On these days, the Armenian world for 32 years has traditionally celebrated a “triple holiday”: the Day of the Liberation of Shushi, the Day of the Establishment of the Artsakh Defense Army and the Day of Victory in the ‘Great Patriotic War’, although the latter could not be as relatable and important for the Armenians scattered around the world for obvious reasons. The tragic discrepancy in the interpretation of the meaning of May 8-9 begins with the national day calendar of the Third Republic: official Yerevan celebrated May 9 as the “Day of Victory and Peace”, and May 8 as the day of “Yerkrapah” (Volunteer Union). In this sense, not much has changed in the form of the holiday: the victory over Nazism in 1945 has not gone anywhere despite the deafening defeat by Nazism in 2020-2023 (the expulsion of an entire population from their millennia-old territory, ethnic cleansing, destruction of cultural and religious monuments and, finally, the acceptance of such an outcome by the Armenian authorities), and “peace” seems to the Armenian authorities closer than ever.
At the same time, today is the fourth Victory Day that Shushi spends under occupation, the first Victory Day on which the Artsakh Defense Army was established and on which it no longer exists, and the first Victory Day with Stepanakert’s Revival Square desecrated by an Azerbaijani military parade. Both lost holidays are closely linked to the fortress city of Shushi. The fall of the city was a harbinger of the fall of Artsakh and its army, henceforth exposing mainland Armenia.
“Eternal peace” to the last Armenian
The story of a fortified city surrounded and defended by brave men is one of the oldest in human history. However, the penetration of the Transcaucasian Tatars into Shushi and their subsequent enthronement over Artsakh has nothing to do with either defense or offensive. It all starts with fratricide and greed of the melik Shahnazar, who invites the khan of nomadic Turkic tribes Panah to Shushi, and the disunity of Armenian meliks – a much more traditional plot for Armenian history. Although Armenian Shahnazar remained the de facto master of Shushi at this stage, and soon the city also de facto became the capital of neighboring Armenian provinces (Sheki, Shirvan, Zangezur), the settlement of Mohammedans in the city could no longer be stopped.
The Armenians of Shushi, despite the growing Mohammedan population in the city, remained one of the most vibrant cells of the Armenian world. The culturally developed city became a center of attraction and a melting pot for Armenian intellectuals fleeing from oppression faced in Shahkert, Agulis, Meghri and Western Armenia. The pressure of the Russian Empire in the early 20th century failed to make the brightest figures of Armenian culture perfectly integrated into the education and art spheres of both the Russian Empire and European powers abandon their native language and history. They continued to openly demand respect for their identity and, at the same time, to hold secret classes in Armenian language and history under the guise of creative circles that changed locations all the time.
The contrast between the life of “Armenian Paris” and its Turkic neighborhood was striking. Realizing the explosiveness of this situation, the richest Armenians of Shushi chose the path of appeasement of local aggressive foreigners by financing the maintenance of Tatar schools and the provision of drinking water to the Tatar quarter. Jumping ahead, one of the main benefactors who created such infrastructure for future “Azerbaijanis”, Tadevos Tamiryan, was “thanked” by them in 1989 by blowing up his tombstone memorial. Another valuable example of “joint investment” in infrastructure and education in the name of “peaceful coexistence”.
In 1920, a century after inviting Panah to the city, Melik Shahnazar’s fatal mistake would turn into one of the blackest pages of the Armenian Genocide and the de-armenization of Shushi.
The brutal all-consuming massacre of the Armenian population in Shushi in the spring of 1920 showed the interconnectedness of the Armenian world and the impossibility of peace and security in its separate parts.
Daniel Bek-Pirumyan, Shushi public school’s graduate, would become one of the triumphants of the victory at Sardarapat and independence of the First Republic two years before the massacre, and two years later would fail to defend the Kars fortress as its commandant, be captured by the Turks, shot by the Bolsheviks and buried at the church of St. Gayane in Vagharshapat. Aram Manukyan, the first Prime Minister of the First Republic, who was born in Shushi, died after contracting typhus in a Western Armenians’ refugee camp never saw the fortresses of Shushi and Kars fallen.
For the future Azerbaijani nation, the bloody spring of 1920 became an “original sin”, for Armenians it was another page of loss and powerlessness in the face of spontaneous brutality on their own territory. A few days after the ethnic cleansing in Shushi, the Azerbaijani Musavatists expressed their official approval of this action and threatened to move to “more brutal” actions in case of Armenian recalcitrance. After the communization of Shushi, even before the transfer of the NKAO (Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast’) to Azerbaijan, surviving Armenians were denied repatriation to the city. The Azerbaijani leadership subsequently prevented the establishment of Shushi as the capital of the autonomy. The Armenians, who were the majority in the town on the eve of the massacre, made up less than 15% of the population during the Soviet period, and in 1988, after the start of the national liberation movement, they were completely banished from the city.
