Shusha Pogrom - The Pogrom

The Pogrom

According to Richard Hovannisian, "Azerbajani troops, joined by the city’s Azerbaijani inhabitants, turned Armenian Shushi into an inferno. From March 23 to 26, some 2000 structures were consumed in the flames, including the churches and consistory, cultural institutions, schools, libraries, the business section and the grand homes of the merchant class. Bishop Vahan (Ter-Grigorian), long an advocate of accommodation with the Azerbaijani authorities, paid the price of retribution, as his tongue was torn out before his head was cut off and paraded through the streets on a spike. The chef of police, Avetis Ter-Ghukasian, was turned into a human torch, and many intellectuals, including Bolshevik Alexandre Dsaturian, were among the 500 Armenian victims".

According to the description of Azerbaijani communist O. Musaev, "a ruthless destruction of defenceless women, children, old women and old men began. Armenians were exposed to a mass slaughter (...). And what beautiful Armenian girls were raped and then shot. (...) At an order of (...) Khosrov-bek Sultanov, pogroms proceeded for more than six days, houses in the Armenian part were crushed, plundered and reduced all to ashes, everyone led women away whenever they wished, to musavatist executioners. During these historically "artful" punishments Khosrov-bek Sultanov, keeping speeches, talked to Moslems about holy war (Jihad) and called on to them to finish off the Armenians of city Shusha, not sparing women, children, etc."

According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Third Edition, 1970), these events contributed to the death of 2096 of the city's population. Subsequently, only a few Armenian families remained.

Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote about Shusha in the 1920s: "...in this town, which formerly, of course, was healthy and with every amenity, the picture of catastrophe and massacres was terribly vivid... They say after the massacres all the wells were full of corpses. (...) We didn't see anyone in the streets or on the mountain. Only downtown, in the market-square there were a lot of people, but there wasn't any Armenian among them, they were all Muslims".

On January 21, 1936, in the Moscow Kremlin, during the reception of the delegation from the Azerbaijan SSR, Sergo Ordzhonikidze remembers his visit to destroyed Shusha: "Even today I remember what I saw in Shusha in 1920, with horror. The most beautiful Armenian town was completely destroyed, and in the wells we saw corpses of women and children."

The former Minister of Internal Affairs of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, Behbut khan Javanshir, was assassinated during Operation Nemesis of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, as ARF believed that he was involved in these events.