Originally posted by TomServo
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We all knew how to react when Armenians would say ‘bizimdir, bizimdir, bizimdir’ (ours, ours, ours). It wasn’t all that nice. And sometimes you’d just want to stop and say, ‘Look, you live here, ‘Sizindir, da!’’ (Isn’t Baku what is yours?). But we would just laugh it off. Someone would be saying, ‘Ararat is ours, Karabagh is really ours’, and someone would break in, ‘And Novgorod?’ And we would all laugh. The jokes were, of course, legendary. . . . The Brezhnev period was such a time of humor because, who knows? Who could survive such nonsense? There was such an extraordinary difference between what people heard from up above and how people actually lived, people fed off of this irony. People just understood that talk about the genocide, Karabagh, Ararat – these things we had heard about all our lives – was just part of some Armenian inventory, part of their repertoire. The point is that it never came to conflict. We never came to blows over that.
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