Sehrguey Ogoltsoff
The Blog
"Well, OK. Do it, Peccy. 'Power Button's on!' Come on, babe!"
The upper valve, screechy-and-slow moved downward…
* * *
Bottle #19: ~ 1992, Full of Worries and Strife ~
When keeping to the raw facts of life, Abulfaz Gadirgulu ogly was just one more Aliev, but if you are a dissident then your vocation obliges to somehow be different, which is a hard nut to crack where any other (okay, fine, every third) guy around is also Aliev (even at my hitch in a construction battalion of the Soviet Army our detail's commander was Corporal Alik Aliev).
Or again that same Deputy Chairman of the KGB of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan and, simultaneously, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, Geidar Aliev, and all his relatives at each and every post of prominence – Alievs as well.
In 70’s Abulfaz all of a sudden spoke up (and rather hotly) on Lenin and the USSR, allowing himself discernibly denigrating tinges in the spectrum of intonations, for which rebellion he got 1 (one!) year of imprisonment.
In the USSR for the like oratory no one got off hook without doing 10-year stretch, but the rebel bore the same surname as Geidar.
So, 12 months later Abulfaz got freed, reinstated in the position of a junior researcher at a linguistic institute, and became the one and only dissident in all of Azerbaijan.
After the collapse of the USSR, he hurriedly discarded his family name, dubbed the Turkish-sounding 'Elchibey' next to the 'Abulfaz', and headed the forces of opposition styled as The Popular Front.
The Shushi capture on May 8, 1992 was deeply resented by The Popular Front.
In the morning on May 15, they presented their ultimatum to President Mutalibov – by 3 pm to get effing off his effing position.
With no response got by the appointed time, they shoot their unopposed rounds around the Supreme Council and then entered the Presidential Palace as well but found no Mutalibov there, who had already fled the country of his own accord, for which deed he is praised up till now as the president who had resigned staging no bloodshed.
And that, by the bye, presents a good example to follow, but will they ever learn anything? Ugh!
On June 7, Elchibey was elected to the presidency and the Karabakh conflict developed into a large-scale war. Hither-thither. They surrender a village then capture back its ruins, surrender the ruins then recapture them back in even worse conditions.
“The Ministry of Defense carried out round-ups in cities taking away youths from their homes, stopped city route buses to arrest young men and send them to the front line.
Different organizations, including Helsinki Civil Assembly, were turned to by complaining parents: in the morning their son left home for work (college, visit, date), never came back, they reported to the police, two days later got a notice:
'…your son bravely perished fighting for his Fatherland.'
Azerbaijani political scientist Zardusht Alizade"
(source:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AD%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%87%D0%B8%D0%B1%D0%B5%D0%B9,_%D0%90%D0%B1%D1%83%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%84%D0%B0%D0%B7_%D0%93%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B3%D1%83%D0%BB%D1%83_%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BB%D1%8B)
The PC by the SC of the RMK was relocated to the former Regional Committee of the CPSU building, floor 3. The job of analytic did piss me off at the BBC World Service who obviously had no intentions to help me in the short waves range. Stranded, seeing no assistance from them, was I doing my professional duties. If the Karabakh conflict at least once a month was mentioned by those snobs – Hallelujah! While my position called for turning in a solid-looking report to the Supreme Council every month, Hallelujah or no Hallelujah—each month, be you dead or reanimated—while those darn BBC chatters kept speaking of nothing except for the cricket matches at the New Zealand Championship. How that for mass-media employees’ solidarity, eh?
And only dear Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, helped me kindly out when she came to Baku for signing a treaty between the Azerbaijani government and 2 companies, the British BP and the Norwegian Statoil, on development of two oil fields in the Azerbaijani zone in the Caspian sea.
Because of that her visit, they were mentioning our conflict for three days but then again drifted back to cricket and soccer matches.
Thus, I became a rear office-rat and at the moment of exploding GRAD rounds I ran into the corner, sat on my haunches and watched the glass in the window panes arching out into the room like a skiff sail and backward, without breaking though, obviously firmer than in the paper’s editorial office or maybe because of the height – it was the third floor after all.
