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

Still the explosions of any sort sounded equally disgusting…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did Armenians need phedais for?

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

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

The following 2 massacres:

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

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

Sum total: 235 000 in 3 massacres.

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

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

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

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

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

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