special pass, and paper and ballpoint pens. So several of us started making lists. We didn't record only names of the dead. Alt our own initiative we simultaneously wrote down where people wanted to go outside of Sumgait so it could somehow all be arranged. There were the names of about 16 dead in the list we drew up at the City Party Committee. And we tried to write more than just "I heard" or "someone told me;:" we tried to get reliable information: Were you 100 percent certain that your rela¬tive, your brother, or someone specific had died? I was then asked to draw up a similar list among those who were in the SK building. I went over there, but in the SK building, in the cultural facility, the situation was hideous by comparison to the one in the City Party Committee: a fantastic number of people! The SK was packed, people were sitting on the concrete floor because there was just no other place to sit. The entire foyer was com¬pletely jammed with people. And to try to get something organized in there, even something elementary like finding a place to put a little chair or a table to write on was impossible. I returned and said that I couldn't do it. The:n we finished the job and turned in the lists, and started organizing people so as to evacuate them from the City Party Committee.

I could go on and on about the horrors that reached my ears. Among the vast number of people I saw was a former pupil of mine, Karina. Karina M. She lived in Microdistrict No. 3, there were three sisters, Karina, Lyuda, and the smallest, Marina. The girl's face was covered with cuts, she couldn't even stand up, her sisters held her, holding her by the arms. I thought that she had probably been beaten, but afterward, after talking with Lyuda and her other sister, found out that the worst imaginable had happened to them.

A huge gang had attacked their apartment. Karina had been able to hide but decided to stay with her parents, who were trying to calm the gang down. You have to know Karina well to understand her feelings at that moment. Karina—I taught her until the eighth grade—is a very nice girl, tall, she was always the first in the class, all the girls gathered around her, she was brave, and she was brave with her words, she was never afraid to tell the truth, and if necessary, she could put up resistance, even to the boys. If anyone insulted her she was able to take them on in a fight and give them their due. This was a girl with the kindest heart, she loved being with oth-ers, and loved to have a good time. I remember once I was at a friend's wed-ding, she was there too—and how she could dance! And it was this same girl who broke. Well and who wouldn't have?! Defending herself, she fell upon those scoundrels and started scratching their faces, fighting back, and of course they immediately got rid of the parents, striking them and knock¬ing them out of the way, and then attacked the girl. They did terrible vio¬lence to her.

Then they decided there wasn't enough room in the apartment because there were so many of them—about 30, according to Lyuda. They dragged {Carina out onto the landing, completely undressed, naked, and kicked her down the stairs. She still has scars on her face. They took her out, dragged her out into the yard and continued their violence outside. That savage mob went at her again outdoors, and beat her terribly. They kicked her ribs and her head. She lost consciousness. They threw her aside and went off to the next entryway, or started to leave, rather. When they went into the next entryway, Karina came around, she came to and started to get up. And they, seeing her, came back . . . the animals! . . . and began beating her again. She passed out again. It was only then that they left her . ..

Well there are many such stories. I'm not telling all this to evoke tears, but so that the people who hear it will have a real understanding of the night¬mare we lived through.

We were evacuated from the SK and the City Party Committee under guard. I wish to again extend our great thanks to the soldiers who gave us their barracks, themselves sleeping in buses. They cooked food and fed us.

It was arranged for buses to take people daily from Nasosny into town to their apartments so they could get things, because many had fled with noth¬ing more than the clothes they were wearing. We traveled only under the protection of soldiers. That's something you never forget. We went to our apartment, my wife and I, to see if perhaps anything remained, because it was fairly cold in the mornings and in the evenings, and we had to dress more warmly somehow. And it was incredibly difficult, physically and spiri¬tually difficult, to go to our apartment knowing that that mob, that gang of nationalists had been there.

We went to our apartment. There were one or two people from each fami¬ly on the bus. The bus had left Nasosny, there were guards with machine guns on it. When we approached the building, my wife and I, going up to the door . . . I'm just using the word door out of habit, because there was no longer a door as such, it had been torn from its hinges, it really just sort of covered the doorway area some. I pushed it and it fell into the apartment, into the hallway. With us was a soldier with a machine gun. He stopped in the hall and said, "Make it quick, we have to get to all the other apartments."

It was painful to see the place, the piano had been grotesquely hacked up with axes. We had had a wall system, the glass doors in it no longer existed, and you couldn't walk on the floor because there were piles of broken and smashed dishes. Our things and our sofa were overturned and cut up, the easy chairs had been slashed with a knife. It was the same story in all the rooms. There wasn't the smallest corner that had been left untouched, every¬thing had been overturned. Part of our things had disappeared. Of course the gear we had prepared for our escape was all gone, as were all the bags So it was slaughter and pillage in the fullest sense of the words.

We tried to find some things, but to be honest it was quite difficult to find anything in that disorder, in that chaos. We didn't find a single coat or rain-coat, my wife couldn't find anything for her feet, her Finnish boots had dis¬appeared, too . . . Well they had taken absolutely everything they wanted and the rest they threw outside. The refrigerator had been chopped up with axes, and the washing machine had been completely broken as well.

I had picked up my books from school. I had a good library, both litera¬ture and technical volumes. I am a physicist myself, and my wife is a mathe¬matician, and we had a great many books related to our disciplines. In fact we suffered not so much from the loss of our clothes as from the loss of our books. I instinctively started gathering up the books in our apartment. I got a sheet and started tossing books onto it, the ones that were still in good condition. I found one of the volumes of our three-volume set of Pushkin, the dark red one. There were axe marks on it. At first I was going to throw it out, but then I thought, no, I'll hang onto this. I am keeping it because only barbarians can take an axe to books, only those who lack even the most basic sense of culture are capable of something like that. I gathered as many books as I could carry.

After that—our time was limited—we left, we got onto the bus and rode off . . . Oh yes, earlier, when we had been approaching the building, the neighbors came down. They brought us photographs, I'm a big fan of pho¬tographs, and I had two albums and a large box full of them, there was sim¬ply nowhere to put them, and I had kept them in that box. Those photos were strewn about the room, covered with ink, and torn, and a neighbor woman brought me nine or ten of them. "Where did you get these?", I asked. She said, "Your photos are flying all over the block ..."

May 8, 1988 Yerevan

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- IRINA BABKENOVNA KHALAPIAN

Born 1963

Laboratory Assistant

Chloro-Organic Synthesis Institute of the

Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijani SSR

Resident at Building 1, Apartment 20

Block 41A

Sumgait

I shall never forget the February events in Sumgait. To have seen them is the same as having lived through a war. The unrest began on February 27, and neither the government, nor the police, nor the Party agencies could stop it, although it all could have been prevented.

Where should I begin ... It was the weekend, we sat at home and didn't even have an inkling of what was going on in our city. When we heard of the horrors we couldn't believe it, we simply couldn't believe that something like that could happen in our times. But on February 29 I saw much with my own eyes, and much became clear to me. In the morning I had to go to work to apply for the practicum I needed for my degree. I set out from home. Downtown was cordoned off by troops. Soldiers were driving off in vehi¬cles. You could hear gunshots, blanks. They shot off blanks to scare off the crowd, but the crowd didn't disperse, it attacked the military vehicles, the armored personnel carriers, again and again, hurling stones at them. On Mir Street near the bus station a huge crowd of Azerbaijanis had gathered, they covered the whole surrounding area. The crowd was boisterous, I couldn't tell if they were rejoicing or what . . . The soldiers drove them apart with their clubs, defending themselves with their shields. They defended them¬selves, but then the crowd regrouped and mounted a new assault. The sol¬diers themselves didn't attack, they only defended themselves and tried to disperse the crowd. Something incredible was happening in town. But when I saw the troops I felt relieved, I thought that probably the unrest would cease, that it all would not continue much longer.

