1
February 1988
An Armenian Revolt
A Soviet Rebels
The crisis began in February 1988 in the depths of the Soviet Union. The central square of Stepanakert, a small but beautifully situated town in the mountains of the southern Caucasus, was a large open space, perfectly suited for public meetings. A large statue of Lenin (now removed) dominated the square with the neoclassical Regional Soviet building and a steep hill raking up behind it. A long flight of steps fell down to the plain of Azerbaijan below.
On 20 February 1988, the local Soviet of the Nagorny Karabakh Autonomous Region of Azerbaijanâessentially a small regional parliamentâsitting inside a concrete-and-glass building on the square, resolved as follows:
Welcoming the wishes of the workers of the Nagorny Karabakh Autonomous Region to request the Supreme Soviets of the Azerbaijani SSR and the Armenian SSR to display a feeling of deep understanding of the aspirations of the Armenian population of Nagorny Karabakh and to resolve the question of transferring the Nagorny Karabakh Autonomous Region from the Azerbaijani SSR to the Armenian SSR, at the same time to intercede with the Supreme Soviet of the USSR to reach a positive resolution on the issue of transferring the region from the Azerbaijani SSR to the Armenian SSR.1
The dreary language of the resolution hid something truly revolutionary. Since 1921, Nagorny Karabakh had been an island of territory dominated by Armenians inside the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Essentially, the local Armenian parliamentary deputies wanted the map of the Soviet Union redrawn and to see their region leave Soviet Azerbaijan and join Soviet Armenia. The USSR was already in the third year of rule by Mikhail Gorbachev, but it was still a frigid and orderly state. Gorbachev had proclaimed the doctrines of glasnost and perestroika, but they were still policies that the Communist Party regulated from above. The resolution by the Soviet in Nagorny Karabakh altered all this. By calling on Moscow to change the countryâs internal borders, the Karabakh Armenians were, in effect, making politics from below for the first time in the Soviet Union since the 1920s.
A week before the Regional Sovietâs resolution, on Saturday, 13 February, a group of Karabakh Armenians had staged another unprecedented event in Lenin Square: an unsanctioned political rally. Several hundred people gathered and made speeches calling for the unification of Karabakh with Armenia. Two or three rows of policemen surrounded the demonstrators, but they were local Armenians who had been tipped off in advance and allowed the protest to go ahead. The rally was timed to coincide with the return of a delegation of Karabakh Armenian artists and writers who had taken a petition to Moscow. The head of the returning delegation, the local Armenian actress Zhanna Galstian, made the first speech to the assembled crowd. She spoke very briefly, saying that she felt happy âbecause by coming out here, the Karabakhi has killed the slave in himself.â2 The crowd chanted back the Armenian word âMiatsum!â or âUnity!â the one-word slogan that came to symbolize their campaign. The organizers of the rally had every reason to be afraid. No one had organized political demonstrations in the Soviet Union in living memory. At least two of the activists later admitted that they had fully expected to be arrested.3 To ward off arrest, they had devised slogans that proclaimed that they were Soviet loyal citizens acting within the spirit of glasnost. Banners carried the slogan âLenin, Party, Gorbachev!â
In the course of these days in February 1988, many Soviet officials found that the ground under their feet was not as firm as they had believed. Members of the Communist Party hierarchy were openly disagreeing with one another, and the leadership in Moscow quickly concluded that it could not simply crush the dissenters by force. Practicing Gorbachevâs new spirit of tolerance, the Politburo told the Azerbaijani Party leaders that they should use only âParty methodsââpersuasion, rather than forceâto resolve the dispute. Gorbachev also decided that neither local Karabakh Armenian nor republican Azerbaijani security forces could be relied on to keep order and had a motorized battalion of 160 Soviet Interior Ministry troops dispatched from the neighboring republic of Georgia to Karabakh. As it turned out, Interior Ministry soldiers were to stay there for almost four years.4
The demonstrators in Stepanakert became more vocal. Within a week there were several thousand people in Lenin Square. Zhanna Galstian remembers an almost religious exaltation as people began to shake off the fear inbred in all Soviet citizens. âThere was the highest discipline, people stood as though they were in church,â she commented. The Armenian political scientist Alik Iskandarian, who went to Stepanakert to investigate, says he found âa force of natureâ: âI saw something elemental, I saw a surge of energy, energy that could have been directed in another direction. Actually, the conflict began very benignly at the very beginning ⌠it was an astonishing thing. I had never seen anything like it in the Soviet Unionâor anywhere.â5
Yet Nagorny Karabakh was not only an Armenian region. Roughly a quarter of the populationâsome forty thousand peopleâwere Azerbaijanis with the strongest ties to Azerbaijan. This sudden upsurge of protest in the mainly Armenian town of Stepanakert, however peaceful its outer form, could not but antagonize them. You had only to tilt your head in Stepanakert to see the neighboring town of Shushaâ90 percent of whose inhabitants were Azerbaijaniâhigh on the cliff top above. The Azerbaijanis there were angry and began to organize counterprotests.