Non-alternative liberation
The de-occupation of Shushi – one of the most brilliant pages of Armenian military history – at the same time remains one of the darkest and even scandalous episodes in Armenian history. The main participants of the operation persistently gave different assessments of the involvement and even awareness of the military and political leadership in Yerevan and Stepanakert until the very end, the number of medals “For the Liberation of Shushi” went out of control, and the man who developed the operation itself, Arkady Ter-Tadevosyan (Komandos) was awarded the title of National Hero of Armenia only posthumously and after the loss of Shushi, on May 8, 2021.
However, the facts invariably confirm one thing: 72 years after the complete de-armenization of Shushi, Armenians entered this natural fortress without encountering any real resistance.
Why did the Armenians dare to storm the fortress and how was it made possible?
A year after the operation, the Azerbaijani Secretary of State admitted that Stepanakert was continuously bombed from Shushi and other Armenian cities for over 100 days, but Armenians still did not leave their homes. Every square meter of the city was under attack. In the first week of May 1992 alone, more than 1000 shells, including 800 rockets, were fired from Shushi over Stepanakert, killing 20 civilians, and this in conditions when Stepanakert residents had already mastered the rules of behavior in such conditions and stayed in basements whenever possible, which in turn also led to the spread of epidemics. Azerbaijani arms deliveries to Shushi continued, and Stepanakert had no electricity or fuel since May 1. The Azerbaijanis chose the Ghazanchetsots Church as a storehouse for deadly ammunition. Shushi was to cease to be the epicenter of Armenian extermination.
According to the academic calculations of the Armenian military leadership, at least twice as many troops were needed for a successful takeover. However, the skillful tactics and flexibility of the volunteer commanders managed to overcome this limitation. Previous steps allowed the city to be encircled and to avoid urban fighting leaving an escape loophole for a short time. To begin the operation, the Armenians, deprived of any provisions, had only to wait for the weapons of their fallen fellow fighters from other battlefields.
The plan worked: Azerbaijanis fled Shushi in panic, without a fight. One of the last occupants to leave the fortress city was the detachment of terrorist Shamil Basayev. As a result, the enemy’s losses exceeded the number of Armenian casualties by more than 5 times. Despite the fact that such a successful offensive undermined Iran’s peacekeeping negotiation efforts, thanks to the acknowledged common interests between two countries Armenia and Iran overcame the resulted tension in a few months.
After the “Wedding in the Mountains” (code name of the Shushi liberation military operation) the Armenian detachments finally felt ready to create a regular army, and it became not only the third part and the crown of the May Victory celebrations, but also, realizing the inevitability of the enemy’s counter-offensive on Shushi, preventively, in conjunction with the Armed Forces of the Third Republic, finally broke the blockade of Artsakh, liberating Berdzor.
“Eternal peace” all over again
Most of the “elite” of the Armenian world and the Third Republic in particular infected people with illusion of “perpetual peace” if did not suffer from it themselves. The “ceasefire” which did not formalize the victory, gave the casual leaders an opportunity to return to a more comfortable position of a submissive object of regional and world politics living one day at a time.
Alas, the “miserable and faded” Shushi as interpreted by the main responsible for its loss in 2020 – Nikol Pashinyan was not a new idea in Armenian public discourse. The “absentee referendum” proposed by the Armenian authorities in 2006 to recognize Shushi as the cultural and educational capital of the global Armenian world, for voting in which it was necessary to send at least 1 euro, was already then perceived with distrust as a way to boost the government’s rating before the parliamentary elections and simply another corrupt idea, while supporters of Levon Ter-Petrosyan were already saying that Shushi was liberated by individuals, not by the state or the nation, referring to the state of the city, which has remained in ruins (since 1920 massacre). They simply forgot to implement the results of the fee-paying referendum, and now Shushi is one of the “cultural capitals of the Turkic world”.
The liberation of Shushi is a perfect example of the only true reading of realism in international relations where the main thing is to take one’s own fate into one’s own hands, to use all available, albeit limited, means for self-preservation, and the “international community” or individual partners, who have never come to the rescue, will surely accept the consequences.
The “Wedding in the Mountains” changed not only the course of the war, but also the enemy’s determination. It took them a quarter of a century, zillions of dollars, widespread propaganda of Armenophobia and the support of the strong patron – Turkey – but most importantly, it took Armenians forgetting about the cost of the “Wedding in the Mountains” and all the weddings that Armenians can still play in their mountains, to overcome that trauma. And more and more often we descend from those mountains so that we can be conveniently shelled from above – as Stepanakert once was from Shushi. Back then dozens of Armenian soldiers preferred death to starvation and captivity and saved tens of thousands of lives. Every Armenian’s life is an absolute value, and now, having taken a defensive and retreating line, we are paying it more and more often.