I took the No. 6 bus to work, and the people around me, Azerbaijanis and Russians, were talking about the events in Karabagh, and you were con¬stantly hearing the Armenians, the Armenians, the Armenians . . . We really didn't know anything about Karabagh, only what Was in the newspapers. The Azerbaijanis on the bus were saying that Karabagh was putting forth demands, and that the Azerbaijani population in Armenia was being oppressed. One woman said that beating the Armenians was the right thing to do, that the Armenians had done worse to our people. These were absurd rumors, as it turned out. I became a little frightened, but I wasn't yet aware of the real danger.

I got to work and turned in my application. Everyone surrounded me and started warning me, saying that I should hurry home, because Armenians would be safer at home. I took a roundabout way home. On the way I saw burned and overturned automobiles. I inadvertently overheard a conversation between two Azerbaijani women. They were saying that they had to pick up their children from school and get them home, because it was going to start again at twelve o'clock. There are four of us in my family, and everyone was already at home: my brothers, Kamo and Karen, and Mamma Kamo had been excused from school, and Karen, from work. I realized the situation might get even more acute.

Around five o'clock I lay down for a minute to rest, and suddenly Mama says to Karen, "Look out the window, there's something going on out there, some sort of racket." We all went to the window and saw that a pogrom was beginning in our block. By that point I had no more illusions. A large, wild mob carrying an Azerbaijani flag and with a megaphone was conducting an organized attack on Armenian apartments. The person with the megaphone was confidently directing the mob to the apartments; apparently he had lists containing the addresses of Armenians. He was shouting into the mega¬phone, "Armenians, come out! Death to the Armenians!" The entire mob did what he said. We saw things being thrown off the balconies: furniture, I remember seeing a green couch, and feathers from pillows flew about the entire block. And below, the things were heaped into piles and lit on fire.

Until the end Mamma believed that soldiers would arrive any minute. Or the police. But we didn't receive any help from anyone. Our neighbor, Aunt Dusya, a Russian, came up to our apartment and knocked, and said, "I can't get through to anywhere, the phones aren't working." But she didn't offer to hide us in her apartment. We knew we had to save ourselves. We knocked on the door of the neighbors on our landing, they weren't at home, they had gone downstairs to watch. Their child let us in the apartment and went to tell his parents. We had been friendly with them all the years that we lived there. They came upstairs and said that they couldn't hide us, they were afraid, it would be better if we went to the technical school, since that's where the soldiers were quartered. That hadn't even occurred to us. Technical Vocational School No. 49 was right next to our building.

The mob didn't touch our building. It moved toward the condominium building and toward Building 2B. We went in the other direction. We got to the School safely. There were many soldiers there. The entire gym was cov¬ered with their cots. The soldiers had clubs and white metal shields, and they had helmets and protective vests. There were already some other Armenian families at the School, they had arrived before us. We appealed to the captain for assistance, we told about what was happening in our block that people were attacking the Armenian apartments. We said to the captain: "Can't your soldiers do anything to help the Armenians?" He answered that the Azerbaijanis were suffering there—he meant in Karabagh—and that we were suffering here. And added that they didn't have orders to get involve in these affairs, these events.

We couldn't understand it. Something like that was going on right next door, literally right next door, and they weren't interceding, weren't stop¬ping the mob. And the mob was wrecking and beating, savagely beating, uninhibited . . . The brutality would be hard to describe in writing, it's hard enough even to imagine it.

Of course, if the soldiers hadn't arrived that day there would have been more casualties. The Armenians would have perished. It was the soldiers who stopped the tragedy. But on that day, February 29, in our block the Melkumian family was killed, it was unbelievably sad . . . Later we learned from the neighbors that six people had been slaughtered. One of them had been visiting the family. It's very painful to recall it. And moreover it's insulting and incomprehensible, was there really no way to prevent it? School No. 49, where the soldiers were, was only 150 to 180 yards away from Building 2B, where the Melkumians lived. And not a thing was done to save them.

The soldiers helped us, they took us to the City Executive Committee at night, to a safer place. We lived under guard, no longer fearing for our lives. Later the soldiers took us, the Armenians, to the barracks, where they fed us and generally went to great lengths on our behalf. But all the same . . . But all the same it's insulting and incomprehensible that they were idle when the mob wrecked our block. Why in the world did it all happen?

October 4,1988 Yerevan

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■ IRINA GURGENOVNA MELKUMIAN

Born 1960 Hairdresser Beauty Salon No. 7

Resident at Building 2B, Apartment 21 Block 41A

Sumgait

The most frightful tragedy befell our family, the Melkumian family. It's very difficult for me to talk about it. Five members of our family died all at one time: the father of the family, my father-in-law, Sogomon Markarovich Melkumian; my mother-in-law, Raisa Arsenovna Melkumian; my husband, Eduard Sogomonovich Melkumian; my brother-in-law, Igor Sogomonovich Melkumian; and my sister-in-law, Irina Sogomonovna Melkumian. On that day, February 29, the Ambartsumian family was visiting us. Uncle Misha Ambartsumian died along with the members of my family. Altogether six people, in a matter of minutes ... I am one of the daughters-in-law of the Melkumian family, Eduard's wife. I have a daughter of three and a half, her name is Lilia. In a matter of minutes she lost her father, her grandfather, her grandmother, her uncle, and her aunt.

I'll begin my story on February 27. I worked the second shift that day, I had to be at work at three o'clock. I was walking past the store between the fourth and eight microdistricts, not far from our police precinct station. And in the door there I saw a young man who had been beaten, his entire face was bloody. I stopped for a moment and saw policemen running from the direction of the station. When he saw them he got scared and started to run. In Azerbaijani, one of them said, "Look, he's probably an Armenian." And they shouted at him, "What are you afraid of? Stop!" Some young Azerbaijani fellows were walking past and smiling: "Look at that coward, the Armenian, they beat him and he's running away!" Well I paused for a moment . . . and set off on my way to work. Four Armenians work in our salon, only the manager is an Azerbaijani. When I got to work I told the oth¬er women what I had seen, and there were some Azerbaijani customers sit¬ting there, and they said: "What do you want? Look at what you Armenians are doing in Nagorno Karabagh, demanding our land ..." Well that was the first I had seen or heard.

I finished my shift and in the evening my husband, Edik, came by to pick me up. The family would always get together at his parents' home on Saturday and Sunday. We had only recently obtained an apartment, but we hadn't yet moved in, we had just started fixing it up. We were temporarily living at my father's. My mother had died recently, six months before. Papa was alone, and we had moved into his place. Anyway, we went home, to Block 41 A. Right away my mother-in-law told us that my father-in-law had gone to a wedding and hadn't yet returned. She said she was concerned. Well just then Igor arrived, he and Edik left us and went to get their father. Five minutes hadn't passed when their father drove up all pale, saying, "I hadn't even finished parking at the entryway, and someone broke my rear window with a stone. I got out to look, and there was no one there; I looked around the other entryways, and there was nobody there, either. It was someone from our building. He says, "Where are Edik and Igor?" We tell him, "They went to get you." He says, "Why did you let them go? In town they're stopping Armenian cars and buses ..." Soon Igor and Edik returned and said the same thing: "We were driving past the fourth microdistrict and they were stopping buses, they tried to stop our car, too, and we barely got away." And I ask Edik, "Edik, how will we get home to Father's?" He says, "It's impossible, we'll spend the night here."