The shelter in the basement (the hospital got removed someplace else already), I never used because of pride and being too lazy – three floors down then three floors back. For which reason, during bombardments, although scared, I kept to the PC Backroom…
But then I learned a way to determine time and direction of forthcoming offensives. It’s just a cinch, whenever in the Russian mass-media one of the conflicting sides stated their complains about the enemy’s attack to one or another village, that served a clear-cut indication that in a couple of days they’d start an offensive from that very village and now it would be the counterpart's turn to complain…
To the front line I went only once. It was the village of Drmbon which hadn’t been surrendered and re-captured yet, so the houses were still in place, abandoned for the most part.
The commander talks over his walkie-talkie (the Diaspora's present to the field commanders) in a reluctant manner, a score of fighters, also tired. One soldier obviously from Armenia, you always could make them out by the black cotton uniform, some posh rags until got dusted thoroughly. GRAD's rare booms at the horizon.
Video camera operator Benic shot an interview and off we went back to Stepanakert.
Two-hour ride along the junk scattered on the roadside – discarded baby perambulators, trunks, kits and the like jetsam. Especially at the uphill stretches. It was the moment of Mardakert City surrender, one day after the fleeing refugees walked from there about sixty kilometers.
The long column it was, on reaching Stepanakert they walked thru the city for about an hour, no less. Walking and walking.
They spent the night in the Region Executive Committee building lying on the carpet runners of all the four floors. Babies squealing, folks panicking. And in the morning the wave moved on. The Lachin corridor to Armenia had been secured already, which meant another fifty kilometers to the border.
On the bridge over the border-line river they were met by the Armenian cordon under the command of a dissident who had just returned from exile to fight for the presidency. He started yelling at the mujiks that they were cowards and did not defend their native town but fled. Then they collected the gold earrings from the refugee womenfolk and let the column pass to Armenia.
I know his family name, the cordon commander's, yet won’t let it out, being too disgusted to even pronounce it. Besides, it’s possible there happened decent people among his ancestors. The bastard had shitted all over his family name. But later he still was popping up in the Yerevan political life with his goatee, for a long period…
Another ripping surprise was served by the cable from Satenic, “Departing from Moscow to Yerevan, flight…” (the number I cannot recollect).
At the cash desk of the SC I got my salary for three months in advance, with Guegham’s assistance for the occasion, 600 Soviet rubles.
By that time all the former Soviet republics had introduced currencies of their own already and only here remained a noticeable lag in the form of Lenin’s bust profile in the banknotes…
By a touching chopper I reached Yerevan and went to the wife’s relatives in Arabkir neighborhood because the flight of forgotten number from Moscow arrived late at night.
When at Zvartnots Airport they announced the arrival, I still got time to buy flowers in the underground level to observe the canons of a happy meeting.
However, on the escalator bringing the passengers from the second floor, neither Satenic nor kids were present.
I rushed to the Help Desk and they clarified about some hitch at the airport in Moscow so the passengers to that flight were taken by two aircraft and the second one was still on the way.
After another couple of hours of waiting, the escalator brought down all kinds of sorts but mine. Yet by that time the Help Desk was already locked for the night and there remained no one to get a consolation from.
Full of despair, I went out to the airfield, although they yelled after me that it was a service exit.
The field was getting ready for the night repose, almost no lights around and by the glass wall of the airport building the airplane stairs dozing in the dark, but that small tractor who rolls the stairs to the planes was nowhere to see, they probably spent nights apart.
That moment a local employee was passing to that forbidden door. A janitor, judging by her venerable age. And she saw that heart-rending figure of me, immovable like a pillar of salt, with a blank stare glued to the airfield darkness, and the odd bunch of flowers in my sad hand hanging alongside my thigh in the posture of an idle broom, to which whole composition the passer-by remarked in Russian but with a beautiful Armenian accent:
"Ah, what a tragedy!" and only after that she entered that service exit.
At first, I felt hurt by the dig in the voice of that Komissarzhevsky actress on the role of a janitor at the Zvartnots airport, but then it tickled me as something funny, I don’t know why. No kidding, I meant to laugh, faith. So I lay that tragic bouquet upon the sleeping stairs and off I started because the leg from Zvartnots to Arabkir is a pretty long haul…
The relatives comforted me with the news that Satenic made a call on their home phone (in absence of mobile communication at those times) to say that there still were no seats for a number of passengers, however, the next day those having tickets for the flight would be transported to Yerevan at an approximately same time.
And so it happened! The next night about the same time after the arrival of the third airplane (they came at half-hour interval flying seemingly in a flock) atop the escalator turned up Satenic, Ashot in shorts (wow! behold how surely he stands all by his own!), Ruzanna waving and calling to all, ‘Look! There’s dad! Look!’
