Ethnic Conflict Seen as Next Big Challenge to Gorbachev

The recent series of extraordinary mass demonstrations in Soviet Armenia has delivered a stiff challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev: How can he reshape Soviet society without letting historic ethnic grievances spin out of control?

The 1 million protesters who congregated in the Armenian capital of Yerevan beginning in February--the largest nationalist demonstration ever in the Soviet Union--demanded reunification with an overwhelmingly Armenian enclave in the neighboring republic of Azerbaijan.

But evidence now indicates, according to U.S. officials and analysts, that Gorbachev’s bureaucratic opponents in the Armenian republic encouraged the protests as a way of resisting his attempts to tighten Moscow’s reins on the local Communist Party apparatus.

Gorbachev got the better of that political skirmish: At Moscow’s direction, the Communist Party Central Committees in both Armenia and Azerbaijan dismissed the republics’ party bosses Saturday.

What makes the Armenian altercation so ominous to Gorbachev, however, is that it was not the first in which his reforms have become intertwined with ethnic tensions. More than a year earlier, when Gorbachev attempted to replace local officials in the province of Kazakhstan whom he considered corrupt, they stirred resistance on grounds that an ethnic Russian had been sent to replace an ethnic Kazakh party boss.

Nor, in all probability, will the Armenian flare-up be the last. One senior Reagan Administration official says the main threat to Gorbachev in the next few years will come not from Politburo intrigues inside the Kremlin but from ethnic conflicts, either with non-Russian nationalities within the Soviet Union or with Eastern Europeans.

Another senior U.S. official suggested that Soviet nationality problems--involving conflicts over territory, language, religion and race--could threaten the cohesion of the Soviet Union itself.

Challenge to Authority

“The collapse of empires has historically begun when provincial leaders found that they could challenge authority coming from the capital with impunity,” this official noted. “Can that topple the Soviet Union? Yes, although I won’t predict it will (do so) soon. But it will worry the leadership, cause doubts. And that will affect all issues, political and economic.”

Recently, one U.S. analyst noted, a message of support was sent to Armenians from sympathizers in Soviet Lithuania . That “shows the unrest will spread,” he said, adding, “Other nationalists saw that a demonstration by 1 million people in Yerevan came off with no heads cracked, and that will embolden them to demonstrate, too.”

At the root of Gorbachev’s problem is the fact that the Soviet Union is not a homogeneous population but rather an amalgam of 101 nationalities and ethnic groups with widely differing, sometimes antagonistic, histories, traditions and culture.

10 Time Zones

Spread over a country so vast that it embraces 10 time zones, most of these groups are small in population. The smallest 79 total fewer than 1 million people, out of the Soviet population of 285 million.

But the five Central Asian republics, whose people are largely Muslim in religion and racially different from Russians, are more than 50 million strong and stretch from the Caspian Sea to China. The “Christian Caucasuses” of Armenia and Georgia have about 10 million.

Despite such numbers, the Soviet Union itself is run overwhelmingly by Russians. They account for 51% of the population--the two other Slavic republics of the Ukraine and Byelorussia make up another 21%--but 19 of the 23 top members of the Politburo and the party secretariat are Russians. Two are Ukrainian and one is Byelorussian.

Only one, Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, a Georgian, is not a Slav.

Nationality issues have their origin in czarist Russia’s conquests of neighboring regions, starting about 1815. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, V. I. Lenin promised “national self-determination” for the minorities. But in fact, after World War II, with Josef Stalin in control, the Kremlin added the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as regions in Central Europe, to the Soviet empire.

Across the Republics

Today, nationalist disputes of one kind or another can be found in virtually all the 15 Soviet republics, particularly around the western and southern periphery of Russia. The three Baltic states oppose Russification, as do Central Asians. The Abkhazi people of the Caucasus rioted a decade ago against the Georgians, in whose republic they have been placed.

Poles in Byelorussia and Ukrainians in the Far East, beyond Siberia, want their own languages taught in local schools. There are even Mongol Buddhists, called the Buryats, who want to take control of a larger piece of Siberia.

Moscow has shown concern about Islamic fundamentalism in Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, which have primarily Muslim populations and long borders with Iran. The Uighur people of Central Asia are divided by the Sino-Soviet border. The Soviet Union even has a sizable Korean population.

Most of the nationality issues are inflamed by anti-Russian or anti-Soviet sentiment. For example, Crimean Tatars want to return to lands in the Crimea from which Stalin banned them during World War II. But to allow them to do so, Moscow would have to oust Ukrainians who took over the lands, and Ukrainians are powerful and close Slavic cousins of the ruling Russians.

Dangers of Reform

Prof. Archie Brown of Oxford University saw in the Armenian events “ample confirmation of (author and statesman Alexis) de Tocqueville’s dictum that the most dangerous time for an authoritarian regime is when it begins to reform itself. That same early stage of development is also the most difficult time for a reformist leader.”

Gorbachev’s opponents “see the demonstrations and subsequent developments as a direct result of raising dangerous expectations through promises of democratization and an excess of openness. . . ,” Brown wrote in the current issue of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute Forum. “The latent national tensions are among the most severe problems Gorbachev has inherited and, to an even greater extent than other areas of policy, they do not permit solutions which can satisfy one significant group without offending another.”