We almost didn't sleep at all that night. On Sunday morning my sister called, she lives in Microdistrict 6. She says, "A neighbor came to our apart¬ment and told us we should take off the name plate with our Armenian sur¬name on it." We took the one saying Melkumian off of our door, too. And we thought, Where could we go? What would happen? I called work and told them that I wouldn't be leaving the house. And the manager tells me, "Well no one's coming to work today, are you on strike or what? For some reason," he says, "of four Armenians not one is coming in to work." I said, "I'm afraid because of what's happening in town!" And our neighbor had come by, too, saying that we Armenians were beating their people in Kafan. Well we did not believe it. It just wasn't possible.

That day we didn't leave the house at all. At lunchtime some boys, around 12 or 13 years old, came into the yard. There was a red Zhiguli there, it belonged to Armenians. They turned it over. I thought, they're not going to stop at this. I called the police. Speaking Russian, I say, "There's an attack in Block 41 A, they're beating people." They answered, "Wait there, we're on our way." Ten minutes later I called again and this time I spoke Azerbaijani. And they said, "What, you again? You just called." I say, "Well why aren't you coming?" Again they tell me, "We're on our way." Well I called three times altogether, and on the third time they told me, "We're sick of you, don't call us anymore." I called once again, but no one answered. So the police didn't come, they didn't even drive by to scare them . . . Well by this time they had already finished overturning the car, and had left. There were men nearby, sitting there playing dominoes, and no one went up to them and asked them what they were doing. So the car stayed turned over. It was only that night that the owner put it back on its wheels.

That night we couldn't sleep either. We thought, can this really go on tomorrow? Although by that time the military was already in the city. We had seen armored personnel carriers, trucks, and tanks drive by. And the next day, the 29th, at eleven o'clock, there were 15 vehicles with soldiers in our block. They had clubs, and they even got out of the vehicles. We thought, well that's it, it's over . . . There was a tank right in the middle of the road. This was right next to our building. They were there about an hour, and we calmed down. My sister called and I told her, "There's a tank and soldiers right next to our building, right under our balcony, so don't worry." And an hour later they drove off. They left...

By that point nothing had happened to us. Before cars had been driving by honking their horns, they had some sort of signals: the drivers would stick their arms out the windows and honk, meaning leave the car alone, our people. When the soldiers left the horns started again.

My father-in-law said, "Let's go to the dacha. That'll be better." This was somewhere around four-thirty. We were just getting ready to leave when there was a knock at the door. We opened the door and it was the building manager for Block 41A. He came in and said, "Sogomon, where are you going?" And he saw that we were getting ready, that we had our coats on, and that the children were dressed . . . "Where are you going? If you go out you'll be killed, it's safer to stay at home." Well my father-in-law believed him. We didn't leave. We undressed the children. Just after he left, about 15 minutes later, there was pounding and kicking on our door: "Open up in there! We know you're in there!"

I completely forgot to mention that before they came to our place there was a pogrom of an Armenian apartment in another building, not far from ours. We pulled back the curtains slightly and saw a refrigerator and a tele¬vision being thrown off the fourth floor. That was right after the building manager had left. So he knew everything, he saw it. And then those bandits came in a huge mob. They had a flag. There was a car with a loudspeaker on it. And now someone was talking over it, rudely: "Get out of here! This is our land! Long live Azerbaijan!" We were afraid to look, but you could hear everything.

We didn't think that anything would happen to us. We thought they'd throw out our belongings, but we didn't think they would kill us. They'd come in, steal, even beat us, but they wouldn't kill us?! My father-in-law said, "Even if ... Even if they kill me, they probably won't touch you ... cer¬tainly," he said, "they wouldn't go that far? . . . We'll defend ourselves." And Edik says, "You, Karina, and Ira, take the children and go into that room."

There were 13 of us in the apartment. My father- and mother-, and sister-in-law; Edik and I and our Lilia; and Igor and Karina, and their two chil¬dren, they have two: Kristina is five, and Seryozha is four. So there were our three families, plus a fourth, the Ambartsumians: Uncle Misha, Aunt Zhasmen, and their daughter, Marina. The Ambartsumians had come over on the evening of the 28th. A mob had passed by their building, young men and boys 12 to 20 years old. They were asking, "Are there any Armenians here?" A neighbor woman had said, "Yes, on the first floor." Rocks had been unloaded for them all over town. They started hurling them in the windows. Then Uncle Misha took some boards they had in the apartment and boarded up the windows, they got their things together, something to wear, and came over to our place.

And at five o'clock in the afternoon they started pounding on our door. There wore many of them, very many. There was din, and shouting: "We know you're in there, open up!" They raced into the courtyard, and then into the entryway. And they were all wearing something dark. It wasn't coats, it wasn't... I don't know, maybe a uniform or something they all had on? All of them were wearing dark clothing.

When they started breaking down the door Edik said, "Go out on the bal¬cony!" Lilia and I, Karina and her children, and Zhasmen went out onto the balcony. We lived on the second floor. The attack came from the courtyard side, but on the street side there was no mob, there were only passersby. We shouted: "Help! We're being killed!" A Russian woman was walking past, and I was shouting to her. Well the Azerbaijanis looked up, and nothing, and the Russian woman looked up and said, "What can I do?" I said, "Call someone, have them come!" Well she went on by, I don't know if she went to call or not. Meanwhile, apparently, they had broken the door down. My sis¬ter-in-law ran up, she had been with them, with the men. Ira runs up and says, "What, can't you get over to the other balcony?" We wanted to get over to the neighbors' balcony. We lived in the third entryway, and from our bal¬cony we climbed over to a balcony in the second entryway. If it weren't for the grape vines, for the vine supports, we wouldn't have made it over. Even if my sister-in-law had helped us we wouldn't have made it. Zhasmen went first. Meanwhile they broke the door down. When we were climbing over there was shouting in the room ... I was going to go after Zhasmen. I could not make it. I got our child, and supported myself with one hand against the wall so as to climb over, and the child started to fall. Her T-shirt tore. I could feel something tearing. I couldn't hold her tightly. I look, no, she's falling, and I went back. I went back and Karina says, "If you can't get over then there's no way I can do it pregnant." Karina was pregnant. . . And then Ira runs up. I say, "Ira, I can't get over there." She immediately grabbed the child and helped me, I helped her, too, by holding her child. She carried the child over to the neighboring balcony, and then she helped me climb over there. She helped Karina with her two children, and then jumped back over. She went to help the men. Ira had had a knife in her hand. She ran up to us and said, "Well, come on, what, can't you get over?" She threw the knife to the floor of the balcony and started helping us.

There were seven people left in the apartment. When we went out to the balcony my father-in-law had an axe in his hands, and Edik had a metal chair leg, and Igor had one too. My mother-in-law was empty-handed, she was so pale . . . And Edik too, when we went out, was entirely pale, he was just white. And Igor . . . Well we all sensed . . . we already knew that they were going to kill us ... or wound us ... Karina even told Igor, "Let's say good-bye." But Igor said, "What are you saying?! Go . . . cross over, quick, onto the balcony!" And Edik was so pale, just white . . . And my mother-in-law was whiter than white. My father-in-law and Misha were standing next to the door, and we were in the room . . . Our last words were, "Let's say good-bye." Karina said that to Igor and Edik. Igor even cracked a grin, but Edik, pale, looked at me, and at the children, we had a premonition . . . These were our last words and our last moments ...

Father had an axe, Misha had something, I don't remember, I just don't remember . . . But he had something, too. I do remember that Edik had his coat on, and Igor had even put on a helmet. We had a motorcycle helmet. We even asked, "Igor, why are you putting on the helmet?" He said, "Well just in case, I'll have it on my head." And Edik had a hat on, too.

