Soviet Union The Armenian Challenge

By Thomas A. Sancton

The first official reports spoke of "rampage and violence" caused by "hooligans." As sensational rumors reverberated around the country, a Soviet government spokesman admitted to "certain injuries" and even "several" deaths in the southwestern city of Sumgait. The full extent of the carnage was only revealed at week's end, when an anchorman of the national television newscast Vremya read a four-paragraph TASS dispatch in a somber voice. "Criminal elements committed violent actions and engaged in robberies," he reported. "They killed 31 people, among them members of various nationalities, old men and women."

The rioting in Sumgait, an industrial center in the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, was one of the worst known cases of ethnic disorder in Soviet history. Coming after two weeks of nationalist unrest in two southern republics, it confronted Communist Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev with a problem that is not likely to go away and could blossom into the most serious political crisis of his three years in power.

The violence erupted in the wake of nine days of demonstrations in neighboring Armenia. By promising to examine local grievances, Gorbachev had managed to calm protests involving hundreds of thousands of marchers in the Armenian capital of Yerevan. But marches were reportedly continuing in Nagorno-Karabakh, an autonomous district that is mainly populated by Armenians but lies within the borders of the Azerbaijan republic. Protests demanding the enclave's annexation by the Armenian republic led to violent clashes between Armenians and Azerbaijanis and, finally, to last week's bloody upheaval in Sumgait.

The explosive complexity of those southern disturbances highlighted the difficulties of controlling a vast empire comprising more than 100 distinct nationalities and ethnic groups living in 15 republics. Russia's rulers have been dealing with restive nationalities since the days of the Czars, but rarely has the problem assumed such urgency. At least two people died 15 months ago, when riots broke out in Alma-Ata, capital of Kazakhstan, to protest the naming of a Russian to head the local Communist Party. A band of Crimean Tatars demonstrated in Red Square last July, seeking the right to return to their homeland on the Black Sea; a smaller group briefly pressed the same demand near Moscow's Lenin Library last week until they were hustled away by plainclothes police. In August and again last month, demonstrators in the Baltic republics commemorated their brief independence between the two world wars. Faced with this surge in nationalist sentiment, Gorbachev has called for a special Central Committee session to deal with the issue.

The roots of the latest disturbances go back to 1923, when the mountainous Nagorno-Karabakh region, 75% of whose population is ethnic Armenian, was included in the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. Since then, the enclave's mostly Christian Armenians, complaining of discrimination by the Muslim majority in Azerbaijan, have sought a union with the Armenian republic. Last month officials of the Armenian republic petitioned Moscow to allow it to ^ annex the territory. Moscow's refusal touched off protests in Nagorno-Karabakh that spread to Yerevan.

For nine days, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators jammed the square in front of Yerevan's opera house, chanting "Karabakh," singing patriotic songs and holding banners bearing such inscriptions as SELF-DETERMINATION IS NOT EXTREMISM. Police did not interfere with the protests, and Soviet army troops maintained a low profile, but the implicit threat of a crackdown mounted with each passing day.

Gorbachev, meanwhile, was striving for a peaceful solution. After sending four top-level troubleshooters to the region and issuing a public plea for restraint, the Soviet leader met secretly in the Kremlin with two well-known Armenian writers, Zori Balayan and Silva Kaputikyan. Gorbachev promised them that he would personally study the Armenian demands. As soon as that message was relayed to Yerevan, the protest leaders agreed to suspend the demonstrations for one month. In Nagorno-Karabakh, however, at least two Azerbaijani youths were killed in clashes with Armenians.

It was apparently the news of those casualties that sparked last week's rioting in Sumgait (pop. 223,000), situated about 20 miles north of the Azerbaijani capital of Baku. According to a local television worker reached by telephone, the trouble started when a group of some 50 Azerbaijanis arrived in Sumgait from Nagorno-Karabakh bearing word of ethnic fighting there. The apparent result was a murderous backlash aimed at local Armenians. An Armenian resident of Sumgait, sobbing into the telephone, told Reuters that Azerbaijanis had gone on a rampage of rape and murder against Armenians. He said that seven members of a single family had been killed and that many Armenians were trying to flee the city. At midweek a government spokesman reported that Soviet troops had managed to "normalize the situation" by arresting rioters and imposing an 8 p.m.-to-7 a.m. curfew.

