Gorbachev’s Moves on Corrupt Officials Run Up Against Backfire of Ethnic Unrest

An old Latin dictum asserts that not all that follows a given event happens because of it. However, this warning is not valid regarding the case of the developments that preceded the disturbances and demonstrations in Armenia and Azerbaijan in February.

Indeed, the Kremlin, crusading against Soviet national republics as part of its struggle against corruption, selected Armenia to be its major target over the last two months. One after another, articles in Pravda and other central newspapers presented the people of Soviet Armenia as being as corrupt as those of the Central Asian republics. All of the party and state apparatuses were described as consisting of mostly bribe-takers and outright crooks. In the campaign the rank of the figures being lashed was gradually elevated until Karen S. Demirchyan, the Armenian first secretary since 1974, finally felt flashes of anger directed at him.

Just a year ago Moscow used the same scheme to radically change the composition of the bureaucracy in Kazakhstan, slowly raising the scale of the campaign against Alma-Ata’s leadership until taking its final shot at Dinmukhmed A. Kunayev, Kazakhstan’s first secretary, just a few weeks before he was demoted.

Kunayev’s ouster was followed by the first large-scale nationalist uprising in the Soviet Union in three decades. Students in Alma-Ata viewed the replacement of Kunayev with a Russian as a direct affront to their national feeling and an omen of further Russification.

At the same time one can hardly doubt that the anti-Russian demonstrations were fomented by Kunayev’s people in a desperate attempt to avert the reshuffling of the Kazakh bureaucracy. The Soviet press has cited many facts that strongly support this hypothesis.

By all accounts the Armenian politicians were much more sophisticated than their Kazakh colleagues. Working to their advantage was the long history of Armenia’s statehood and a heritage of defending its independence. While Kunayev and his people had decided to counterattack Moscow only after the milk was already spilled, the Armenian strategists chose to move without waiting for a formal announcement of Demirchyan’s removal.

Tension between the mostly Christian Armenians and the mostly Muslim Azerbaijanians has a long history. To the Armenians the conflict is associated with the massacres of their ancestors in 1915 by the Turkish empire. It is precisely the memory of this event, the first genocide of this century, that makes Armenians react so passionately when they hear of persecution of their people by Muslims. It is also obvious that the harassment of Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region (officially a part of Azerbaijan where Azerbaijanians make up the majority of the authorities) is not a result of glasnost and has taken place since the 1920s, when a stupid decree separated the residents of this region from Armenia by a small patch of land.

It is only natural to reason that it was not a great problem for Demirchyan’s people to stir up unrest in the beginning in Stepanakert, the center of Nagorno-Karabakh, and later in Yerevan, the Armenian capital. Furthermore, Yerevan politicians--exploiting the opportunities that were afforded by glasnost --acted boldly and nudged local government to call formally for the incorporation of Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia. While technically behaving in such a manner as to demonstrate loyalty to Moscow and the Russians, Armenia openly challenged the Kremlin monopoly on making all important political decisions.

By bringing up a nationalistic issue, Demirchyan has linked himself with almost all of Armenia’s apparatchiks, and can now claim title to being a true national leader. The unity of the Armenian people, agitated by a national cause, has been overwhelming. Moscow has already recognized that it is dealing with a new phenomenon--a province that defies the metropolis. Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev is obviously aware of this. He received two Armenian writers as truce envoys, and asked them for a month of reprieve. Under these new conditions, Moscow will hardly go so far as to remove Demirchyan.

The events in Armenia, as well as the obvious helplessness of Moscow to cleanse Central Asia (it has already quietly replaced a second first secretary in Uzbekistan), show that corruption--which the ideologues of glasnost present mostly as a bureaucratic phenomenon--embraces in fact a significant part of the ordinary population that simply cannot survive under Soviet conditions without participating in the second economy. We are dealing here with a new social structure that enjoys the support of a considerable portion of the population and that is challenging the Soviet system and all its inefficiency and lies. When this structure is further based on ethnic solidarity, it is almost invincible and challenges the dominance of the Russians.

Clearly glasnost and perestroika stand little chance if ethnic conflict becomes a threat to the Russian empire.