At the last moment, when we were crossing over, Karina and I turned our heads to Ira and said, "Ira, are you coming?" She says, "I'm not coming, I'm staying with my parents, you have children, you go over." We wouldn't have gone over ourselves if it hadn't been for the children. If it hadn't been for the children, we would have stayed too. It was for their sakes. Ira helped us. There were Zhasmen, Karina and her children, Lilia, and I—six of us, the six of us were there on our Azerbaijani neighbor's balcony. The balcony door was locked, we started knocking, and she came to the window and waved with her hand as if to say, "I won't let you in." And we said, "We're going to break the glass!" Anyway, she opened the door and let us in. She let us in, we were in the bedroom, and she started shouting for us to leave. She has two boys around 14 years old, and they started shouting, "We'll kill you our¬selves! Get out of here or we'll kill you!" At this point the neighbor's brother appeared. He had apparently been in the courtyard and seen them attacking us. All the neighbors were either in the yard or on their balconies watching. The neighbor whose apartment we crossed over to was named Sevil. She shouted, "Get out of here!" We started pleading, "Let the children stay, we'll leave." She wouldn't do it. Her brother chased out Zhasmen and Karina and her children, but I held back, in the corner, I was hiding there. He chased them out and came back into the room and saw me: "Oh," he said, "are you still here?!" I started pleading, "Maybe you'll hide us, maybe you were afraid before when there were a lot of us, but now it's just me and the child." He began shouting again, but I had no intention of leaving. He took me by the collar and forced me and the child out into the entryway.

And through the wall you could hear noise and shouting. I heard the voices of my father-in-law, Edik, and Uncle Misha .. . They were talking and shouting, apparently, about how to ... I don't know, how to get away or how to defend themselves . . . You could hear the voices of those animals, "Kill them, don't spare them!

So Sevil's brother threw me and the child out of her apartment. I was on the second floor in the neighboring entryway. I couldn't see Karina or Zhasmen. I figured that they had gone downstairs, but then I thought because of the children Karina wouldn't go downstairs. I went upstairs to the third floor and knocked . . . This whole time I heard noise and shouting-It was in our entryway, in the courtyard ....

There were two apartments on each landing in our building. They opened their doors and said, "No, get away!" We were the only Armenian family in the building. I went up to the fourth floor and knocked, and an Azerbaijani woman opened the door. I say, "Take the child, I'll leave, maybe one of my relatives will come for the child." She took the child, who was ... she was screaming, she screamed until she was just blue. She was crying so hard, Lilia, that I thought she wouldn't survive, because she was all blue. I handed her over. The neighbor took her and slammed the door. And I went back downstairs. I had already gone down two flights and was going to the courtyard, to my family. Then the woman opened her door again and said, "No, take your child, if they come knocking here she'll cry and they'll know it's not my child." Well I was no longer even thinking, I couldn't take any¬thing in, I was just so ... I just started going up to the fifth floor, thinking, well now what will I do? Now they're going to throw me and the child off the fifth floor. I thought, let them kill us in the courtyard ... In those moments, from the noise and shouts of "Kill them!" I realized that it was all over, that we were lost.

I went up to the fifth floor and knocked. I knocked and a man opened the door, I didn't even know where he was taking me. He led me into the bath¬room. And just then the power was shut off in our block; the telephones had been out since lunch.

I went into the bathroom and saw Karina and her children and Zhasmen there. And Lilia was sobbing terribly, she couldn't stop. The man closed the door to the bathroom and wouldn't open it, afraid that we would come out and look down from the balcony. From his accent you could tell that he was Lezgin, not Azerbaijani. Later he told us he was a Lezgin. "Calm the child," he said, "they may come up here and it'll go badly for us, too." Karina's chil¬dren are a little older and calmer, and they fell asleep. I couldn't calm Lilia down. The bathtub was full of water, and I got into the tub, rocking Lilia.

I didn't know if I should rock the child or ... There were shouts from the courtyard, such wild shouting, oh, it was terrifying! At one point we even knocked, saying, "Open up, we'll go out, we can't stand it!. .. We'll go to our family!" We heard Ira shouting. It didn't even sound like her voice, she shouted, "Oh, Mamma!" As we later found out, they had burned her alive. .. they stripped her ... or they had killed Mother first, and she saw it. It didn't even sound like Ira's voice shouting, but I recognized it immediately and said, "That's Ira!" I can't even describe her voice when she shouted, "Oh, Mamma!"

Later we learned how our family had died. A Russian man who lived in the next building gave testimony. He described it and made sketches when he was at the Procuracy. First they stripped my mother-in-law, she was an older woman, 52, they stripped her and dragged her downstairs, they dragged her, and took her to the basement, and in the basement they beat her, they beat her and tossed her aside, she was on the verge of death, and they thought she was already dead. And those 12- and 13-year old boys took sticks and beat her and beat her and beat her to death. That's what the Russian said. They beat her and then threw her into the basement. He said they beat Edik, my husband, with sticks and shovels. They had axes and some sort of special shovels, and some kind of knives, it was all homemade, it had all been specially prepared. He said, "They beat your husband, they hit him in the head with the shovel, and then they burned him." They burned him to the point that he couldn't even be recognized later. Only by scraps of his clothing. There were scraps of his pants and his shoes, and that was all. His second cousin, he lives in Jorat, Grisha, he identified him. 1 said, "Maybe it wasn't him?" He says, "You know, it was hard to recognize him, but it was he." They burned Ira, too. They took her clothes off . . . and burned her alive! He saw all of it, the Russian man, he was in the courtyard. Almost all the neighbors were in the courtyard. He said they stripped her and poured gasoline on her and burned her next to the streetlight. Grisha identified her, too, I don't know how, but he did. They found my father-in-law behind the building. When they were dragging him, he shouted to one of those guys in Azerbaijani, "What, are you too attacking me? You too want to kill me?!" That means it was someone he knew. He was 52. Igor lay in the yard, off to the side from Edik and Ira. He was completely beaten, his legs were half- burned, and there were burned spots on his face, evidently they had put cigarettes out on his face. They found Uncle Misha across the street. While he was defending himself, they killed my family. They had forced Uncle Misha out toward the road, over where the bus lot is. And that whole crowd, all those people, and the neighbors, went to watch him. They threw stones at him, and he sat and covered himself with his arms so they would not hit his head. There were a lot of them, then ran up to him, one had a shovel... they all had those shovels and equipment pieces, one of them had a really odd shovel, not rounded, but squared off, and sharpened. And with this shovel... he hit him in the head. They burned Uncle Misha alive, too.

Seven people had remained in the apartment, and they killed six. Only Zhasmen and Uncle Misha's daughter, Marina, survived.

The whole time we were locked in at our Lezgin neighbor's. We heard the shouts from the courtyard, and asked him through the door, "What's hap¬pening to our family?" He walked by and in Azerbaijani, said, "It's some¬thing horrible. I can't tell you." We said, "Open up, open up," but he wouldn't open the door.

