Arman Tatoyan, head of the “Wings of Unity” political initiative, writes: “Today is May 1. Labor Day…Not a working day. Most of the world celebrates this holiday.

In the history of Armenia, however, the first days of May are known for another reason. On April 30, 1991, units of the internal troops of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Soviet Army and the Azerbaijani OMON entered the Armenian-inhabited villages of the northern part of Artsakh.

In the first days of May, Getashen and Martunashen were “cleansed” of Armenians. villages were suddenly surrounded, men were arrested, women and children were deported in buses under surveillance, houses were looted, property and lands were handed over to Azerbaijanis.

The operation was called “Koltso”. Beginning on the actual May 1st, it lasted throughout 1991. summer, covered dozens of Armenian villages and became the last major punitive action of the Soviet army in its own territory against its own people. The USSR army deported Soviet citizens in trucks to the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs
(NKVD) with the methodical instructions inherited from the troops.

“Koltso” is the direct methodological heir of Stalin’s national deportations. The same troops, the same methods. the start of the operation on the same day as the holiday, the same logic. there is a population that prevents the solution of the problem, therefore it is moved. Only the formal reasons changed: “unreliability” in 1944, “passport regime” in 1991, but the essence of the procedure was the same.

In Artsakh, the architect of this model was Major-General Vladislav Safonov, the military commandant of the emergency region of Nagorno-Karabakh. For Azerbaijan, he is a hero with the nickname “iron general”. In the Armenian memory, he, like the whole action, was carefully pushed into the background, because remembering was inconvenient due to geopolitical considerations.

Why return to all this today and why exactly like this?
Not to say “Russia is bad, USSR was bad”. It is a pointless thesis. States are not “good” or “bad”. they have interests, resources and instruments with which they realize those interests.

USSR in 1991 was solving its problem of keeping Azerbaijan within the collapsing Union at the expense of the population of dozens of Armenian villages. An understandable, cynical, rational problem.
The problem of the Armenian political tradition lies elsewhere. It was built for decades on the thesis of “special”, “fraternal”, “inviolable” relations.

In theory, this is convenient, but in practice it is disastrous, because it interferes with calculation. It is difficult to see when Russian interests coincide with Armenian ones, and when they conflict. It is difficult to understand that the inactivity of the peacekeepers in Stepanakert in September 2023 was not a “betrayal of the company”, but a consistent implementation of interests that were visible for a long time, and never meant to sacrifice something for the sake of Armenia.

So that Koltso, Sumgait, Artsakh are not repeated, the solution is neither to restore the myth of “friendship” nor to reject it (for those who reject it, “Russia is an eternal enemy”, which is equally absurd).

The solution is a sober understanding: with whom do Armenia’s interests coincide, in which sector, on what issue, under what conditions?

Boring, unromantic, pragmatic work. But it is precisely the lack of it that has cost the Armenian people what it has cost them in the last 35 years.

Labor Day is a good occasion to remind that sober calculation is also work.”

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