Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan

 

Alik Bakhshi

Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan

 

 

Can the soul be stolen from the heart? Never!

You are my breath, you are my bread and water!

Your cities have opened up before me.

I am all yours. I am given to you as a son forever!

Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan!

                                 Samed Vurgun

 

If, by repeating the name of his homeland twice, the poet strengthens the feeling of his enthusiastic love for it, then similarly with the title of the article I want to reflect the misfortune of the people of Azerbaijan, cut into two parts by the interstate border.

 

A difficult fate befell the colonial peoples of the Russian Empire. Not many managed to break free with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But even those who have gained freedom are still experiencing the consequences of being in the "prison of nations", moreover, the threat of ending up there again is very real: for example, if it were not for the West's demand to stop the advance of the Russian tank column on Tbilisi in 2008, and if the American frigate had not appeared off the coast of Georgia, the Georgians would have been a people who voluntarily entered Moscow's protection twice. How can one not mention here, I would say, the unique ability of the Russians to liberate peoples with their inevitable subsequent annexation to the empire. This peculiarity of the Russians to bestow freedom on peoples has a long tradition, runs like a red (read bloody) thread, with which the patchwork empire is sewn, and is recorded in the history textbooks of the USSR, and although, in the case of Afghanistan, it has somewhat weakened, in the long term none of the neighboring peoples of the Russian Empire is guaranteed against the manic desire of the Russians to free them from the heavy burden of freedom. For example, the rumor of this Russian peculiarity reached Turkistan in its time, and in 1865 the Russians were invited by the residents of Tashkent to free them from life. True, the Tashkent residents stubbornly resisted liberation, probably due to their masochistic inclinations, and after the capture of the city they were mercifully killed, including women and children, which gave them the opportunity to posthumously voluntarily join the Russian Empire. Or another example: Moscow went to meet and satisfied the persistent request of Fatali Khan of the Derbent Khanate of Azerbaijan to become a vassal. This glorious act of voluntary reunification with Russia was later especially noted by the fact that the Kremlin cartographers included Dagestan (translated from Turkic - the land of mountains) into the Russian Federation, which the inhabitants of the former territory of Azerbaijan were extremely happy about and still express their gratitude to the Russians, saluting with gunfire and blowing up houses in Buinaksk, and in some cases, the joy overwhelms their souls so much that, unable to withstand the emotional load, they blow themselves up, involving those around them in an instant move to paradise, who naturally voluntarily joined the holiday of the soul, similar to that voluntary expression of the will of peoples to join Russia and free themselves from ... Once, while in Soviet Lithuania, I heard a phrase from an aborigine, pronounced with enthusiastic sarcasm, which I remembered forever: "the Russians came and freed us from meat and butter." Thus, the Lithuanian expressed personal gratitude to the "elder brother" for his concern for the health of the Lithuanian people. Indeed, what could be better than a diet for increasing life expectancy!

 

It must be said that the Azerbaijani people (more correctly called the Azerbaijani Turks, as the people in South Azerbaijan define themselves, as well as the Turkish Turks, Iranians and Armenians), like no other, have been especially favored by the Russians. Thus, as a result of a series of "voluntary" annexations of the peoples of the Caucasus, Azerbaijan was divided into Northern Azerbaijan as part of the Russian Empire and Southern Azerbaijan in Iran, where there are twice as many Azerbaijanis as in its northern part. Since then, apparently in gratitude for Baku oil, and perhaps for purely altruistic reasons, Moscow's concern for the Azerbaijani people has continued without ceasing, and in addition to the territory of Dagestan (Derbent Khanate), the Azerbaijani people were also liberated from the territory of the Zangezur region, which was transferred to Armenia, on the grounds that, as a result of Moscow's far-sighted national policy based on the principle of "friendship of peoples" (read ethnic cleansing), the number of the fraternal Armenian people had grown significantly there. Thus, the territory of the former Karabakh Khanate of Azerbaijan, previously populated by Armenians from Iran and Turkey, then received the status of an autonomous region under Soviet rule, and in 1989-1991, after the complete deportation and destruction of the Azerbaijani population on this original Azerbaijani land, the birthplace of folk poets and musicians, Moscow actually transferred to Armenia all of Karabakh with the adjacent areas, which were also liberated from the Azerbaijani population. As a result of the Karabakh conflict, Azerbaijan lost another 20 percent of its territory.