He let us out when everything was quiet. It was dark. We asked, "What time is it?" He says, "I'm afraid even to light a candle, because no one has any lights on." Then he lit a match and looked. I had a watch, too: it was nine o'clock. He let us out an hour after it was all over, when they had all left and it had grown quiet; the pogrom and the killing had gone on for three hours. He said, "Come out, have a seat." Well we told him right away, "Let's look off the balcony." He said, "No, I won't let you out onto the balcony." He pushed us right from the bathroom into the room. We sat down on the couch. He had a wife and three children, two boys and a girl. He even told one of the boys, "Don't tell anyone that there were Armenians here in the bathroom ..." We were silent a while and then we said, "Tell us." He said, can't tell you, it was awful." He couldn't tell us! Well, we asked, "What should we do?" He answered, "I can't keep you until tomorrow morning, afraid, if you can, leave now, if the neighbors see you in the morning they'll give me away." And what if one of those animals, one of those sadists, was from our building?! "I'm afraid," he said, "I'm a Lezgin, and I'm very fright-ened. If you can, leave now." We were crying, "Where will we go?" We didn't have any real clothes on, we had run out in robes, and the children ... we were wearing indoor clothes, we ran out wearing what we had on. Karina said, "I'll stay with the children, and you and Zhasmen go to my brother's, have him drive us away from here." Her brother lived in the fourth microdistrict. Karina's children fell asleep on the couch, but not Lilia. Lilia simply couldn't calm down. Karina took her in her arms, but she wouldn't stay there. Then Karina said, "I'll go with Zhasmen. You stay with the chil¬dren, we'll go." That man gave Karina some shoes, his old raincoat, and his wife's old scarf. I said, "Karina, if you can't reach your brother's, go to our place in Microdistrict 4." My Papa lived in Microdistrict No. 4, too. I said, "Maybe he won't' be home. We have Russian neighbors, they're friends, you can go to their place, tell them to have someone come for us."

They put clothes on and left. I stayed with the three children. The man watched from the balcony, and said that they had already made it out to the street. Fifteen minutes passed and he said, "If they don't come back in an hour, you and the children have to leave, I can't keep you until morning." I said, "What are you saying?! I can't even walk, I can't even go down the stairs. How will I make it with three children? We don't have outdoor clothes on, they'll recognize us ... and the children are sleeping!" Lilia had fallen asleep by this time, too. He said, "I don't know, but if they're not back in an hour you'll have to leave."

About an hour and a half later a truck drove up. He looked out the bal¬cony and said, "A truck! They've come for you!" I say, "No, I'm afraid, it's probably those bandits again." He said, "I don't know, but that truck is prob¬ably coming for you." I told him, "I'm not leaving until I see for myself." I went out onto the balcony and looked: Zhasmen was getting out. With sol¬diers. I woke the children. But I couldn't walk. I said, "Help me!" He said, "No, you have to go down by yourself, go down before the soldiers get up to the fifth floor." "I can't." He asked again, saying, "No, you have to go by yourself, and hurry, before the soldiers get here." I took Lilia into my arms, and Seryozha too, and told Kristina, "Kristina, you're a big girl, let's go." She was frightened, and grabbed at my hem. I went out. . . and my legs gave way. When I remembered how I had come up the stairs, I... I imagined that I would now go out and see our family, our balcony ... I went down to the fourth floor. I sat down. I sat down, I could go no further. I see the soldiers coming up, about ten of them. Armed. They took the children, and helped me up with their arms. I couldn't stand up by myself. And I was thinking if so many people came for me, it meant something happened to my family, The soldiers said, "You've held out for so long, just hang on." Then they said, "When you go out, get right into the vehicle, don't look around! You might shot." So we went down to the first floor, and they stopped. Several sol-diers went out to look. Then I and the children, we were in the middle, they were surrounding us, got into the vehicle. I looked at our balcony anyway: the windows were all broken, tatters of clothes were hanging there. Something was still burning next to the condominium building, and there was smoke coming from near the streetlight, too. It was Ira and Edik. But at the time I thought it was burning furniture ... It was cold, it was drizzling They pushed me into the vehicle and said, "We told you not to look." Zhasmen was already inside. There were other Armenians, too, from Microdistrict 4. The Armenians were being evacuated. They took us to the City Party Committee. We stood on the square in the rain, without clothes on. There were many guard dogs near the City Party Committee. We stood in line for 20 minutes until it was our turn to go in. We went in to the first floor, and there was no room at all, you couldn't even get your foot in there! We ran into a neighbor from Papa's microdistrict, he took the children into his arms and said, let's go upstairs, we're in a room upstairs. We walked upstairs to the fourth floor. What am I saying, walked upstairs? It probably took us half an hour to make our way up there, because there were people on the stairs, sitting, lying, standing, any way they could. There were about 30 people in the room, if not more, children and adults. A woman gave us her spot on the floor. We put the children to bed. Someone gave Karina their place on the floor, too. There were infants sleeping on the table, about five of them, really small ones, 2 or 3 months.

Despite everything we still hoped, we still had the fainiest hope that our family was still alive, only wounded. Although when we were on the fifth floor, besides Ira's cries we also heard the bandits shouting, "We've killed the five of them! Look—blood! We have Armenian blood on our hands!"

That same night the soldiers went around the floors of the City Party Committee asking people where their relatives were. We wrote about ours, too: Karina's brother, my father and my sister. The soldiers returned and said, "They weren't there, but the neighbors told us they're in a safe place."

On the morning of the 1st the children woke up and were hungry, they asked for water and tea, but no one had anything. We went around asking who had what, who had brought things from home. Then the soldiers began feeding us. On March 2 around evening time my Papa found us. He and my sister's family had hidden in Jorat. I could see it all in his eyes, he started crying, he already knew what had happened to our family. Papa's apartment was completely burned, too.

On March 3 we were taken to the village of Nasosny under armed guard. Things were better there, of course, and safer: no one would attack us, noth-ing could harm us there.

Already during those days I was often thinking about why specifically our family was treated so brutally and savagely. Perhaps because we fought for ourselves, defended ourselves as best we could? Indeed there had been four healthy men in there. But perhaps it was merely hatred, malice. We weren't poor, after all. But maybe someone gave us away—that Russian said that my father-in-law recognized someone in the gang ...

No other Armenians lived in the building besides us. They didn't go into any other entryway, they came right to our place, right up to the second floor, and didn't even knock on the neighbors' door. They knew that we were living on the second floor and in apartment 21. We had even removed the name plate. Someone sent them. And there was the building manager. He had come to our apartment. What were his intentions? "Don't leave, it's safer to stay at home." But when he was walking over he must have seen them stealing and throwing things down. That means he knew; he told us to stay home on purpose. He had never come to our place before. I told the investigator about the building manager. He says, "We asked him, too, what proof do you have?" I said, "The proof is that he came at four-thirty, and fifteen minutes later the attack began." He said, "Maybe he had good intentions, and genuinely thought that you'd be safer at home." He doesn't deny that he came to our apartment, and he gave the same time, too: four-thirty. I argued with the investigator, I was overwrought, and said, "Torture him like they show on television." He said, "What do you think I should do, smash his fingers in the door? Is that what you think I should do? Did you see him in the gang? You don't have any proof. Maybe the man had good intentions."

So that was how our lives were turned upside down. We had a family—but no more.

We had lived in friendship. Not long before that we had gotten an apart¬ment. My father-in-law said, "Now Igor's got a place and moved in, and you, Edik, have a place too. Now we'll fix it up. You'll sleep at your place, but eat your lunches and spend your birthdays and holidays at our place. Only sleep at your place, because I have to have you and my grandchildren around. I'd like to come home and have you already here." He was very kind to us, his daughters-in-law. He would call us over, smiling: "Irina, Karina, come over here. If your mother-in-law says anything wrong to you, you let me know." Well Karina and I would always laugh. He often told his wife, "Your words are heavy." Well he'd say it in Armenian, meaning that if she said anything to us our feelings would be hurt, but if he said something, they wouldn't be. He told her to keep quiet, that he would say anything that needed to be said. We, the two daughters-in-law, called him Papa, and our children called him dedulia [Gramps.] And my mother-in-law had taken the place of my mother. He'd come home from work and say, "Why are you all hanging around here? Air pollution get to you? Let's go to the dacha!" He couldn't get along an hour without his grandchildren, without us. He posi¬tively wanted all of us there in the evenings. That was on weekdays, and on Saturdays and Sundays he wanted us to come first thing in the morning, or after work, and stay till evening, till midnight.

