Life and Freedom. The autobiography of the former president of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh
regions of the country; there were about 10 of us from Karabakh, and none of my friends were among them.
Boot camp is a special place. A whole lot of guys from the same draft season end up in an unusual setting, where they must understand and get a sense of what military service is going to be like. In part, that understanding comes through adjusting and forming an internal hierarchy. For instance: who sleeps on the top bunk and who sleeps on the bottom, or who is responsible for cleaning the bathrooms. I didn't want to clean bathrooms at all.
It was here that I finally understood the essence of the "natural law" in Spinoza's Political Treatise. Fists, and the perpetual willingness to use them, became the only means of self-assertion. I was in good shape. My years of freestyle wrestling came in very handy, and my courage and will were over the top. Boldness and aggression, which I never thought I had, suddenly surfaced in me. Very soon, I started to get respect. A guy who grew up in a cultured family from an upscale part of a quiet town unexpectedly ended up in a setting where he had to fight for a place in the sun – brutally and without mercy. I faced the kind of reality I was shielded from during my childhood and adolescence. This played a critical role in my self-formation. I acquired the skills necessary to function in unfriendly and even highly aggressive environments. Without these skills, I probably couldn't have faced the ordeals awaiting me in the future.
From boot camp, I was sent to Pushkin, near Leningrad, and later to Vologda. It was the same story: adjusting and self-assertion, but it was much easier to do this time.
This type of service could hardly be called military service. I saw the shooting range only once, and I shot nine rounds there. I didn't see any military hardware, only tractors and dump trucks. For the next two months, I lived a free life in Leningrad. We repaired trailers in the workshops of the Defense Ministry for a month. We lived there, too, and worked hard, but we were free at night. I drove all over Leningrad dressed in a tracksuit. We didn't have any bosses, only a guard – a retired old man. Then I worked at an army farm near Viborg for a month. Together with seven other soldiers, I harvested potatoes and vegetables for our military base. We lived in the local cultural center under my supervision – no marching drills, no army service regulations. Here, too, just like in Pushkin, we worked hard during the day, but at night, we went to the local dance hall, where we were very popular with local girls.
I served my final year in Mongolia – in Darkhan and Erdenet. It was very different from serving in stationary military units. Our command was ordered to form a special battalion to build a railway from Darkhan to Erdenet in order to reach Mongolia's molybdenum mines. Every military base in the railway troops sent several servicemen, according to quotas, to form this new battalion.
To get rid of the troublemakers, commanding officers gave them favorable reviews and assigned them to the newly-formed battalion. I was serving in Vologda at the time and volunteered for the battalion to join my friend, who was number one on the list to be sent away. Kolya, from Bryansk, was our commanding officer's biggest headache. He was awfully rowdy, a regular in the stockade, yet brilliant and well-read. He annoyed the entire command with his very well-written complaint letters to various agencies. He wrote them all the time, triggering multiple inspections to check on the complaints. Our commanding officer was furious, of course.
I remember that during the morning flag assembly, enraged by another inspection, he screamed at the top of his lungs, "We can't find someone to write even a couple of lines for our unit's newspaper, yet this dick composed a whole letter and sent it to none other than the minister of defense himself!" I think our commanding officer was the happiest man in the world to hear that a critical railroad was to be built in Mongolia.
Thus, the new battalion boarded a train and spent the next 10 days getting to its destination. Imagine a crowd of the rowdiest heavy-drinking rebels – some new recruits, some about to be discharged – on a train together for 10 days. No one knew what they were capable of. The adjustment, this time on the road, began right away. We saw our platoon commander only twice – once at the place we boarded and once at the destination, but this time with a big shiner. I don't know how he got it, but I could tell that he had been drinking non-stop. As it turned out, the officers were selected using the same criteria: they were the ones to be gotten rid of. Even though the commanding officer and the political officer were capable professionals, it took a lot of effort to control this bedlam.
We reached our deployment location at night. There was nothing but a bare steppe, but we had to settle there. We put up tents. We had to do everything ourselves: organize our work, get equipment, and build shelters. There were no settlements for many miles around. You could drive for three hours and not see anything except for a couple of yurts and a herd of cattle.
In these harsh and very unusual living and working conditions, soldiers built very different relationships from those on regular stationary military bases. Sticks and carrots didn't work. The stockade was far away in Ulan Bator. There was nowhere to go after dismissal – only wild nature all around us. Our leisure time was built around the high bar, weights, parallel bars, and boxing gloves. There was a pool table set up for the officers in the field, but it remained there only until a sandstorm lifted it 50 meters high and slammed it onto the ground, smashing it to pieces.
Matters were not settled by the army service regulations. Although we were privates, three of us – Gena from Riga, Kolya from Bryansk, and I – ended up at the top of the hierarchy. We were on good terms with the officers, and our detachment was completing tasks ahead of schedule. But enforcing service regulations – the way they did in Moscow or Germany, where soldiers lived in good barracks, had showers, followed precise daily schedules, and were well fed – was impossible.
We didn't have barracks at all – we lived in tents. As the railroad construction progressed, our base moved three times to be closer to the work site. Each time, we had to settle in from scratch. The nature was breathtaking: very unique landscapes, unusual to my eye. Gently sloping mountains that stretched across the steppe underscored the vastness of pristine wilderness. The climate was markedly harsh: -35° centigrade in the winter and 40° during the summer. In May, it was -3° at night and 27° during the day. Yet, we stayed in tents, 30 soldiers in each tent. For heat, we used woodburning stoves with long chimneys. It was cold on the bottom of the bunk bed and scorching hot on the top, where all the earlier recruits slept. With no refrigerators in the steppe, meat would go bad before it could reach us during the summer. So that we wouldn't be eating canned meat all summer, our commanding officer let us put together a fishing brigade, which I joined thanks to my hunting skills. We caught burbots at night in the Orkhon and Selenga rivers for the entire military base and slept during the day. Sometimes we shot antelopes by chasing them down in GAZ-66 trucks, although it wasn't encouraged. This is how the summer went by.
Serving in the army was а priceless character-building life experience for me.
After being discharged, my relationships with my army friends didn't last for too long. We went our separate ways, and long-distance communications back then – without mobile telephone service and social media – required much effort.
CHAPTER 4
SUCCESSION OF CHANGES
I was discharged from the army at the end of December, right before New Year's Eve, and made it home for the holidays. By then, all of my friends, classmates, acquaintances, and neighbors of the same age had already returned to Stepanakert, having concluded their military service. The phone rang almost every day. "Oh, you're already here? We have to meet!" I wanted to see everybody, and I met up with someone every day. During