 

From the very beginning of the arrival of Russians in the Caucasus, Russia pursued a policy of ethnic expulsion of the Turkic population from the teTurkey and Iran, and the settlement of these lands by Armenians, encouraging their migration from neighboring countries. These vile actions against the Azerbaijani people reflect the real picture of the coincidence, up to a certain point, of the strategic goals of Moscow and the Armenian Nazis, dreaming of a Greater Armenia, from sea to sea. Yes, yes, exactly like that, “from sea to sea” and nothing else, because how can one explain the massacre of 1918, carried out by Armenians in Baku and other cities of Azerbaijan. Having secretly supplied weapons to the numerous Armenian diaspora, the Dashnaks prepared an unheard-of insidious rebellion in its cruelty. The Armenians, who had lived side by side with the Azerbaijanis for many years, suddenly began to break into houses and literally slaughter the unarmed population of the city, sparing neither children nor women. The residents fled, there was no way to organize resistance to the outrageous armed murderers. Pursuing the refugees, the bandits rushed to the suburban villages. Let me make a short lyrical digression. There was a large old photograph of my grandfather hanging in the house. As a small child, I noticed that there was a patched hole in the chest area of ​​the portrait. When asked about its origin, my father answered briefly, "from a sabre." He generally did not like to talk about military topics, although he had been through the entire war from beginning to end, commanding an anti-aircraft battery. I learned the details from my mother when I was already an adult: Terrible news about the cruelty of the Armenians reached Balakhani. The residents, taking their children and food, hastily left the village at night. There was nowhere to run, Baku and the surrounding villages are located on a peninsula. Their escape was interrupted by the deserted shore of the Caspian Sea. Fortunately, the Armenians did not think to move to the sea. A few days later, when the grandfather's family returned, they found broken dishes and a portrait pierced by a saber in the house, a colorful hint of what awaited them if the Armenians found the family in the house.

 

In Azerbaijan, the Armenians used the same tactics of ethnic cleansing of the territory for the proposed Armenian state as in Turkey in 1915, with the only difference that in Turkey this action was carried out with the help of the tsarist authorities, and in Azerbaijan with the assistance of the communists. The then Armenian military commander Andronnik telegraphed the Kremlin about the glorious victory over the enemy. However, the joy was short-lived. Turkey, despite the desperate situation on the front, sent a military detachment to Baku for rescue. (Turks and Azerbaijanis are one people, by analogy with the Germans and Austrians). Having broken the defense organized by the Dashnaks on the approaches to the city, the Turks entered the city, which, apparently, according to the invaders' plans, was supposed to enrich Great Armenia with oil.

The Dashnaks hoped that the Russians would help them create Great Armenia, but they were deeply mistaken. Having organized the Armenian Socialist Republic on the site of the Yerevan Khanate (one of the khanates of Azerbaijan), the Kremlin communists simultaneously buried any hope of the Armenian Nazis for independence, which responded many years later with a series of terrorist attacks carried out by the newly strengthened Dashnak party in the form of blown up ducklings in the Moscow metro and commuter trains.

 

However, the main thing that, in my opinion, the Dashnak ideologists, planning to build a chimerical state, did not take into account is the mentality of the Armenian people. Here it is appropriate to point out the peculiarity of the mentality of the Armenian people, namely the desire to migrate to economically developed areas, usually cities, creating centers of compact settlement there. For example, a very eloquent fact is that at the time of the Russian conquest of Georgia, there were more Armenians living in Tbilisi than Georgians themselves. In Baku, an entire district of the city was called Armenikend, with an exclusively Armenian population. By the way, in Soviet times, the number of Armenians making up the population of Baku exceeded the number of Armenians living in all of Karabakh. Only the difference in mentality can explain the fact that Azerbaijani refugees from Armenia and the occupied territories fled to Azerbaijan, while Armenian refugees ended up anywhere but in Armenia. Those few who did end up in their homeland soon left it with the sole thought of never returning there. But it was after the collapse of the USSR, when it would seem there were no special reasons not to come to the free and much-desired Armenia, that a significant number of them appeared in the rich American state of California. Didn't they follow in the footsteps of the Jews, in order to create an Armenian lobby in the most powerful world power, to solve their problems with the hands of American taxpayers, or even with the lives of American soldiers to implement the Dashnak ideology of creating a Greater Armenia. The reason for the lack of desire for the Motherland can also be sought in the fact that today's Armenia is an artificial formation of Armenians resettled from Turkey, Iran and Lebanon, as a consequence of the implementation, with the assistance of Moscow, of the ideology of the extremely nationalistic Dashnaktsutyun party.

