Arif Yunus

"The main thing is, Leyla and I are historians. And we were constantly confronted with problems that many Soviet people were not aware of. Because what was a historian in national countries? It mean you couldn't deal with the history of your own nation. One more remark. I was in the department of ethnogenesis, which dealt with the origin of the nation. And it turned out that, first of all, we had to do everything in Russian, especially when writing about fundamental problems. In the native language, one could write about the history of the Communist Party or praise the Soviet Union. But antiquity and the Middle Ages - only in Russian. Moscow had to give endorsement before publication. The dissertation was also approved there. We always felt this moment. Or who worked in the archives, certainly encountered scrutiny at various levels. If he wanted to work in the archives, he had to get permission. Every institution, especially our Academy of Sciences, had a so-called 'special department' - that was the KGB. Permission was given by a special department of the academy, then a special department in Moscow. Then you got permission and went to the archives, where you were checked again. Whether you liked it or not, you started thinking, 'Why all this? Why should I get materials about the history of my nation in this way?' And by the way, not everybody gave permission. When you had access to the special depository, a lot of questions arose. I saw the difference between the official history of my nation - the declared history, and the real history. I even knew that Soviet history was completely distorted. In Russia, by the way, it is distorted even now. Much of what we saw in movies and read was a complete lie. And as a historian, as a military historian, as an expert on wars, I knew this very well."

"While studying the pogroms in Armenia, I interviewed 928 refugees. And not just any interviewees. There were no computers in those days, I wrote by hand and made calluses on my fingers. Then I sent these materials to the General Prosecutor's Office of the USSR. On the basis of this, Moscow opened 26 criminal proceedings in the matter of the murders of Azerbaijanis in Armenia. I did the same in the case of the pogroms in Azerbaijan. Of course, both sides were unhappy with me. If I, as an Azerbaijani, had written only about the pogroms in Armenia against Azerbaijanis, they would have made me a hero in Azerbaijan. But I also wrote about pogroms against Armenians. So I broke the taboo of not writing bad things about one's own people in times of war. You can't. You become the enemy. That was the first time, by the way, that I was labeled an Armenian spy, an enemy of the nation. But I said then and I have always said that in the Karabakh conflict nobody is in the right, both sides have their hands up to their elbows in blood. There is blood on both sides. My job was to create awareness."