Events moved with speed. Eighty-seven Armenian deputies from the Regional Soviet exercised their right to call an emergency session of the assembly for Saturday, 20 February. Two top officialsâthe local Armenian Party leader, Boris Kevorkov, who was still fully loyal to Azerbaijan, and the first secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, Kamran Bagirov, tried and failed to stop the sessionâs taking place. The emergency session finally began at about 8 p.m., four or so hours behind schedule and in an explosive atmosphere. Late in the evening, 110 Armenian deputies voted unanimously for the resolution, calling for Nagorny Karabakh to join Soviet Armenia. The Azerbaijani deputies refused to vote. In a scene of high farce, Kevorkov tried to swipe the stamp needed to confirm the resolution.6 Journalists at the local newspaper, Sovetsky Karabakh, doubled the impact of the resolution by working late into the night on a special edition. Next morning, amid the usual dull TASS bulletins and reprints of Pravda, the paper published two columns on the right side of the front page announcing the local Sovietâs intention to leave Azerbaijan.
âSomething Completely Newâ
On 21 February 1988, the Politburo met in the Kremlin to hold the first of many sessions devoted to the crisis. Heeding a keen instinct of self-preservation, members began by rejecting out of hand the Regional Sovietâs demand. Gorbachev said later that there were nineteen potential territorial conflicts in the Soviet Union and he did not want to set a precedent by making concessions on any of them. The Communist Partyâs Central Committee passed the text of a resolution blackening the disloyal Karabakhis as âextremistsâ:
Having examined the information about developments in the Nagorny Karabakh Autonomous Region, the CPSU Central Committee holds that the actions and demands directed at revising the existing national and territorial structure contradict the interests of the working people in Soviet Azerbaijan and Armenia and damage interethnic relations.7
Other than taking this rhetorical step, it was far less obvious to the Politburo what it should do next. It ruled out the option of mass arrests but lacked any experience of dealing with mass political dissent. As the Politburoâs adviser on nationalities, Vyacheslav Mikhailov, admitted, âThis was something completely new for us.â After all, the revolt came from a Soviet institution, and the Karabakh Armenians were prepared to make the argument that all they were doing was shaking the dust off Leninâs moribund slogan âAll power to the Soviets.â
Gorbachev tried dialogue. He dispatched two large delegations to the Caucasus, one of which traveled to Baku and then on to Nagorny Karabakh. In Stepanakert, the Moscow emissaries called a local Party plenum, which voted to remove Kevorkov, who had been the local leader in Nagorny Karabakh since 1974, the middle of the Brezhnev era. Kevorkovâs more popular deputy, Genrikh Pogosian, was appointed in his place. However, this created new problems for Moscow when, a few months later, Pogosian, who enjoyed much greater respect with the Karabakh Armenians, began to support the campaign for unification with Armenia.
