Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

Margarita.” He went on in careful English: “I learned English also.” It 
transpired he had learned his English at home in front of the record 
player. “My favorites were the Beatles,” Parkev said and quickly reeled 
off a long list of his favorite songs: “‘Yesterday,’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ 
‘Eleanor Rigby,’ ‘Paperback Writer’ . . .” And with this unexpectedly en­
dearing glimpse of the Beatles-loving archbishop, I left the ruined town. 

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13 
June 1992 – September 1993 
Escalation 
AN ARMENIAN  COLLAPSE 
In the middle of June 1992, an exodus of thousands of people streamed 
south through Nagorny Karabakh, fleeing their homes in the face of an 
enemy attack. Film footage of the human tide shows trucks overloaded 
with people bouncing over the dirt roads. Others follow on foot. They 
are country folk: old women in head scarves, younger women with chil­
dren slung over their shoulders, farmers leading bullocks on ropes or 
driving them with sticks. Weary villagers try to scrape the mud from the 
house shoes they are trudging in. A gaunt woman with gray straggly 
hair appeals to the camera: “Who laid a curse on us? What are we, the 
orphans of the world that they torment us like this?”
1 
This was an exodus of Armenians, but it could just as well have 
been Azerbaijanis. Wholesale expulsion of civilians was the most ter­
rible feature of the Armenian-Azerbaijani war—and a much greater 
number of Azerbaijanis eventually became victims of it. The conflict 
saw fewer casualties than other comparable wars, such as Bosnia or 
Chechnya, with perhaps twenty thousand dead on both sides. But the 
refugee crisis it created, with hundreds of thousands of people dis­
placed, was one of the most terrible in the world. 
This flood of Armenians was escaping an unexpected Azerbaijani 
offensive, which began on 12 June 1992 and quickly overran the whole 
northern part of Nagorny Karabakh. The Azerbaijanis took the Shau­
mian region within four days, putting its villagers, who had been de-
ported in “Operation Ring” the year before and then returned home, to 
flight once again. Over the next three weeks, the Martakert region was 
conquered. 
Most people, both fighters and civilians, simply fled before the ad­
vancing Azerbaijani army could overtake them. The volunteer Kemal 
194 

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195 
Ali was one of the first soldiers to enter Martakert on the evening of 4 
July, only a few hours after the Armenians had left. He found that the 
defenders had left the town in panic. “They had abandoned their 
weapons and fled,” said Ali. “When we came into the town we had the 
impression that everyone was asleep at night and in the morning they 
would wake up and go to work. There wasn’t a single cartridge there. 
There was no damage. The furniture, everything, had been left be-
hind.”
2 
By early July, around forty thousand people Armenians were on 
the move, heading toward Stepanakert. 
Azerbaijan’s attack was launched just five days after Abulfaz El­
chibey was elected the country’s president on 7 June 1992, finally bring­
ing the Popular Front to power. Elchibey’s victory appeared to have re-
solved the country’s long-running political crisis, and morale at the 
front was high. Units like Iskender Hamidov’s extreme nationalist Gray 
Wolves division were now fighting for a government they supported. 
The Armenians, by contrast, had succumbed to a false sense of eupho­
ria after capturing Shusha and Lachin. Many fedayin fighters, assuming 
the war had been won, simply went back to Armenia. The Karabakh Ar­
menian authorities had expected that an attack would come from the 
east and had left the northern sector poorly defended. When the offen­
sive was launched, the front simply collapsed. 
Azerbaijan’s attack was spearheaded by a phalanx of armored vehi­
cles and tanks—by some accounts as many as 150 of them—which swept 
aside the poorly armed Armenian defenders. The use of heavy armor 
was a dramatic escalation in the conflict. In July, the Russian military 
journalist Pavel Felgenhauer wrote: “The partisan period of the conflict 
in Karabakh is over. A ‘normal’ war is beginning in which the role of the 
volunteer, defending his own village with a Kalashnikov in his hand 
from all conceivable enemies, will become smaller and smaller.”
3 
The heavy armor was Russian and the drivers were Russians. Azer­
baijani commanders had moved quickly to take over the abundant So­
viet military equipment in Azerbaijan and had cut deals with the 23rd 
Division of the 4th Army based in Ganje. Attempts were made to con­
ceal the Russians’ presence, although it was obvious that Azerbaijan did 
not possess this number of trained tank drivers. But the Russian sol­
diers were sighted, not only by the Armenian villagers but by a Western 
diplomat and an American journalist.
4 
The attack was led by Russians and—extraordinary to say—it ap­
pears to have been stopped by Russians. In early July, the Karabakh 

