"Черный сад".
Лето 1987 года я провел в Баку - ездил в пионерский лагерь по путевке. Столица Азербайджана запоминалась мне тогда ярким солнцем, теплым морем и вкусными фруктами - это был вообще первый раз, когда я куда-то выехал из Свердловска.
В то время я был маленьким и многого не понимал, но на фоне всех этих детских радостей меня не покидало ощущение какой-то опасности - буквально кожей я ощущал неясную тревогу исходящую от местных жителей.
Пройдет совсем немного времени и на всю страну прогремят события в Сумгаите, Баку и Ходжалы; поэтому на прошлой неделе начал читать книгу про страшные события конца 80-х-начала 90-х - "BLACK GARDEN. Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War" Томаса де Ваала.
The research done for this book is based on around 120 original inter-views done in 2000-2001, supplemented by eyewitness reporting and secondary sources. Personal testimony is of course subjective, so I have tried to balance my reconstruction of events from as many sources as possible. The problem is that the written record on the subject is also frequently unreliable, partisan, and incomplete. It will take many years for a full picture of what happened in Armenia and Azerbaijan after 1988 to be assembled. This is intended as a beginning in a field that has very few accounts interested in both sides. Many Armenians and Azer/baijanis will take an interest in what is written here, and I would make a plea for them not to quote some of the information here selectively, to suit their own political agendas. The book stands or falls as an entire whole.
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Now, the heat has gone out of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict and it is frozen and inactive, like Cyprus. But it cannot be ignored. It is the tiny knot at the center of a big international security tangle. The story of how the knot was closed takes in the coming to independence of both Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the rediscovery of the Caucasus by the outside world. It is a tragic story that helps explain how conflicts begin and how the Soviet Union ended. In retrospect, it should perhaps have been obvious that the suppressed problems lurking in this corner of the Soviet Union would be dangerous if they ever came to the surface. Yet, when it all began in 1988, almost everyone was taken by surprise.