Lifting the Lid in Armenia

Weeks of mass protests in Armenia, perhaps the largest unapproved demonstrations in Soviet history, appear for now to have subsided, but meanwhile officials have acknowledged that violent riots have taken place in neighboring Azerbaijan. While foreign newsmen have been barred from traveling to the areas of unrest, a videotape made by a dissident local journalist and shown to Western correspondents in Moscow confirms earlier reports that hundreds of thousands of protesters took part in nationalist demonstrations in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital. Other recent outbreaks of ethnic and sectional unrest in the Soviet Union pale in comparison.

The Armenians are demanding a return to their republic of an enclave in Azerbaijan called Nagorno-Karabakh, where demonstrations began three weeks ago. Nagorno-Karabakh was separated from Armenia in 1923. More than three-quarters of its population shares the same Christian religion, the same language, the same proud and ancient culture that prevails in Armenia proper. Azerbaijan, by contrast, is essentially Turkic and Persian in culture and Shia Muslim in religion. What, then, prompted Moscow to order this mountainous region of rich farmland to be incorporated into Azerbaijan 65 years ago? The answer seems to be that its aim was to try to curry favor with Turkey, which at the time was supporting Muslim rebels along its border with the Soviet Union.

Nationalism among the diverse peoples of the Russian empire was supposed to wither away with the emergence of the Soviet state. Of course it never has done so, despite intense and brutal efforts to suppress it beginning in the 1920s. For some time many Western experts have thought that the problem of restive nationalities could well pose one of the greatest long-term challenges to the Soviet regime. What is happening in Armenia and Azerbaijan now, what happened in Kazakhstan just a few months ago, is a reminder of the potential for regional unrest that Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his colleagues face.