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Armenians faced being overwhelmed. According to one Armenian sen­
ior official, “This flood [of people] was moving toward Stepanakert like 
a herd and it was impossible to stop or to organize a defense. So I have 
to say that that flood was stopped by the Russians.” The official, who 
asked to be anonymous, said the Armenians persuaded the Russian 
military to intervene and help them turn the tide. Russian attack heli­
copters were sent in and carried out air strikes, which halted the offen­
sive in its tracks. So elements of the Russian military ended up fighting 
one another. The Armenian official was insistent that this was the only 
occasion during the Karabakh war when Russians actively intervened 
to help the Armenian side (an assertion that most Azerbaijanis would 
strongly dispute). 
After the Russian-Armenian counterthrust, “One or two days were 
needed to restore the front,” said the Armenian official. But the Kara­
bakh Armenians were still close to collapse. Azerbaijani forces had oc­
cupied almost half of Karabakh and were only half an hour away from 
Stepanakert in the East. In August, the Azerbaijanis, again using mostly 
Russian or Ukrainian pilots, began air attacks on the town. The bombers 
destroyed dozens of houses that had escaped the artillery battering of 
the winter and spring. The local parliament was in disarray. The Ter-
Petrosian administration in Armenia and its allies in Karabakh now de­
cided to take charge. According to Robert Kocharian: 
There was a situation of panic. Forty-eight percent of Karabakh was 
occupied by Azerbaijani forces, there was a huge number of refugees, 
and constant sessions of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet [the 
Karabakhi parliament], which was in a semishocked situation, inca­
pable of taking decisions. Then I proposed two or three solutions, and 
the condition for them accepting these solutions was that I would be 
ready to take responsibility for further actions. The plan was to intro­
duce military rule, create a state defense committee . . . it was adopted 
literally in thirty or forty minutes.
5 
Nagorny Karabakh’s new State Defense Committee, created on 15 
August, was modeled, both in name and purpose, on the decision-mak­
ing body of the same name that Stalin formed in the Soviet Union in 
1941. It assumed all executive powers. The entire Karabakh Armenian 
male population between the ages of eighteen and forty-five was con-

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197 
scripted into a new army that numbered around fifteen thousand men. 
All local businesses were put at the service of the war effort. 
Robert Kocharian, the new head of the committee and of the Kara­
bakh Armenians was thirty-seven. He had been the quietest and most 
dogged of the Karabakh Armenian activists and was something of an 
enigma even to those who knew him well. In Soviet times, Kocharian 
had been head of the Party section in Stepanakert’s Silk Factory and 
came across as a good Communist, albeit with reforming tendencies. 
(Arkady Volsky remembers that he used to love to quote the Marxist 
philosopher Georgy Plekhanov.) He was a poor public speaker and 
more comfortable in Russian than Armenian. His Azerbaijani friend 
and colleague, Zahid Abasov, remembers that he was always calm and 
never drank or smoked. A better clue to the aggressive inner drive is 
that he is a fan of active sports such as parasailing and hang-gliding, 
and among which he has reportedly listed “war.” 
At the same time, Kocharian’s old comrade, Serzh Sarkisian, was 
put in charge of the logistics of the Karabakh military campaign. Sar­
kisian, had been senior to Kocharian when the two were the leaders of 
the Stepanakert Young Communist organization, the Komsomol, and, 
in Sarkisian’s words, “There wasn’t a week that we didn’t go hunting or 
fishing.”
6 
Abasov remembers that “Serzhik” Sarkisian was more gre­
garious, drank heavily, and on the surface seemed more of a natural 
leader. In the new Defense Committee, the two men resumed a tandem, 
which would eventually bring them jointly to power in Armenia. 
THE GREAT CARVE-UP 
On 15 May 1992, at a meeting in Tashkent, both Armenia and Azerbai­
jan formally inherited vast amounts of Soviet weaponry as their due 
from the dividing up of the Soviet army. On paper, the two new states 
were allowed to acquire 220 tanks, 220 other armored vehicles, 285 ar­
tillery pieces, and 100 combat aircraft. For two combatants who had 
been relying a year before on meteorological rockets and hand-held 
weapons, it was a great lurch forward in their destructive capabilities.
7 
In practice, both sides acquired many more weapons than were al­
lowed. In the spring of 1992, a series of mysterious explosions were re-
ported at army bases in both Armenia and Azerbaijan, which permitted 

