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Party official in Shusha at the time, told me that he refused the demand
to head a special commission to oversee the demolition operation. Now
an old man in Yerevan, his voice still trembled as he spoke about the
razing of the old Armenian quarter. “Those ruins were still standing,”
Shugarian said. “All the houses could have been restored, all that was
needed were the wooden sections and doors. For years I had scrambled
all over those ruins. I saw wells, bones. In my heart I felt hatred toward
the people who had set fire to the town.”
2
The main cause of war, it has been said, is war, and perhaps that
should include the memory of war one or two generations back. In
Karabakh, the sense of historical grievance was sharpest among the
Armenian townsfolk, many of whom remembered the old pre-1920
Shusha. The actress Zhanna Galstian, one of the founders of the Ar
menian nationalist movement in Karabakh, told me that as a child the
conversations she overheard at home about the prerevolutionary pe
riod made a deep impression on her. Her grandmother’s family had
been deported from a village named Alguli and fled to Khankendi, the
village that later became Stepanakert. Alguli was then completely set
tled by Azerbaijanis:
We had just one small bed and Grandmother and I slept on this bed.
And every night, my grandmother’s relatives from Alguli came, these
beaten, deported people, who had gone on foot to Khankendi and set
tled here. Those old people were still alive then, and I was small, and
they talked about it all in whispers. It wasn’t allowed, it was the years
of Stalinism. You know what a child’s brain is like, it records every-
thing like a tape recorder.
3
S H U S H A : T H E N E I G H B O R S ’ TA L E
53
In a dingy windowless office in a back street of Baku, I met another
Shusha patriot. Zahid Abasov, a chubby man, is now the official in
charge of culture of the Shusha administration in exile in Azerbaijan, a
more or less meaningless position, which gives him plenty of time to re
flect on what might have been. In the 1980s, he ran the local young
Communist or Komsomol organization in Shusha. Working in a pre-
dominantly Armenian province, he worked mostly with Armenians,
and remembered them all well. When I mentioned the Khachaturians,
he exclaimed, “What a pleasant couple!” “How she’s aged,” he com
mented of Larisa Khachaturian as he studied a photograph of her in her
garden. Of Zhanna Galstian, he remarked ironically, “Zhanna once
gave me a crystal vase as a present. I left it behind in Shusha. She’s very
welcome to it, if she wants it.”
4
Then Abasov pulled from his desk drawer a stack of old black-and-
white photographs. One of them, bleached with sunlight, showed six
smiling tanned young men sitting at a café table on a terrace. The third
man along, grinning broadly, in wide sunglasses, was Abasov. If the
man on the right of the picture, in a white short-sleeved shirt, his watch
glinting in the sun, looked familiar, that was because he is now presi
dent of Armenia. It was a younger Robert Kocharian. The group of
friends from Nagorny Karabakh had gone on vacation to the Gurzuf
sanatorium in Yalta in the Crimea in the summer of 1986.
Fate decreed that while Abasov lost pretty much everything and
was driven into exile, several of his old Komsomol friends have be-
come the leaders of independent Armenia. Abasov’s closest colleagues
were the first secretary of the Stepanakert Komsomol, Serzh Sarkisian,
now minister of defense in Armenia; his deputy Robert Kocharian,
the Armenian president; and Nelli Movsesian, Armenia’s minister of
education.
Abasov used to come down from Shusha to work every day in
Stepanakert and, rather than have him head back up the mountain, his
colleagues took turns inviting him home to lunch. When had he first no
ticed Armenian nationalist feelings, I asked. “Toward the end I started
to feel something with Serzhik [Sarkisian],” Abasov responded. “He be-
came rather quiet. But with Robik [Kocharian], right up to the end I felt
nothing.” Even, it seemed, during soccer matches, the moment when
nationalist feelings traditionally rose to the surface: “There were work
ers in the Regional Committee who supported the Ararat soccer team,
but Robik didn’t even do that.” Abasov added that he kept up with his
54
S H U S H A : T H E N E I G H B O R S ’ TA L E
friends even after 1988, but political conflict made their meetings fleet
ing and furtive, as national cause made friendship with the other com
munity undesirable. Abasov hunched over his desk, more gloomy now.
He still didn’t want to believe what had happened. “How much longer
can this go on?” he asked me, as if the conflict were only a terrible mis
understanding that could be set right by a few friendly conversations.
In Yerevan, the Armenian minister of defense Serzh Sarkisian
laughed when I passed on the greetings of his former friend and col
league. Yes, he remembered him well, Sarkisian said, and he was a good
man. Sarkisian told me that he himself spoke good Azeri and had a lot
of Azerbaijani friends—but pointed out that he had also studied in Ar
menia, a side of him that Abasov had evidently never seen. The Ar
menian cause mattered more than personal friendships, Sarkisian
seemed to be saying. “The problem was inherent in the Soviet system.
But as for Zahid or Rohangiz, the first secretary of the Shusha Komso
mol, she was a pleasant normal woman.”
5
The further I went to the top looking for answers, for the personal
roots of all the killing, the more frustrated I became. No one felt that
they personally were to blame. In an interview, Robert Kocharian of
fered only general thoughts on personal friendship and ethnic conflict.
“Of course I do have [Azerbaijani] friends. The situation, the path of life
meant that I did not have a wide circle of friends. But I do remember
those friends that I did have, I have no complaints about them, we had
normal friendly relations. But usually when ethnic conflicts begin, it al
ways retreats into the background.”
6
The president of Armenia had
been one of the leaders of the Karabakh Armenian national movement
“Krunk” from the very beginning, in 1988. In 1992, he had taken part in
the operation to capture Shusha. Yet he talked almost as if he had
played no role in starting the conflict, as if it had come out of the blue.
Again the language was passive, as though simply “ethnic conflicts
begin,” like natural phenomena. The president had no explanation.
4
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