Back to Basics in Armenia

Soviet authorities apparently feel that the ethnic conflict in Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan is enough under control that a fuller if still selective account of what took place can now safely be given. As described by the Tass news agency, last month’s turbulence took 34 lives, injured 247 and involved considerable rape and pillage, nearly all of it directed against Armenians in the Azerbaijanian city of Sumgait. Pravda, the Communist Party paper, cites local socioeconomic “shortcomings” for the violence and accuses “Sovietologists across the ocean” of helping to stir things up. This feeble attempt at blame-laying of course ignores the long history of cultural and nationalist grievances underlying the turmoil.

The central demand of Armenian demonstrators not surprisingly has come under harsh press attack. What the Armenians seek is the return of Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave that was once part of their republic and that is still populated primarily by Christian Armenians, but that was incorporated nearly 65 years ago into largely Muslim Azerbaijan on Josef Stalin’s order. In an effort to defuse the Armenian protests, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev last month said that he would take the Nagorno-Karabakh matter under advisement. Pravda’s denunciation of the territorial demand as “anti-socialist” can be read as an official response.

From Moscow’s standpoint it is the only possible response, since any agreement to permit territorial changes within the multiethnic empire that was built piece by piece by the czars and added to under the Communists would set a destructive precedent. Yet, as events in the Caucasus show and as continuing tremors of discontent in the Baltic states and elsewhere underscore, the nationalities issue remains the most serious challenge to Soviet internal stability. The root problem is not, as Soviet officials would have it, caused by outside agitators or even by bumbling local officials. The root problem stems from persistent claims for greater cultural freedom and for greater independence from Moscow’s overlordship, and these are things that the Soviet system simply doesn’t know how to deal with.