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military equipment to be written off. A likely explanation was that arms 
were changing hands—in the words of one Armenian military special­
ist, because of “money, personal contacts and lots of vodka.”
8 
The free-for-all gave an initial advantage to Azerbaijan. In Soviet 
times Armenia, next door to NATO-member Turkey, was envisaged as 
a combat zone in the event of war and therefore had only three divisions 
and no airfields on its soil. Azerbaijan was a rear zone and the base for 
a much greater concentration of forces, with five divisions and five mil­
itary airfields. It also had far more ammunition than Armenia on its 
territory. According to one estimate, Armenia had only five hundred 
railroad cars of ammunition on its territory; Azerbaijan had ten thou-
sand cars.
9 
Leila Yunusova, who was now Azerbaijan’s deputy defense minis­
ter, says that by spending money in the right places, her republic was 
able to acquire a large part of this arsenal, giving it a military advantage. 
“So that [the Russians] would give us more than was in the agreement, 
we simply paid the commanders of the divisions. It was more difficult 
for the Armenians, because they didn’t have such a number of divisions 
there.” Everyone, from factory directors to housewives, took part in a 
great patriotic money-raising exercise to buy the weapons. “We all 
paid,” recalls Yunusova. “Every shop paid out some money, factories 
gave money. . . . Women brought in gold and diamonds for weapons. 
Everyone brought something.”
10 
Two prominent Azerbaijanis were able to get weapons from the 
Russians easily and on favorable terms. The defense minister, Rahim 
Gaziev, unusually for a Popular Front radical, was a strong supporter of 
Russia. After the experience of being imprisoned in Moscow after the 
January 1990 events, “Something turned in his head,” said his old ac­
quaintance Hikmet Hajizade. “After [the Moscow prison] Lefortovo, he 
had the idea that you have to be friends with Russia, you have to bribe 
Russia.”
11 
Another Russophile Azerbaijani was Suret Husseinov, the 
sleek young director of a textile plant in the town of Yevlakh. Hus­
seinov, who had no military background, set up his own armed brigade 
for the Karabakh front and was so successful that he was made a Hero 
of Azerbaijan and the president’s “special representative” for Kara­
bakh. Husseinov was extremely rich. One of Azerbaijan’s black market 
kings, he outspent all his rivals on the war effort, paid his soldiers high 
wages, and—most important—became a close friend of the commander 