One of the junior officials in the Politburo delegation was Grigory Kharchenko, a Central Committee official who spent most of 1988 and 1989 in the Caucasus. Kharchenko was no doubt picked for the job because of his big physical stature and open character, but he declares that he found it impossible to hold a coherent conversation with the demonstrators:
We went to one of the rallies ⌠I would begin to say, âWe have met with representatives of the intelligentsia, all these questions need to be resolved. You are on strike, whatâs the point of that? We know that you are being paid for this, but all the same this question will not be resolved at a rally. The general secretary is working on it, there will be a session of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the issue will be studied, of course all legal complaints have to be dealt with.â But no! âMiatsum, Miatsum, Miatsum!â8
The slow descent into armed conflict began on the first day. The first tremors of violence were already stirring the two communities. The writer Sabir Rustamkhanli says he was one of several Azerbaijani intellectuals who traveled to Nagorny Karabakh wanting to begin a dialogue, but he was too late:
In the Shusha region everyone was on their feet, they were ready to go down [to Stepanakert], there would have been bloodshed. And in [the Azerbaijani town of] Aghdam, too. We didnât want that and at the same time we did propaganda work, saying that if the Armenians carried on like this, we would be ready to respond to them. We organized the defense of Shusha. It was night, there was no fighting. The Armenians wanted to poison the water. We organized a watch. We were in the Regional Committee. I was the chief editor of the [Azerbaijani] publishing house and I had published their books in Armenian. The writers were all there. Ohanjenian was there. Gurgen Gabrielian, the childrenâs writer and poet who had always called me a brother. And this time, when they were standing on the square, they behaved as though they didnât know me. There was already a different atmosphere.9
How much violence occurred during those days will probably never be known because the authorities pursued a concerted policy to cover up any incidents. But, in one example, something nasty, if not fully explained, did happen among the trainee student teachers of the Pedagogical Institute in Stepanakert. In the Azerbaijani capital Baku, during the second week of the protest, the historian Arif Yunusov and a colleague, both of whom were already collecting information on events, were called to the cityâs Republican Hospital. Apparently, two Azerbaijani girls from Stepanakert had been raped. At the hospital, the head doctor denied the two academics access to the girls. The hospital nurses, however, confirmed that âthese girls had come from the Pedagogic Institute in Stepanakert, that there had been a fight or an attack on their hostel. The girls were raped. They were in a bad way.â10
Two days after the local Sovietâs resolution, angry protests took place in the Azerbaijani town of Aghdam. Aghdam is a large town twenty-five kilometers east of Stepanakert, down in the plain of Azerbaijan. On 22 February, a crowd of angry young men set out from Aghdam toward Stepanakert. When they reached the Armenian village of Askeran, they were met by a cordon of policemen and a group of Armenian villagers, some of whom carried hunting rifles. The two sides fought, and people on both sides were wounded. Two of the Azerbaijanis were killed. A local policeman very probably killed one of the dead men, twenty-three-year-old Ali Hajiev, either by accident or as a result of a quarrel. The other, sixteen-year-old Bakhtiar Uliev, appears to have been the victim of an Armenian hunting rifle. If so, Uliev was the first victim of intercommunal violence in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.11
News of the death of the two men sparked Aghdam into fury. An angry crowd collected trucks full of stones, crossbows, and staves and began to move on Stepanakert. A local woman, Khuraman Abasova, the head of a collective farm, famously climbed onto the roof of a car and threw her head scarf in front of the crowd. According to Azerbaijani custom, when a woman does this, men must go no further. The gesture of peace apparently restrained the crowd, and Abasova later persuaded her fellow citizens not to march on Stepanakert at a public rally. This intervention probably averted far more bloodshed.12
Origins of a Campaign
The events of February 1988 in Nagorny Karabakh occurred as if out of the blue and quickly acquired their own momentum. But the initial phase of the Armenian campaign had been carefully planned well in advance. Many Azerbaijanis, caught unawares by the revolt, believed that it had been officially sanctioned in Moscow. This was not the case, although the Karabakh movement did use the influence of well-placed Armenian sympathizers in the Soviet establishment.