But I was without flowers already, just in case of any tragic delay, so as not to start up some form of bouquet addiction by those stairs, you know.
On the way to relatives (by a taxi) I began to carp, kinda you were sent to evacuation and not to just spend the summertime.
Now, what was her response?
"I got it there that to live just for the sake of living is not worth the while."
And I had to shut up because philosophy in a woman’s hands is an all-conquering weapon. Moreover, when you were parted for a 3-month stretch…
Later on, she told about that hitch at the Moscow airport. As it turned out, the flight they had the tickets for was outbid by some entrepreneur to send a consignment of consumer goods to Yerevan (it was 90’s, the business starting to raise their heads). And even the following day arrival happened by pure chance, when in the crowd at that Moscow airport Ruzanna sneaked away and some man asked her, ‘Why are you roaming alone? Where is your Dad?’ And she answered, ‘In Stepanakert’.
Then he asked who was her Dad and, when Ruzanna named me, he cried to his friends, 'Hey! I do know the guy!’, because he was not alone but in a company of men.
In a nutshell, Ruzanna took them to where in the crowd she left Satenic, and Ashot, and the trunk. From there the new acquaintances, bypassing the pilot and the stewardesses, who at the foot of the stairs were letting pass another batch of goods, put my family, over the handrail, a couple of steps up the stairs, above that cordon of overseers, so that they could ascend the airliner. And the crew members down there never peeped at such a breach of order because they marked that the seers-off were men only (I do love the 90’s).
For a long time it stayed a sassy mystery to me – who was the unknown do-gooder capable of identifying me by only my family name? And he sent his ‘hello’ too.
‘Hello him from a photo correspondent’.
And only in a month or so the memory snapped out the picture of our meeting in Mamikonian Street by School 8 shattered by large caliber shells.
The day was calm and sunny, we greeted each other and he said he had seen me at the Press Center where he dropped to, being a photo correspondent. Then he asked if Maria had flashed there, from Moscow, a correspondent like him.
I could not recollect anyone matching his description and we parted…
People! Humans! Ahoy!
Wherever you are: on a bus, train, airliner or just sitting on a bench in a park, or seated in a cinema, any place.
I pray – yank your noses out of your mobile applications, break away, look around, have an eye-contact with your neighbor, exchange at least a few words – sometime, somewhere this fleeting action will become your savior.
And in conclusion, following the well-known declaration by Julius Fuchik, a Czech by his nationality:
‘People, I loved you! Be vigilant!.’
** *
Bottle #20: ~ A No-Rules Fray ~
Scabby rubs and randomly chipped-in crevices corrode the entire field of view because of improper over-zooming in the vast surface of vertical stone squares tiling the old blank wall.
Without ever looking back, he knew for sure there was a street behind him and, across the street on the other bank in its two-way traffic stream, the lengthy glass strip of the high windows in “Make Or Mar” along the opposite sidewalk. There it should be. As sure as he was standing there, his forehead leaned against the wall. You could just bet your farm on that…
The jagged, nervous noise of cars rushing behind him only confirmed such a conjecture, yet he still was withholding the turn about which would make it sure a hundred per cent, and instead raised his hands at shoulder-height and pressed the palms to the flat smooth surface of hewn stone.
As hard as you would expect, anyway.
The scrape exactly at the level of his pericardial sac served one more proof – it’s right here that he had given the slip to the chase. The bullet couldn’t follow, stopped by the stone.
Before or after the stone couldn’t stop him?
Did the bullet hit the wall thru him on the run or a sliver of a split sec later, as he had already dissolved in the barrier?
No way to punch into the matter deep enough for an articulate answer. Not without Isaac Newton and a bottle of vodka for the sake of clearer comprehension. But Isaac Newton replaced his flying colors with the standard of total abstinence though being a quite promising dude, at first, before that effing apple had domed him too severely. Since the accident the guy abandoned all crazy ideas and flopped over to horny materialism on whose behalf he got knighted, later on in his sober career.
Nothing doing but to strain your brain alone, without ‘the call to a friend’ or 'the prompt from the audience'.
"Hello! May I speak to Sir Isaac? This is the program Wanna Be a Millionaire? And you? Ah, the butler… And he? Ah, drinking coffee in his study… Okay, fine, we’ll recall a bit later."