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of the 23rd Division in Ganje, General Alexander Shcherbak. The net re­
sult was that by the summer of 1992, Azerbaijan had acquired a vast ar­
senal of weapons. The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry admitted in No­
vember 1993 that it had taken over 286 tanks and 842 armored vehicles 
and 386 artillery pieces in May 1992, well in excess of the limits set by 
the Tashkent agreement.
12 
The Armenians now began to call on Russia to close the gap. Ar­
menia’s traditional close relations with Moscow and personal ties 
formed between Boris Yeltsin and Levon Ter-Petrosian proved vital. 
Ter-Petrosian now confirms that President Boris Yeltsin personally au­
thorized arms shipments for Armenia. He says that he would put a re-
quest for weapons in writing to Yeltsin, who would ask Russia’s Min­
istry of Defense to supply the corresponding amount of equipment. 
According to Ter-Petrosian, because Azerbaijan had inherited far more 
Soviet weaponry than Armenia had, Yeltsin wanted to preserve a mili­
tary balance in the Karabakh conflict: 
It turned out that there were three times more weapons in Azerbaijan 
than in Armenia. And when we talked to the Russian side, we came to 
the conclusion—and I managed to get them to agree to this—that we 
should be compensated for this. And Yeltsin agreed to this and agreed 
that the balance had to be preserved. No more than a balance. In the 
following years—1992, ’3, ’4—we were almost completely compen­
sated for the gap between us and Azerbaijan. And in 1994, we were on 
the same level. That means equipment, tanks, artillery, APCs, hand-
held weapons.
13 
The extent of the arms shipments to Armenia came to light only in 1997, 
in a report made to the Russian parliament, the State Duma, by the 
Russian general Lev Rokhlin. Rokhlin, who estimated the total cost of 
the deals at one billion dollars, said he was reporting on them because 
they were in contravention of a commitment by Russia not to arm either 
of the combatants in the conflict. According to Rokhlin, most of the 
heavier weaponry in the operation had been sent to Armenia only when 
the fighting had ended, in 1995–1996. These included eighty-four T-72 
tanks and fifty BMP-2 armored personnel carriers. However, some of 
the supplies had arrived as early as the summer of 1992. From August 
1992 to June 1994, according to Rokhlin, there had been mass deliveries 

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of ammunition from warehouses in the Russian military base at Moz­
dok to Armenia. In the same period, Russia had also supplied Armenia 
with spare parts and fuel. He gave no dates as to when other items, such 
as 350,000 hand grenades, had been transported to Armenia.
14 
The transport of all these weapons to Armenia was a vast and com­
plicated operation. Pavel Felgenhauer says: “It was authorized by the 
Kremlin and signed by Kolesnikov. I enquired, ‘Was it authorized?’ Yes, 
of course, it was authorized. These things don’t happen in Russia with-
out authority—like flying in tanks by air. The biggest transport aircraft 
there is, the Antonov-124 or Ruslan, flew them in.”
15 
THE RUSSIAN FACTOR 
Moscow’s arms supplies to Armenia are just one piece in the biggest 
puzzle of the Karabakh war, the Russian factor. The issue is complex. 
Toward the end of 1992, as Russia began supplying the Armenians with 
arms and fuel, the Russian defense minister, Pavel Grachev, also ap­
pears to have forged a close relationship with his colleagues in the Ar­
menian military. Yet it is not entirely clear how this support for the Ar­
menians was translated on to the battlefield; to complicate things fur­
ther, the Russians also gave some assistance to Azerbaijan. So, although 
obviously Russian help was clearly essential for the Armenians to close 
the military gap with Azerbaijan in 1992–1993, it is debatable if it was 
the primary cause of the Armenian victory in 1993–1994. 
Another complicating element in this story is that much of the 
“Russian support” to both combatants did not come from Russia itself. 
Early on in the conflict, in the chaos immediately following the end of 
the Soviet Union, there were dozens, if not hundreds, of “Russian” free-
lancers and mercenaries fighting on both sides. Many of these were not 
actually “Russian” in the strictest sense. They were former Soviet sol­
diers—mainly Russians, but also Ukrainians or Belarussians—who, 
when their units were withdrawn, had stayed behind in Ganje or Ste­
panakert to earn a living. They were generally military specialists in 
short supply locally, such as the Ukrainian pilot Yury Belichenko, who 
was shot down over Stepanakert in August 1992. A month later, six 
Russian soldiers were captured by the Azerbaijanis in the Kelbajar re­
gion. They said they had been part of a group of twelve Russian “spe­
cial forces” mercenaries from the 7th Army, who had been fighting on 