The festering nationality issues came to a head as Gorbachev was struggling with challenges to his program from conservatives, and nationalism can be used against him in the fight over the pace and content of his political and economic reforms.

Failing to Draw Line

“Gorbachev can justly be criticized for surfacing the nationality issue in Armenia by failing to draw the line on what is and what is not permitted under glasnost ,” said Harry Gelman of the Santa Monica-based think tank RAND Corp., who is a former CIA official. “He is responsible not for the Armenian problem, but for the problem coming to a head . . . and that’s not trivial.”

Inside the Politburo, Yegor K. Ligachev, Gorbachev’s main challenger on the national level, has positioned himself to benefit from Gorbachev’s regional troubles. Ligachev has pushed for more Russian-language training for non-Russians, for example, while Gorbachev would promote teaching more national languages among Russians living in non-Russian areas.

Soviet authorities have identified 18 to 20 “flash points” where nationality conflicts could lead to violence. A U.S. intelligence official counted 40 to 50 Soviet regional disputes in which he felt “border changes are warranted, some of them more warranted than in Armenia.”

Appeal Turned Down

But the difficulty in redrawing borders now was addressed by the Communist Party newspaper Pravda when it announced that the Armenian appeal was being turned down: “What if other regions started similarly satisfying their own interests at the expense of other peoples? What then would become of the (Soviet) Union?”

The Armenian crisis has also dramatized the delicate balancing act that Gorbachev must perform to implement his reforms of perestroika, or restructuring, and glasnost, or openness.

Although decentralized economic decision-making is a critical component of perestroika, he simultaneously wants to re-centralize political power, which his aging predecessors had allowed to flow to provincial party leaders.

“Some of those provinces are nothing more than corrupt satrapies, if you believe the Moscow press,” a senior U.S. official said. But as events in the Armenian republic showed, the provincial officials who are the targets of Gorbachev’s reforms can be expected to fight back.

Paradoxical Relationship

Armenia also demonstrates a paradoxical relationship between Gorbachev and the Soviet people as his reforms proceed.

“He needs dynamism in the people. He needs them to express concerns and become involved with things in society, including nationality issues, if his reforms are to succeed,” said another Administration expert. “There are even Soviet studies which show that the firmer a person’s ethnic identity, the better the Soviet citizen he is.

“But Gorbachev can’t let nationalism get out of hand, beyond the control of the party. People in Moscow must be saying even now: ‘See where glasnost is leading. Look at the Pandora’s box you’ve opened.’ ”

Some U.S. intelligence analysts differ from their seniors on how threatening the nationality problems are to Gorbachev.

“These movements are mainly cases of ethnic self-assertiveness,” said one younger official, “rather than the anti-colonial drives of the Third World whose goals were independence.”

Early Genocide

The nationalists want more freedom within the Soviet Union rather than freedom from the Soviet Union, he added. “They often have no place to go,” he said. An independent Armenia, for example, could again feel threatened by Turkey, which has been accused of the century’s first genocide, when between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed between 1915 and 1923.

“My feeling is that most Soviet nationality problems can be managed within the system,” he said. “But they can also be mishandled and turned into anti-Russian ‘colonial’ problems.”

About 100 demonstrations have occurred during Gorbachev’s three years in power. The fact that the demonstrators suffered little or no punishment--quite unlike what happened under his predecessors--has spurred more protests.

“As coercion drops, more issues come onto the table (of public concern), and Gorbachev tolerates it,” explained a U.S. intelligence expert.

Punishment Meted Out

In Armenia, Gorbachev ultimately meted out punishment. Karen Demirchyan, the party boss, had been publicly criticized by Gorbachev, and his replacement had been expected in the wake of the huge demonstration that occurred in February. American experts are now certain that the protest was encouraged, if not initiated, by local politicians who seized upon legitimate nationality complaints to oppose Gorbachev’s efforts to move against them.

At the heart of the Armenians’ nationalist concerns is the Delaware-sized enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Although Nagorno-Karabakh’s population is 80% Armenian, Stalin placed it in Azerbaijan in 1920 to placate Turkey, which feared that a strong Armenia might seek revenge for the genocide of Armenians before World War II.

Compounding the border issues are religious and racial differences: Armenians are Orthodox Christians and Indo-Europeans, while many of the Azerbaijanis are Muslims. The peaceful Armenian protest was followed by a violent anti-Armenian pogrom in Azerbaijan in which at least 32 Armenians, including pregnant women and babies, were slaughtered.

In December, 1986, rioting had broken out in Kazakhstan when Gorbachev replaced a Kazakh with a Russian in the top Communist Party job in that province. Local Kazakh chiefs who were accused of corruption apparently portrayed the personnel change as a national, even racial, slight.

According to U.S. experts, it was not lost on the Armenian party leaders under attack by Gorbachev that after the Kazakhstan riots, only one-fifth of the expected purge of Kazakh officials was carried out. Nationalist protests had apparently saved their jobs, at least temporarily, so party officials adopted the same approach in Armenia.