"Uite, oameni buni. Este o oaie."
A pack of noisy kids surrounds him. Street Arabs. He let the wall go and turns about.
Yep, he was right – there looms "Make Or Mar", across the street.
From all the sides around him, big flashy eyes underneath the stomp-dance of greasy black strands curly, wavy, a-swinging. Everyone watches him closely gauging his high of intoxication. Swarthy hands, emaciated kids' hands jerk the skirts of his plain blue frock coat without epaulettes. The cloth is not in its prime yet holds on, withstands the pulls and yanks of the restless ants with their loudly importunate gibberish…
And here comes the queen of the anthill.
"Lashi bun, romale! Lashi bun!"
The Gypsy takes a crack at shooing their swarm off, at which movement the corner of her flowery shawl touches on the sly, caressingly and softly, his right wrist.
The kids recoil from the "sheep", retreat a step back yet never break the circle of their flicker of incessant shifting. Their voices never hush and only merge switching over to a chant in the rhythm of Hypnopedia.
"Aye-aye, Captain! You've seen a harsh spell! Vicious enemies tried hard to harm you, yet intact you stayed. Well, almost. And where it smarts the pain will cease and the long and winding road awaits ahead…" commences she her part in the usual score in the process of steeping the victim into mesmerized tetanus.
"Gimme your hand, Esma will read your fate. Esma does not cheat, Esma sees, Esma knows. Free palmistry for you, handsome. Gimme your hand."
The slightly puffed eyelids screening her eyes, which had seen anything there ever could be to see, went down slowly, suggesting the example to be followed:
"Everything will be all right, handsome, not at once though, gimme your hand, I’ll teach you all what’s to be done…"
"What was there I know, what is to come I don’t want to know. How about singing a song, Crisp-Curls?."
The backing chorus, at sea for absence of conducting signs from their coryphaeus, stumbles in their beef-about part, while she stays obviously stunned and dazed as if smitten by his clue, the half-forgotten keyword from the times at the dawn of her career but it suddenly sounded here, not eye-to-eye but in presence of the entire audience…
"The house’s sold today! Debates of the applicants to the position of the Resident in Indiscernible (Almost) Saturn! During the intermission, The Jolly Guys-Gagays-2 band perform their hottest hits! Soft drinks sale at 5.12 % discount! Only here! Just this only time!"
"Maybe you know but not all, handsome, though wildly will to know, huh?"
"Well, well, let’s cut out, honey, the useless polemics in the like effing sort of approach, and consider the issue from the standpoint of distilled experimentalism."
His hand dives in the blue depths of the double breast in his not fully buttoned frock coat to reappear balled and mysterious, with the glib skill of a professional pearl diver.
Esma’s eye instinctively blinked at his other hand to check if the wide-blade knife for shell-cracking is still there. Nope. And not a single hair in his beard got drenched. Some shifty bastard!
The magician’s fingers moved to bloom snakily out, slow like the long petals of a sea anemone actinia. Smack-bang in the middle of the palm of the voracious predator, a kinda lure in the set up trap, flashed a silver circle.
"Piastres! Piastres!" Without any rehearsal screamed the back-up chorus in unison. With a noteworthy burr as if at the casting for the Lenin In The Leap Year flick.
"Dong-dong, darling! An unalloyed piece of eight! The prize to them who unprepared guesses my name."
"Ptooey!" spat the clairvoyant in disgust. "Looting the drowned!"
Yet, he was quick to withdraw his moccasin of possum skin, obviously handmade, with a buckle of also Spanish silver before the monetary reform of 1497.
"None of us, fair lady, is without flaws, as was postulated in the original work by Mr. Charles Darwin and stays prominently backed and confirmed by steady gross income of suppliers of banana related products, currently."
Shrill whistles of Gypsy kids in the bleachers, booing, ejaculations “enough of fucking confab!”, “give us a zap!”
The Unseizable Revengers carry out the assembly of a machine gun Maxim on their cart. Post-haste.
Yashka Tsigankov uncivilly unharnesses from out the cart's shafts the horses, completely fucked up, who drop dead at once.
The Colosseum stage workers drag the animals away, by the tails in their grabs, along the sand in the arena, crooning under their Roman noses, “You’re sweet as the horseweed from Canada…”, for the solidarity’s sake.
Lech Valenca, movie director Keosaian (not from Hollywood yet), and Levantine usurers…
However, back to the epicenter!