At home we spoke Armenian, sometimes we spoke Russian. But my father- and mother-in-law would always speak Armenian among them¬selves and with us. We always had guests over, relatives or friends. At the able my father-in-law would always say, "Stay for the week!" That was his favorite thing to say, and he'd also say, "Eat, drink, and be merry!" Mother—mother was heavy-set, a short, red-cheeked woman, she loved to knit things for her grandchildren, she could knit very well. She knew how to sew, too. She was, you know, a calm woman. She preferred to be silent, lis-tening. But how she loved to laugh! Someone would be telling something and you'd hear her voice, her laughter.

Ira was 27, she worked at a pharmacy. She was single. She resembled her mother, she was short, but she was thin. How she would help us! She was the housewife. Her mother worked, she'd get home at six in the evening, but Ira got home at four, and all the housework fell on her. She loved to prepare meals, and she'd do the wash, and everything else so that things would be in order around the house. How she loved to straighten up!

Igor resembled his mother too: stocky and calm. True, he was tall and strong. He loved to relax. He'd come home after work and sit, but not Edik, Edik couldn't do that! He'd come home and always be doing something, be involved with something or other. He used to work at a tailor's, he'd come home and immediately be doing whatever people needed, something would have come unstitched or someone would need a button. He was a tailor before he went into the Army, and after that he did furniture covers. Edik served in Afghanistan. In 1978 he served for about two months off in the Baltic Republics, and then he was sent to Afghanistan. He was there almost two years. He told how hard he found it to be in the Army, but all the same he felt he had to do his duty. He told of being attacked by the Afghans. But he wasn't wounded in Afghanistan, he came back all in one piece, as the phrase goes, without a scratch, but here, on Soviet territory, he was killed, and so brutally! Even .. . even the fascists probably wouldn't have done that, kill and then burn beyond recognition. If it had happened in Afghanistan it wouldn't be quite so painful, but here, on Soviet territory, in our country, for something like that to happen. They had to be sadists, animals, to do some¬thing like that.

Edik also loved Lilia because she resembled him. He always said, "She's my daughter." My father-in-law named her. We didn't want to hurt his feel¬ings, so we named her as he wished; he liked that very much. When Edik would come home from work he would always bring her something, a toy or something else. He would open the door and say, "Lilia, come see what Papa brought you!" And she got used to it: "Papa's home, Papa, what did you bring me?" If he went anywhere he would always take her with him. And in the car she always had to sit up front, next to her father. She would get in and immediately turn on the tape player. Edik always said, "There's my daughter for you, she loves music." He played the accordion very well. At Detskiy Mir, the toy store, he would usually buy her a toy piano, or accordion, or a drum. Our Lilia had a birth defect, she was born with a dislo¬cated hip, and the doctors recommended either a cast or a brace. They said if she didn't wear a brace she'd have a limp. Of course we took this to heart: our first child, a girl, and she'd have a limp. We immediately got a referral and took her to the Traumatology Institute. The child was around five months old, and when she was 14 months the brace was removed. We wait ed so long, it was so hard. My mamma was still alive, she helped us. They took off the brace and told us she should be walking in a month. And when they took the brace off and then held her by her hand, she took her first steps. Edik said, "Watch her, watch her, in case she starts to limp ..." She started walking at 15 months. We were so happy! She started walking,and she didn't limp. She was completely healed. How we celebrated! How many guests were there!

Several days before February 29 Edik had bought her Finnish coveralls, and the marauders took even those. She had had a simple pin in her hat, it had cost four rubles, and they took that, too. So they took her coveralls, and her hat-pin, apparently they must have thought it was gold, but they left her hat.

On March 10 Karina and I were taken home. The investigator was there, and there were armed soldiers, one stood guard in the entryway, a second stood at the door, and a third was on the balcony the whole time we were in the apartment. It was awful and eerie to go inside, everything was over¬turned, and all the dishes had been smashed. And how they had destroyed the furniture! You had to have time to chop it up like that. They even broke the mirror in the bathroom. The lighting fixtures had been torn down. There had been meat in the freezer, they broke the freezer and took the meat, they even took the meat!

We buried our five people—I don't remember what date it was—in Baku, at Volchi Vorota Cemetery. Before that Karina and I had been summoned to the City Party Committee. We had hoped that someone from our family was still alive, for Edik's friend, Gamlet, a photographer, said that Edik was in serious condition, he was in the hospital. He was only trying to calm me down, but I went on hoping all the same. Someone from Moscow spoke with us, I don't recall his name. He started reading off a list: Sogomon Melkumian, Raisa Melkumian, Igor Melkumian, Irina Melkumian, and when he got to Eduard Melkumian, I thought he was going to say that they were all alive, or in serious condition. But he said, "Died." Then he said, "The funeral is today, your relatives are expecting you."

We didn't see their faces, the caskets were closed. About 20 of our rela¬tives were with us. There was Armenian music playing. They buried the parents, and at their heads, the three children. We weren't even allowed to finish mourning: "Hurry up, hurry up." There were people from the Council of Ministers there, from Moscow. And there was a police car. Karina and I were saying, "It was they who did this!" Our relatives told us, "Be quiet, stop saying that." They feared for us.

It was raining. There was a very strong wind. They put up five metal crosses. There were no names on them. The weather was so bad, they said they'd put them on later ...

June 3,1988 Ararat Boarding House Near the Village of Arzakan Hrazdan District Armenian SSR

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■ KARINE BORISOVNA MELKUMIAN

Born 1963

Teacher

Boarding School No. 1

Resident at Building 2B, Apartment 21

Block 41A

Sumgait

This is my fate: I had everything, we were a happy family, and now, at 25, I've become a widow, I'm left to raise my three children alone; the third, not yet two months old, was born in Yerevan. Igor and I had thought that if it was a girl we would call her Raisa, after my mother-in-law, and if it was a boy, we'd call him Arsen, after Igor's grandfather. I had a girl, and I, without Igor, named her Raisa, in honor of her dead grandmother.

Our family and the Melkumians had been neighbors since 1965. Igor and I grew up together, we were friends from childhood on. We got engaged when I was 16. In 1981, when I was 18, we were married. Two children were born to us in Sumgait. My daughter is now 6 years old, her name is Kristina, and my son, Seryozha, is four and a half.

First I shall tell what happened on February 27. That day on my way home from work I passed Lenin Square, where about 1,500 people had gath¬ered. There were Komsomol members there, and Pioneers [Children's orga¬nization], and there were both Party members and non-Party people there as well. All of them were shouting, "There's no room for Christians here!" and "When we finish with the Armenians, we'll go after the Russians!" And some even cried out, "Death to the Armenians!" Absurd rumors had been circulating about town. I became frightened. I came home, breathless, and told about everything I had seen downtown. My family couldn't believe it. My father-in-law, Sogomon Markovich Melkumian, wasn't home, he was at an Azerbaijani wedding. By eight o'clock he returned and had barely fin-ished parking the car when his rear window was smashed with a rock. He got out of the car but there was no one there. Well I was telling him every thing, too, and he said, "What, is there no longer any government? That same day Igor said, "Papa, something terrible is happening in the city." And he said, "We'll stay at home, no one will drive us from our own home.

The day passed. On February 28, that was Sunday, we didn't go out. We called our relatives and asked them all kinds of questions, and they all said the same thing. Sometime around evening they started smashing the car of an Armenian from the neighboring building. Ira, my brother-in-law's wife, and I called the police: they're wrecking a car, help. We called and called and nonetheless they didn't come and they didn't do anything.