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the Armenian side. They were reprieved from a death sentence after a 
personal plea from Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev. 
Russians also fought as tank drivers. They led Azerbaijan’s June 
1992 offensive, and several witnesses said that they saw Russian tank 
drivers serving later on the Armenian side. As one Karabakh Armenian 
farmer in the village of Talish put it: “The Russians helped the Azerbai­
janis, then they turned round and fought for us.” The Azerbaijani offi­
cer Zahid Neftaliev said that in February 1993, he and his comrades 
were cut off by an Armenian attack at the “Globe” cliff outside Martak­
ert. They had run out of ammunition and were facing annihilation: 
We didn’t have anything left to fight with. We had either to die or to 
surrender. A Russian tank came up with a Russian crew. He came out 
of the hatch and said, “Go, I won’t kill you.” The Russians let us go and 
said, “We don’t want to kill you. Leave the territory and go.” They con­
quered the territory and gave it to the Armenians.
16 
Most or all of these soldiers appear to have been acting as mercenaries, 
independently of Moscow. Leila Yunusova says of this period: 
You know how many officers came from the Soviet army? Clever, ed­
ucated officers, rocket specialists, signalers—they were left completely 
without salaries. They had nothing. There were pilots. They had their 
families, lived in garrisons, their children and families were here, they 
had no salary, nothing. They literally didn’t have money for food. Do 
you think they listened to Moscow? What Moscow! Money alone de­
cided everything. 
Kemal Ali remembers Russians who did not even ask the mafioso com­
mander “Freud” in Aghdam for money: 
[Freud] had some equipment, which he’d bought from the Russians 
somewhere. No one knew how to mend Russian military equipment. 
They could fire it, but it broke down quickly. Then they brought in 
three colonels from Ganje to mend the equipment. They worked well 
from morning until lunchtime, then they started drinking wine and 
they were drunk all night. In the morning [Freud’s men] beat them up 
to sober them up and wake them up. Then they would start working 
again and mend the equipment. 

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The Azerbaijanis gradually lost their advantage. From late 1992, the 
Russian military began to pull out of Azerbaijan and close down its 
bases. As a result, the Azerbaijanis received only one crop of Russian 
soldiers in 1992, when they “privatized” hundreds of former Soviet of­
ficers of the 4th Army. In Armenia, however, the Soviet 7th Army, based 
in Gyumri, stayed behind and turned into a Russian force. That ensured 
that a large number of friendly Russian officers stayed on Armenian 
soil. This new army’s assets were also subtly “nationalized” in that the 
majority of its serving soldiers were actually Armenians. In the words 
of one Russian military observer: “An army whose soldiers are 60 to 80 
percent Armenian and whose officers are 20 to 30 percent Armenian can 
hardly be called ‘Russian.’”
17 
It came as no surprise, therefore, when in 
January 1994 the Azerbaijanis captured eight trucks and five Armenian 
officers belonging to the Russian 7th Army on the battlefield. 
The two sides dispute whether Moscow made a political decision to 
help Armenia win the war. With regard to Russia’s arms deliveries, Ter-
Petrosian says that Yeltsin wanted only to achieve a “balance” between 
Armenia and Azerbaijan: in effect, they did not so much want an Ar­
menian victory as not want to see an Armenian defeat. “All the stories 
that the Russians helped the Armenians more is a legend, it’s nonsense. 
The Russians behaved very honestly and preserved a balance. How do 
I know this? Because I know that when we asked for a bit more, they 
didn’t give it. I knew that. They never gave more than the balance.” 
For their part, Azerbaijani officials are categorical that at least from 
the autumn of 1992, Moscow was working against them. They say that 
Russian officials consistently used veiled threats that Azerbaijan might 
be defeated on the battlefield to try to dictate their own peace settle­
ment. This became more marked in the spring and summer of 1993, 
when the pro-Western government of Yegor Gaidar had left office in 
Moscow and the nationalist Elchibey regime was still in power in Azer­
baijan. Elchibey pressed for the withdrawal of Russian bases and in­
sisted that Azerbaijan would not join the new Moscow-led organization 
of post-Soviet republics, the Commonwealth of Independent States 
(CIS). Elchibey’s ambassador in Moscow, Hikmet Hajizade, said that he 
was constantly being coerced into giving his agreement to a peace plan, 
which involved Russian military monitors. 
During my term as ambassador, I received three [draft] agreements 
like this. It began at the end of 1992. So, for example, they said, “Here 