"Touching allowed?"
"Be my guest, Carmen Pansovna, but within the limits of 12+, I do not need to be rubbed off by hands of the Chechnya archimandrites."
The carelessly polished nails served the pincer to lift the coin off the crossroads of the Line of Fate and the Cross Mystique responsible for the cleverness (who’s, as always, on fucking AWOL), it gets rubbed against the above-mentioned shawl’s corner (knitted in the village of Melenky before its incorporation into the Pavlov Posad conglomeration), bitten with chippy plastic in the false jaws after which action Esma clearly wanted to spit, however, held it back and swallowed, for the sake of appropriateness and decency in manners.
There followed a short pause, which period she stood with her tongue stuck out to the utmost, its tip almost vibrating from the strain, the trade-mark of aspiring stand-up comedians in a desperate endeavor to win the public’s sympathy by demonstrating the surest way to eat thru to the show business by means of Russian cunnilingus, and (her eyes half-closed) listening to something heard only by her, she nodded her head and repeated ‘ohoo!’, ‘even so?’ and suchlike nonsense, but at last exhausted the stock of psychotropic tricks in her fucking passive aggression and—breaking the deafening silence of the audience frozen in anticipation—she dealt the final puñalada of Jose from the opera by Bizet:
"Kenty’s a fool! Kenty’s a fool!" (Without any burr traceable).
Her opponent went groggy after that brief but too overwhelming series:
"Yok!" eructed he from the depth of his very spleen. "The prize is yours – take it."
"Honest deals are my soft spot!" commented the eager matadoress wrapping her trophy tight, as well as the title of the World Champion, in that same shawl, but this time it was another corner, produced in the village of Usovo of the same and also mentioned Pavlov Posad conglomeration.
Midst the whirling twists and enthusiastic hops of her loyal fans and juvenile hands, she leaves the ring while the fucked up… ahem!. that is, stunned and effed up opponent, forgotten already even by his seconds, leans his ass against the wall he was pressing with his hands so recently if not with some other part in his anatomy…
"Yep! Ladies an' Gentlemen! Even in our over-advanced world, Experience still splashes the brains out of Upstart Aficionados! Overtly and straight from the shoulder!
See you at upcoming confluxes in the outflows of ectoplasm! For you commented Vasyok de Vasuky! Sign up for our channel!"
Sounds of a hasty trot grew nearer. A black-haired kid ran up to the lonely figure leaned groggily against the wall.
A small hand in a long-standing need of a good wash-and-rub pulled the wide pant leg above his curly head.
"Unclie, eh?" and, turning his face up to the not yet quite there stare of the routed, reported:
"Esma told to say you that Maya waits, don’t waste time or you’ll get it!"
His jaw began to move like Peccy’s valve, not up though but down, after the running away, in the bossa nova rhythm,—hop-and-hop yep, hop-and-hop yep…
Ah, por que estou tão sozinho?.
–errand-boy…
* * *
Bottle #21: ~ East is a Dang Subtle Matter ~
Comrade Geidar Aliev was being trained and shaped into the taker-over after Leonid Ilych Brezhnev, persistently, in earnest. You could see it with both of your eyes shut.
Firstly, over and over again from the high rostrum of the Party Congresses, Azerbaijan was trumpeted The Most Blooming Republic of the USSR and Leonid Ilych developed a habit (overlapping to an addiction) of visiting that bloom, and never was he to come back without this or that nice souvenir.
That might be a scimitar flashing gems of precious nature or a finger ring promoting the right political context (blood red ruby in the center surrounded by 15 diamonds – the shining personification of 15 Republics in the USSR) the trinket’s value equivalent to 22+ vehicles “Volga” of the latest make by the state authorized price, no tips under the counter.
Yep, cunning East did discover the soft spot of comrade General Secretary, his tender attitude to shiny objects. Wise East did not miss to guess what those four (or five?) Gold Medals of the Hero of the Soviet Union on the leader’s coat were hinting at glaringly enough.
Besides, comrade Geidar Alirzaevich could proudly report (and he did it) to his superiors in Moscow that in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan they gave up pocketing bribes (8 of 11 from the CC Members had to be replaced and the remaining 3 prudently pulled up the undesirable practices, notwithstanding their kinship with the First Secretary).
He deposed all of the corrupt managers starting with ministers and down to kolkhoz foremen, which vacant positions were put up for a garage sale.