An underground movement for unification with Armenia had existed inside Karabakh for decades. Whenever there was a political thaw or major political shift in the USSRâin 1945, 1965, and 1977, for exampleâArmenians sent letters and petitions to Moscow, asking for Nagorny Karabakh to be made part of Soviet Armenia. (It was an indication of the way the Armenians thought and the Soviet Union worked that they never raised the issue in their regional capital, Baku). With the advent of glasnost and perestroika under Gorbachev, they began to mobilize again. On 3 March 1988, Gorbachev told the Politburo that it had been remiss in failing to spot warning signals: âWe must not simplify anything here and we should look at ourselves too. The Central Committee received five hundred letters in the last three years on the question of Nagorny Karabakh. Who paid any attention to this? We gave a routine response.â13
The latest Karabakh Armenian campaign was different from its predecessors in one important respect: previous campaigns had been run from inside Nagorny Karabakh itself, but the main organizers of the new movement were Karabakhis living outside the province. In the postwar years, many Karabakh Armenians had settled in Moscow, Yerevan, or Tashkent, and they now formed a large informal network across the Soviet Union.
The man in the middle was Igor Muradian, an Armenian from a Karabakhi family who was only thirty years old. Muradian had grown up in Baku and now worked in the Armenian capital, Yerevan. At first glance, he did not look the part of leader of such a big movement. Large and shambling, he speaks with a stammer and, like many Baku Armenians, is more comfortable speaking Russian than Armenian. But Muradian was both a formidable political operator and utterly uncompromising in his hard-line Armenian nationalist views. Muradian says that he was convinced that the Azerbaijani authorities were trying to settle Azerbaijanis in Nagorny Karabakh and force out Armenians, such that within a generation the province would lose its Armenian majority. He therefore argued that Armenians must seize the historical moment afforded them by Gorbachevâs reforms.
Muradian was a Soviet insider. He worked as an economist in the state planning agency Gosplan in Yerevan and had good connections among Party cadres. He learned the lesson early on that if a petition were presented in the right way, with the appropriate expressions of loyalty to the Soviet system, many influential Soviet Armenians could be persuaded to support it. For a 1983 petition on Nagorny Karabakh to then General Secretary Yury Andropov, he had secured the signatures of âveterans of the Party, people who had known Lenin, Stalin, and Beria. There was a lot of blood on their hands.â14
The scope of the Gorbachev-era campaign was much more ambitious. âThe aim was set for the first time in the Soviet Union to legitimize this movement, not to make it anti-Soviet, but to make it completely loyal,â said Muradian. It is not clear whether Muradian actually believed the Soviet system would deliver Karabakh into the arms of Armeniaâif so he was making a big miscalculationâor whether he was merely seeking the maximum political protection for a risky campaign.
In February 1986, Muradian traveled to Moscow with a draft letter that he persuaded nine respected Soviet Armenian Communist Party members and scientists to sign. The most prized signature was that of Abel Aganbekian, an academician who was advising Gorbachev on economic reforms: âWhen [Aganbekian] went into this house where he signed the letter he didnât know where he was going and why they were taking him there, and before he signed he spent four hours there. During those four hours he drank approximately two liters of vodka.â
The Karabakh activists even received the tacit support of the local Armenian Party leader, Karen Demirchian, for one of their schemes: a campaign to discredit the senior Azerbaijani politician, Heidar Aliev, whom they had identified as the man most likely to obstruct their campaign. Aliev, the former Party leader of Azerbaijan, had been a full member of the Politburo since 1982. One of Muradianâs more outrageous ideas was that he and a fellow Armenian activist should open a prosecution case against Aliev, based on Artic...