On February 29, on Monday, even though there were troops in the city, we were afraid to go to work. I called the school: I had the keys to the class¬room. I told the senior teacher that he should send someone for the keys, I wouldn't be coming in. He agreed, and even said, "Fine, don't come in, we understand what's going on in town, don't come in."

Before that, on the 28th, the Ambartsumian family came over. They came to my father-in-law and said, "Uncle Sergey, they broke our windows, bad things are happening in town." Uncle Misha Ambartsumian even said, "With my own eyes I saw them chasing naked girls through the streets. I don't know," he said, "we should leave town." Well on the 29th we were already trying to decide where we should go, thinking we'd go to our dacha. We got a couple of bags together, clothes, food, the bare essentials. And then somewhere around 4:45 the building manager came by and said, "Uncle Sergey, the situation in town is bad, don't go out." My father even opened up to him and said, "Maybe we'll drive to the dacha, it'll be safer there." "No," he said, "it'll be worse there, you'll be safer at home." He said don't be afraid, if something happens I'll send people to save you.

After he left about 15 minutes passed and about 200 people burst into our courtyard. All of us were at home at the time: Igor and I and our two chil¬dren, Ira and Edik and their daughter, my sister-in-law Ira, and my mother-and father-in-law. And the Ambartsumian family, there were three of them, Uncle Misha, Zhasmen, and their daughter Marina. Now when they started breaking down the door I remember Edik and Igor told us, "Go in that room and close the door. Close the door and calm the children so they won't hear that there's anyone home." The children started crying. Suddenly Ira, my brother-in-law's wife, suggested, "Let's run out onto the balcony." We—the two daughters-in-law and the children, and Zhasmen and Marina-raced out onto the balcony. My sister-in-law and my mother-in-law ran in and said, "Quick, over to the other balcony, or they'll kill you all." We lived on the sec¬ond floor. We needed to cross over from our balcony to our neighbor's. At first we couldn't manage it. The balcony looked onto the street. At that time people were coming home from work, and many just stood there, watching. I pleaded and begged: "Please, call someone, have someone come!". I even started shouting. "I'll throw down the children, I'll throw them down, you catch them and take them somewhere, so at least the children will survive." Either they were afraid or ... I don't know what. They looked as though they were watching a movie. Some of them started throwing stones at us. I'll say it again, these weren't the bandits, these were people from the other part of the building and from our entryway, they were just regular people, passersby. A bus even stopped. I remember a man's voice saying the Armenians were climbing over to the other balcony. Ira, my sister-in-law, helped us get the children over there. I was pregnant, about seven months pregnant. No, it wasn't yet seven, it was six and a half. I climbed over too. I think Zhasmen went first; you know, I just don't remember it all that well. Zhasmen went first, I think, and Edik's wife Ira and I had the children, and they were all screaming and crying. My Kristina said, "Mamma, don't throw us over the balcony, we're afraid!" Lilia was crying, and Kristina and Seryozha were crying too. Kristina didn't even want to climb over. She shouted, "I'm staying with Grandmother, I'm staying with Grandma!" She loved her grandma, more than she loved me. And my mother-in-law shout¬ed, "Oh no, Kristina's still there, she's still there, save Kristina, too!" Ira helped us climb over, with Kristina coming last. Ira helped us and went back inside.

We started pounding on the neighbor's balcony door. I pounded with my fist, "Sevil, open the door, open it, please!" She didn't open it. "No, go away, go anywhere, go, I'm not opening the door." She was our neighbor, we were friends, we never refused her anything, ever! And apparently she thought we were going to break the windows, and she opened the door. She opened it and said, "Karina, Karina, go away, go anywhere, just don't stay here, they'll kill us, too, because of you." I begged, "Please, at least take the chil¬dren, we'll leave, we'll go back." "No," she said, "you have to leave." Her sons ran in, one had a knife. Sevil's brother, he's around 18, shouted at us: "Get out of here, leave, I'll kill you with this knife!" I became terrified, I took the children and went out in the entryway and went down a few stairs. I went down and heard a loudspeaker. It was in the courtyard: "The Armenians must be killed, they've taken all the best places, all the best apartments!" One of them said, "Let the Armenian blood flow, none of them should survive!" When I heard that I went upstairs and started knocking on doors. No one opened their door for me! Not on the third floor, or the fourth. 1 couldn't see Zhasmen any longer. Ira came upstairs later. I even thought that they had let her stay, that they would save her.

My head was spinning. They were killing my family, and here I was in the next entryway with two children. Seryozha was four, and Kristina was five and a half. They were crying, "Mamma, we're scared!" They were so frightened that I didn't even know how to calm them, should I try to calm them or myself? It was awful. But on the third floor a man did open his door. I asked, "Open up, let me inside!" He opened the door slightly and said, "No!" "No" and that was it! He said it so sternly: "No!" I went up to the fifth floor. I pounded my fists on the door with all my might. He opened up, the man of the house, and stood there, looking at me. I was ready to get down on my knees. I almost did get down on my knees. "Please, I beg of you, at least take the children." He wasn't an Azerbaijani, he was a Lezgin. I don't even know how, but he let me inside. And when I went in, Zhasmen was already there. Two minutes hadn't passed when Ira and Lilia came up the stairs. Lilia was crying. He didn't want to open the door. And again I started pleading, "Please, open the door, it's our Ira and Lilia! Open the door!" And he said, "No, I'm afraid." I said again and again, "Please, open the door, please!" He looked at me. He looked at me for a long time and then opened the door after all. Ira came in with Lilia. We threw ourselves into each other's arms, crying. Then the man locked us into the bathroom. We sat there for a long time. Through the door he told us, "Calm the children, and calm yourselves down, too."

Calm down? This man was hiding us, but what of our family? When I was still in our apartment I had sensed that none of us would come out of this alive. I said, "Igor, Edik, let's say farewell." And Edik turned around and looked at me as if to say, is that some kind of joke? All the same I thought they would kill all of us. Igor looked at me, too . . . But it was already too late! They started pounding on the door, Igor was standing next to the door. Before that he had told us, "Go lock yourselves in that room and sit tight." He thought we were in the room. But before we went out onto the balcony we went to them: "Edik, Igor, let's say farewell." Igor didn't think we could climb over to the other balcony. And we did get over there, and I myself can't believe we were able to save ourselves.

Igor put on a helmet, and Edik had his coat on, and he put on a fur hat. All the men—Igor, Edik, their father, and Misha Ambartsumian—they all stood next to the door. They thought they would pound on it a while and leave. But from the other side of the door they ordered in Azerbaijani: "Open the door!" We were all silent, waiting. Someone outside the door said, "They're home, they're in there, break down the door!" And I remember my father-in-law whispering, "They're going to break it down now, it's coming down now..."

He had something in his hands, I think it was a knife: if they got in, we were going to defend ourselves. In the hall near the door there were two metal chair legs. From outside the door they said, "We're counting to five, open up!" But we were all quiet, we didn't answer them. We made like no one was home. We figured they'd leave, they'd get tired and leave. My father-in-law had said, "It's not possible they'd come into my home. How can that be? Everyone knows us, all of Sumgait knows our family, we are on good terms with everyone." And indeed a day did not pass that there wasn't an Azerbaijani guest at our table. We had a nice dacha, everyone would get together there often, Azerbaijanis liked being with us there too. But now we had to save ourselves, we had to flee from our own home. Ira, I remember, said, "I'm not leaving here, my brothers and my parents are here, I'm going to fight alongside them." That's just what she said. She picked up a knife and said, "If they open the door and come into the apartment then I'm going to fight alongside my family, I'm not going anywhere."