 

It is no secret that the Armenians had great influence in the Kremlin under the communists (A. Mikoyan), creating a powerful diaspora in Moscow, otherwise howrritories adjacent toIt can be explained that of all the Soviet republics, only Armenia became increasingly mono-ethnic, and this despite the fact that the number of Armenians in Armenia itself did not increase due to the continuous migration of Armenians to the central cities of Russia, as well as the resort cities of the Black Sea coast and the North Caucasus. Not only the Azerbaijani population was gradually squeezed out of Armenia, but even Russians, whose number was constantly growing in all the other Soviet republics, were practically gone in Armenia at the time of the collapse of the USSR. By the way, the impetus for the Karabakh conflict was the forced deportation of Azerbaijanis from Armenia. This was a well-planned, insidious action. (Let me note that insidiousness on the part of Armenians has been noted more than once in history). At its first stage, refugees from Kafan appeared in Azerbaijan. And this was in the USSR, in peacetime! Driven out of their homes by Armenian militants, they headed to Baku, intending to seek protection and justice from the official authorities, who were in complete indecision, because all the requests of responsible party comrades from Baku remained unanswered. Moscow maintained a stubborn silence. General Secretary Gorbachev did not take any action to stop the lawlessness committed in Armenia. What is the reason for such strange behavior of a person in whose hands all the power is concentrated in the conditions of such a totalitarian state as the Soviet Union? One involuntarily recalls the time of Gorbachev's visit to France, his meeting with representatives of the Armenian diaspora. One can only guess how they managed to tie Gorbachev's hands. The only thing that the cowardly republican government did, instead of ringing all the bells about the blatant arbitrariness of Armenian nationalists, was to prevent the appearance of Kafan refugees in Baku. They were not allowed to go further than Sumgait, otherwise what happened in Sumgait would have had larger-scale consequences in Baku due to the large Armenian population, significantly exceeding the number of Sumgait Armenians. It must be assumed that the Dashnaks were counting on an Armenian pogrom in Baku, having started to play out sinister plans, having prepared the fate of hostages for the Baku Armenians in favor of their crazy ideology of creating a "Great Armenia from sea to sea". Time passed, and the homeless refugees were left alone with their problems in an artificially created information vacuum. The authorities did not even create a tent camp for them. It was then that provocateurs appeared, as it turned out later, two Armenians, who, taking advantage of the artificially created dangerous situation, pushed desperate people to a pogrom of Armenians in Sumgait. The action was so carefully planned and, most importantly, documented at the same moment and, moreover, surprisingly quickly, literally a few hours later the film of the vandalism of the Azerbaijanis, having crossed the state border, which was already nonsense for the USSR, ended up abroad, which leaves no doubt about the pre-planned sinister operation. Note that at that time the common people did not have video cameras, much less professional movie cameras. It is difficult to imagine that all this suddenly appeared in a timely and appropriate manner. But it is even more difficult to imagine that something like this could have happened in such a totalitarian state as the Soviet Union! In a state in which not only a tank, but every bullet was accounted for, and all this unexpectedly ended up in the hands of Armenian militants who began open military actions against Azerbaijan.

 

The planned tragedy of Sumgait legitimized the expulsion of the Azerbaijanis from Armenia, and then the seizure of Karabakh. As I said, Moscow remained silent about the lawlessness of the Armenian authorities, it seemed that, hiding behind the Kremlin wall, the all-powerful Secretary General was afraid to restore order in the country. No, apparently, there is a reason for such inaction, which can only be guessed at. For the first time since the war, thousands of refugees appeared in the USSR, direct evidence that Soviet power on the territory of the Armenian Socialist Republic ceased to exist. However, when the retaliatory expulsion of Armenians from Baku began, Gorbachev immediately sent troops to restore Soviet power in Azerbaijan, and this against the background of the fact that in Armenia itself, Soviet power practically no longer existed. In fact, the collapse of the Soviet empire can be counted from the moment the Karabakh conflict began.

