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

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

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

Where are they, that third?

Fled to Russia, fled to France, fled to America.

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

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

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

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

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

From 1915 to 1923, while the elite were being hanged out on the lampposts in the capital city, the arrangement about mujiks was way simpler – collected in crowds, they were driven to Syria (also a part of the then Ottoman Empire), driven into the desert under the pretext as if some camps were awaiting to accommodate them there. So one million human beings died on that trek because they were driven without any food, shepherded by riflemen.

The guardsmen did not bypass gutting dead womenfolk in case she swallowed her gold earrings while alive. Some were lucky to find. (Armin Theophil Wegner; 1886—1978, another German witness of atrocities.)

Still, what did Turkey need all that trouble for?

Easy as pie – it’s an Empire and any state of that status has no choice but to grow. It exists only while it grows, like those polyps in the Coral Reef.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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