The population of the Republic knew the price list by heart – how much was the position of a minister or the title of doctor of science, the job of the head of a clinic, and so on along the hierarchy lines.
My mistake in 1987 was to arrive in Baku in a naive hope of getting the job of a construction worker (they would scramble for a bricklayer of the 4th category!) and not a kopeck in my pocket.
Quite naturally, at employment offices they informed me there was no foreseeable demand for my specialty and kept winking at each other, waiting.
But had they given me a job, everything could turn different too, and this war I’d consider from a contrastingly opposite angle, say, from Mardakian Settlement on the Caspian sea shore.
(Cut it out! It was a fucking hooey and happens only what has to happen.)
And after Brezhnev’s sufferings were over (in the final years of his leadership to the mike they were bringing the poor thing clutched by his coat sleeves and turning the white sheets solicitously upside down when he grabbed his speech text the wrong way), the following mummy (yes sure, that one under whom the KGB and militia were disrupting day shows in the cinema with their round-ups – what are you doing here in the working time of day? Are you a parasite or what?) while being at the rudder, transferred Geidar, like one KGB man another, to Moscow and gave him the post of First Deputy of the Prime Minister in charge of both the light and heavy industry and on top of everything else entrusted with one more reform of the educational system in the USSR.
And the warmly memorable Baikal-Amur Railroad was laid under his supervision, and whenever another cruise liner sank catastrophically Aliev was sent there to punish those guilty and discover the reason for the tragedy in hand.
In short, for the Soviet population there remained no defendable grounds any more for doubting that their next Kremlin Ruler would be of Caucasian roots, again…
However, Comrade Gorbachev found crook ways to cross the straight path of Comrade Aliev's rise, jumped unexpectedly in a Central Committee wide corridor (like from under the slippery parquet!) and became the General Secretary of the CPSU.
Feeling slighted by such a turn and for security reasons as well, Geidar went to his native Nakhichevan which is a rather large mountainous autonomous region of Azerbaijan cut from the Republic by a wide swath of Armenia’s territory (this here Caucasus is just a kinda layer cake, I swear!)
In 1991 the self-isolated pensioner wisely spurned off his membership in the Communist Party of the USSR (those SCES putschists turned out miserable pussies), then picked up the post of the Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Nakhichevan, and got a development grant ($100 000 000) from Turkey.
Turkey's attitude towards the population of Nakhichevan was always markedly warm and brotherly, and so as to have a stretch of common borderline with the autonomy, the government of Turkey worked out a territory swap with Iran at 3 : 1 rate. You never can guess the underlying springs or reasons for moves in this here subtle East…
President of Azerbaijan Elchibey, that same who spent a year in prison for his dissidence, embraced the presidency for the exactly same stretch (habit is always the decisive force) resulting from his wrongful political behavior:
– declared (often inappropriately yet everywhere) that Turkey's “ueber alles”;
– threatened to incorporate in Azerbaijan all of the Southern Azerbaijan (which is a part of neighboring Iran openly repulsive to the idea of such an ‘Anschluss’);
– rejected joining CIS (redrawn version of the USSR);
– intimidated the leaders of the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia with their replacement, unavoidably nearing, by the local dissidents;
– demanded a translator at the signing a treaty in Moscow, albeit having a good command of Russian;
– commenced to flirt with America…
For how long to tolerate the like inadequacy?
On May 28, 1993, the personnel of the 104th Guards Airborne Division are withdrawn from Ganja City ahead of schedule, which introduces a good occasion for the following test:
Where did the bulk of the mentioned army detachment's arsenal stay?
Exactly! In Ganja! (wow! some folks here started to see thru subtleties of East!)
That very Ganja City, the seat of Suret Huseinov and his personal army organized with the beginning of Karabakh war. That same Suret who Elchibey did not know what to do about – one day awards him the title of Hero of Nation, the next day issues an order to arrest that effing Huseinov (a self-confirmed case of inadequacy, dear colleagues, you know it as well as I do).
On May 28, the well-equipped army of Suret set off for taking Baku and punishing Abulfaz.
Eventually, they reached the capital.
The city life turns into a round the clock nightmare, anyone possessing weapons – shoots.
The military are shooting, the police shooting, Suret’s rebels shooting, neighborhood committees of self-defense shooting, thieves eager not to lose the handy moment are shooting too.