The Azerbaijani-Armenian clashes apparently stemmed more from centuries of bitter ethnic rivalries than from separatist urges. Says a senior Western diplomat in Moscow: "I think it would be a mistake to consider them a challenge to Soviet rule as such, or to a socialist system." Nonetheless, the turmoil has once again shattered the ritual claim that Communist "internationalism" and "Soviet patriotism" have overcome the primitive instincts of nationalism.

While Moscow is in no imminent danger of losing control over its non-Russian & nationalities, the problem is likely to become more critical in the future. Today ethnic Russians constitute about 51% of the Soviet Union's 285 million population. That proportion will shrink to 48% by the year 2000 and to only 40% by 2050, mainly because of the high birthrate of the Muslim populations of Central Asia. Russian domination will become increasingly hard to maintain.

Gorbachev's reforms are a more immediate factor threatening Moscow's control. Western experts on the Soviet Union generally agree that his policies of economic restructuring (perestroika) and political openness (glasnost) are feeding the centrifugal forces of nationalism. "If Gorbachev wants to do something, he has to carry out perestroika," says French Sovietologist Helene Carrere d'Encausse. "But he can't do it without letting people express themselves. This leaves the door open to air all their frustrations, and the easiest ones to express are national frustrations."

Gorbachev's anticorruption drive, moreover, tends to hit hardest in those republics whose quasi-feudal party leadership has traditionally operated on a basis of bribery, kickbacks and influence peddling. Such leaders, in turn, may seek to whip up nationalist resentments against Moscow to protect their own positions.

At best, the uprisings in Armenia and Azerbaijan are an embarrassment for Gorbachev; at worst, they could prove fatal to him. Party conservatives are almost certain to turn the ethnic unrest into an argument against further liberalization. "What is the implication in these riots for Gorbachev?" asks Marshall Goldman, associate director of Harvard's Russian Research Center. "The implication is disaster. After 70 years of repression, it is not so easy to accomplish what he wants, and this will be a black mark against him by Russian nationalists and traditional centralists."

Others take a less gloomy view of the Soviet leader's position. "Gorbachev should be encouraged that the Armenian demonstrations are not anti-Soviet or even anti-Russian," argues Columbia University Sovietologist Jonathan Sanders. "As a political actor he has shown a very astute response." Stephen Cohen, a professor of politics at Princeton, notes that "Gorbachev himself has seen something like this coming and has been ready for it." He adds, "Gorbachev has already explained that everything he is doing represents a diminishing state control and unleashing the unpredictable. Nobody can know what will happen."

Much depends, obviously, on how the present crisis is resolved. Gorbachev has won a month's breathing space, but the Armenians may take to the streets again if he doesn't grant them some concessions. It is doubtful that Gorbachev will agree to redraw the boundaries, which would only encourage similar demands by other nationalities. Nor, if he can help it, is he likely to resort to a military crackdown that would tarnish his reform image at home and abroad. Perhaps his greatest advantage is that the Armenian people remain relatively loyal to the Soviet Union and seem to trust him personally.

When Gorbachev came to power, he showed little interest in the nationalities problem and focused all his energies on the economy. "Gorbachev doesn't care about nationalities," observed a Western diplomat in Moscow. "He only cares about who works most efficiently." Yet events seem to have thrust the issue upon his attention -- with a vengeance. He devoted a lengthy passage to the subject in his 1987 book Perestroika, vowing "not to shun this or other problems which may crop up." By last month he was calling nationalism the "most fundamental, vital issue of our society." And in the wake of last week's violence, he had to realize that it was becoming one of the greatest challenges to his own leadership.

With reporting by James O. Jackson and Ken Olsen/Moscow