We were at Sevil's when they broke into our apartment. We heard fight¬ing and shouting. The noise was terrible. And when we hid upstairs on the fifth floor at the Lezgin's apartment, you could hear everything up there, too. Even Ira's voice. I remember her calling her mother several times. She called her for a long time ... I started pounding on the door in the bath¬room: "Open the door, what are they doing to Ira, who's shouting, that's Ira shouting, that's her voice!" But the Lezgin said, "It's nothing, calm down, no, it's not in your apartment." He was lying to me so I'd calm down. Two hours went by and the Lezgin opened the door and said, "Karina, Igor got away, calm down. He ran away." He saw Igor break away and run off with his own eyes. They killed him outside, next to the building.

While we were in the bathroom I experienced every possible human ter¬ror. The way Ira shouted! She shouted, "Save me, Mamma, save me! . . . Mamma, Mamma!" She repeated it several times. There was a wild din There were very many people there, all of them shouting, all of them bellow¬ing, howling, whistling—you just can't imagine what was going on, what the roar was like.

Apparently, after they had killed Ira those murderers came into the entry-way where we were hiding and came upstairs, all the way up to the fifth floor. I don't know if they were just looking for any Armenians or for us in particular, but I think they were looking for us because when we had climbed over the balconies someone on the street was saying that the daugh¬ters-in-law were climbing over the balconies. And after we heard Ira we heard them coming up the stairs in the entryway and hammering on the doors. I thought those were our last moments, and started saying good-bye to my children, kissing them. They were sleeping. I woke them up: "Kristina! Seryozha, wake up!" And I tell Ira: "Ira, if something happens, we'll throw ourselves off the balcony." We were on the fifth floor. Apparently our Lezgin neighbor had opened the door too, because later he said, "I opened the door and told them there were no Armenians inside." And after they all left our neighbor went out on the balcony himself to see: they were gone.

We weren't friends with those Lezgin neighbors, we only knew each oth¬er from the building. But the people we were friends with wouldn't even consider hiding us.

The Lezgin let us out of the bathroom. They had a candle burning. He said, "Karina, there're no lights on in our block." The whole block was dark, the whole block! It's a huge block, too. The Lezgin said, "I'm afraid to keep you until morning, I'm afraid of the neighbors, they might kill me for saving you." I said, "What are you saying, we'll leave now. But we can't just leave with the children in the middle of the night. Give us time to find somewhere else to hide." He said, "Well OK, go look." I asked Ira, "Ira, do you want to go?" Ira said, "No, I'll stay with the children, Karina." I said, "Fine, then I'll go." Zhasmen and I went downstairs together. It was very dark. No one was in the courtyard. It was dark, pitch black. I was afraid to go out at after sev¬en, Igor always met me after work and accompanied me home, I never went out alone. And now here I was out in the middle of the night and after a slaughter like that, too. It was probably after eleven. Later I called the board¬ing school and my director answered. He said, "Karina, where are you?" I didn't know, I was calling from a public phone outside and didn't know where I was. I got confused and hung up the receiver. From him I only found out what time it was, I asked him, "What time is it?" He said 11:20, I think, but I don't really remember. So anyway Zhasmen and I went out into the courtyard. I look and see what appears to be a person not far from our apartment. And there was the smell of something burnt. I became horrified. I looked at the corpse for a long time. It was either Ira or Edik. I only saw one of them, Zhasmen grabbed my hand and squeezed it: "Hurry up, let's go . . . Hurry up, come on, what are you turning around for?" I turned around and saw a large truck, it must have belonged to the bandits, because they came to kill us in a truck like that. We lived in the third entryway, and that truck was next to the fourth. We walked quickly, holding hands. I thought, if I go to the police then they'll put me away. I couldn't count on them. Before I reached the police station I saw a military vehicle. We went over and I said, "Soldier, in Block 41, I don't know if they've killed people or injured them—we need to save them!" And he said, "Go to the police station and tell them everything." I said, "I'm afraid to go there, I'm afraid of them." He said, "Don't be afraid."

We went to the police and they wrote down the address, and the military vehicle went to our building. I didn't go with them, they left me at the police station. I gave the addresses of my mother and my brothers so that they'd rescue them, too. I didn't know where they were or what had happened to them.

After a while they brought my children and Ira and Lilia. First they took us to the KGB, that was at two or three in the morning. Then around five they took us to the City Party Committee, and there were very many people there, very many. I was pregnant and was wearing nothing but a dress. Seryozha was only wearing a shirt, and Kristina had a little dress on. No coat, no boots, nothing! And we sat there for three whole days in the City Party Committee.

The Lezgin had told me that Igor escaped. And I thought that he was probably alive. But then after two and a half days, they took us, the Armenians of Sumgait, to Nasosny. On March 6 some people from the Central Committee came and told us, "Karina, Ira, we need you, come with us to the City Party Committee." My Mamma had come to Nasosny, and she had been looking for me for six days. Mama, my brothers, and my uncle. We went to the City Party Committee and waited there in the courtyard. I was wearing nothing but a dress, and Ira had only a dress on as well. There was a strong wind on March 6. An hour went by. And then one of the func¬tionaries told us, "Karina, Ira, gather your courage. Would you like to go to the burial?" I said, "What, did they really kill all of them?!" He said, "Let's look." He had a long list, and he started reading them off: Igor Melkumian, my husband, Eduard Melkumian, my brother-in-law, Irina Melkumian, my sister-in-law, Sogomon Melkumian, my father-in-law, and Raisa Melkumian, my mother-in-law. He read off all their names and said, "Get in the car, let's go to the burial."

We buried our family. I couldn't believe it at the time, I couldn't conceive of it or imagine it... And even now I think how shall I explain it to my chil¬dren when they're older?

My children were very attached to their father and their grandfather and grandmother. Kristina didn't love me the way she loved her grandfather and grandmother, they spoiled her. Kristina would always announce, "My grandma is better than anyone!" Now, even though she is getting used to my Mother, it's difficult for her, and once she told her: "You're a bad grandmoth¬er."

I don't know why, I asked her, "Kristina, where's Papa?" and she said, "They killed him." She knows, she understands it all. And recently I scolded Seryozha severely for something, and he started shouting at me, "When Papa comes I'm going to tell him everything!"

July 26,1988

Nairi Boarding House

Near the Village of Arzakan

Hrazdan District

Armenian SSR

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Примером геноцида (который квалифицируется как "Действия совершаемые с намерением уничтожить полностью или частично какую-либо национальную, этническую, расовую или религиозную группу как таковую") является армянская резня в Сумгаите.

Журнал "Век XX и Мир",М, 1988, № 12, с. 8.

“Виновники, подстрекавшие людей к погромам в Сумгаите, в данный момент носят в карманах депутатские мандаты и сидят в Милли меджлисе''.

Ильяс Исмайлов, председатель партии "Адалят'', в период сумгаитских погромов 1988г. занимавший должность генпрокурора Азербайджанской ССР (газета ''Зеркало'', 21 февраля 2003г.).

"Тогда, в феврале-марте 1988 года, начала писаться непредсказуемая, неожиданная, дикая, кровавая, местами предельно подлая страница Отечества и моей личной биографии. Самое печальное заключается в том, что подлость, нечистоплотность, неразборчивость в выборе средств проистекали от людей, занимавших высшие посты в государстве... В Сумгаите пахнуло средневековым садизмом, звериной, нечеловеческой жестокостью, часто перемешанной с глупостью..."

Александр Лебедь, " За державу обидно".

http://sumgait.info/

**************************************************

От себя хочу поблагодарить всех, кто помог с коррекцией и публикацией английского перевода книги Самвела Шахмурадяна.

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