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is an agreement, sign it. The Russians will stand here. The war will 
stop for a while, negotiations will begin.” And we said, “This could 
turn into Cyprus.” They said, “Fine, and then Armenian forces will 
take Kelbajar. . . .”
18 
If Russia’s intentions, especially in 1992, seem opaque, that is probably 
because one arm of the Russian government was not bothering to in-
form the others about what it was doing. In the Caucasus, the most ac­
tive Russian player was the Defense Ministry, which did not bother to 
keep other branches of the Yeltsin administration informed of what it 
was up to. 
Three senior Russian military men took an active interest in the 
Caucasus and progressively gave more support to the Armenians. 
Colonel-General Fyodor Reut had been former commander of the So­
viet 7th Army in Armenia; now in charge of Russian forces in the Tran­
scaucasian Military District based in Tbilisi, he helped landlocked Ar­
menia get supplies to and from the Black Sea ports in Georgia. Mikhail 
Kolesnikov, another former 7th Army commander, had risen to become 
chief of the Russian General Staff and could be expected to take a pro-
Armenian stance. Most important, the new Russian defense minister, 
Pavel Grachev, began to adopt a more pro-Armenian line. 
Grachev chose Armenia as the destination for his first foreign trip 
in May 1992, only a few days after being appointed Russia’s new de­
fense minister. There had just been armed clashes on the border be-
tween the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan and Armenia, and ten­
sion was high because Turkey, a NATO member, had announced that it 
might act to uphold its obligations to protect Nakhichevan by the 1920 
Treaty of Kars. Grachev, together with Yeltsin’s right-hand man, Gen­
nady Burbulis, came to Yerevan to pledge Moscow’s continuing com­
mitment to guard Armenia’s frontier with Turkey and to face down the 
“Turkish threat.” 
Grachev was an unsophisticated man, and his views on the Cauca­
sus appear to have been formed from a mixture of commercial and 
personal motives and a crude vision of Russia’s strategic interest there. 
Put simply, this meant maximizing the number of Russian troops on 
the ground. It was a strategy that went beyond support for one partic­
ular regime or country. As Felgenhauer puts it: “The Defense Ministry 
had good relations with Armenia, but did not fully break with Azer­
baijan.” Grachev personalized his policy making and struck up close 

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relationships with fellow defense ministers. In Georgia, he even chose 
the then Georgian defense minister as his godfather when he unex­
pectedly chose to be baptized—and yet he had given support to the 
Abkhazian rebels in their war to break away from Georgia. In 1992, 
shortly after visiting Yerevan, Grachev befriended the Azerbaijani de­
fense minister Rahim Gaziev and spent several days as his guest in 
Gaziev’s home region of Sheki in the mountains of northern Azerbai­
jan. Gaziev even went to the funeral of Grachev’s mother. 
Grachev’s strongest friendship, however, was with the Armenian 
defense minister and military leader Vazgen Sarkisian. After Sarkisian’s 
death, in December 1999, Grachev attended a reunion of the “Yerkra­
pah” veterans’ union and was made a freeman of Yerevan. He returned 
in March 2001 to commemorate Sarkisian’s birthday and told his hosts, 
“Vazgen Sarkisian was my friend and a good student. I was happy to 
teach him military arts.”
19 
In September 1992, Grachev convened a meeting in the Black Sea 
town of Sochi with the ministers of defense of all three Caucasian 
states, Gaziev, Sarkisian, and Georgia’s Tengiz Kitovani. Gaziev and 
Sarkisian reportedly signed a brief agreement, which called for a cease-
fire and the deployment of “observers” in Nagorny Karabakh from CIS 
countries. However, Grachev failed to inform a long list of interested