 

The communists, in fact, continued the policy of tsarism to resettle Armenians among the Muslim Turkic population of Azerbaijan, hence the deliberately created Karabakh problem, thanks to which today Russia has the opportunity to influence the political situation in the Caucasus region, which is strategically important for it. Russia, whose economy traditionally relies solely on energy sales, will do everything in its power to prevent a competitor, such as Azerbaijan, from entering the European market. Incidentally, Russia's failed intervention in Georgia also envisaged blocking the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline. Armed RoArmenia is only waiting for the Kremlin's go-ahead to begin military action to further annex the lands of neighboring Azerbaijan and Georgia into Greater Armenia - the programmatic goal of the revived extreme nationalist Dashnaktsutyun party, the party responsible for the tragedy of the Turkish Armenians in 1915, when the Dashnaks, with the help of the Russians, undertook the ethnic extermination of the Turks in order to build an Armenian state on the free territory. At the time when the Turkish army was engaged in heavy fighting with the Russian troops, the Armenians raised a bloody rebellion in the rear not against the regular Turkish army, but against the civilian population, in order to cause general panic and facilitate the advance of Russian troops deep into Turkish territory. However, the cruelty committed by the Dashnaks spontaneously caused massive popular resistance, which led to colossal casualties among the Armenians. Accusing Turkey of genocide is completely groundless, because, unlike the Jewish one in Germany, no genocide was planned by the Turkish authorities or carried out by the army, what happened was a spontaneous popular retaliation for the extermination of the civilian population organized by the Armenian Dashnaks. During the entire existence of the Ottoman Empire, Armenians lived happily among the Muslim population and no oppression was noted either on national or religious grounds. Having failed in Turkey, the Dashnaks did not abandon their plan and undertook a similar insidious action in 1918 in Azerbaijan, also failing. But the most important thing is that in their insidious plans, the Dashnaks, in order to achieve their political goals, each time, playing a kind of "Armenian Gambit", if we follow the chess terminology, set up the Armenian people, as happened in Turkey in 1915, in Baku in 1918 and as happened in Sumgait in 1988.

 

The care of the "big brother" affected not only the reduction of the territory of Azerbaijan, but also the culture: the Azerbaijani people, of course, by their voluntary expression of will, by a special order of Moscow, were twice deprived of the alphabet, that is, they became illiterate overnight; first, the Latin alphabet was introduced, and then they came to their senses and switched to the Russian alphabet. By the way, failure to comply with this decree was tantamount to anti-Soviet activity and was strictly punished. It is the same as if Russians were obliged to use the Japanese alphabet, and after, say, five years, the Chinese. I wonder what Pushkin's poems would look like in Chinese characters! And who would read Pushkin and Dostoevsky given the sudden illiteracy of the Russian population. This is exactly what happened in Azerbaijan. At best, if someone heard that there were such poets as Nizami, Khagani, and there was no real opportunity to read them. In schools, instead of national literature, the study of purely Russian writers and poets was imposed, and, of course, how can one not mention the masterpiece of Soviet literature "How the Steel Was Tempered". Honestly, the name of the author of this masterpiece has been forgotten for some reason.

 

Having gained independence, Northern Azerbaijan adopted a democratic constitution, but the people's mentality and corruption do not allow it to fully benefit from its benefits, there is also the fact that the people had no experience of Democracy, which, as if a self-evident gift, suddenly fell on them. Of course, it will take time, but while the country is developing economically, Baku is acquiring the appearance of a modern metropolis, which harmoniously combines the beauty of ancient architecture with bold architectural projects of skyscrapers, and the only dangerous moment is the aggressive intentions of the Armenian Dashnaks with their chimerical dream of building "Armenia from sea to sea".

 

Today, Azerbaijan is a place where the strategic and economic interests of Putin's Russia and the Tehran obscurantists intersect, which consist, firstly, in preventing energy resources from the Caspian basin countries from entering the world market, and secondly, in the unification of Northern and Southern Azerbaijan, and the smoldering Karabakh conflict is a good fuse for the start of military actions, which have every chance of escalating into a large-scale regional war, or, God forbid, into World War III.

 

28.07.12.