Unrest Among the Soviets

In less than two weeks Soviet Communist Party officials are to gather in Moscow for an extraordinary conference that will be asked to redefine their nation’s future, but even as they prepare for that watershed event their attention is being claimed by problems from the recent past. Among the most tumultuous issues now confronting the Soviet leadership is how to respond to the newly reasserted demands of some of the Soviet Union’s many ethnic groups. Nowhere are those demands being pressed more insistently than in Armenia, and nowhere is the prospect for explosive confrontation greater than in that southern Soviet republic and in neighboring Azerbaijan.

Armenia’s parliament has now defied the clear wishes of Moscow by endorsing a resolution to annex a section of Azerbaijan that was wrenched from Armenia in 1923. Azerbaijan, of course, flatly refuses to give up its control over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. Embittering this contest over sovereignty are ancient religious and cultural antipathies. More than three-fourths of Nagorno-Karabakh’s people are Christian Armenians. They live surrounded by an Azerbaijani population that is largely Turkic and Persian in culture and Shia Muslim in religion. Four months ago the dispute was carried to the streets and at least 32 people, nearly all Armenians, died in rioting. Now, a Moscow newspaper says, police units have moved in to protect the Armenian minority in Azerbaijan.

Under the Soviet Union’s constitution a conflict between the republics must be resolved by action of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow. Pravda has already denounced Armenia’s territorial demand as “anti-socialist.” It seems inconceivable that the authorities who are now required to rule on the territorial dispute would approve any redrawing of boundaries and reassigning of sovereignty, not only because to do so would almost surely prompt a bloody revolt in Azerbaijan but also because such a precedent would be certain to incite demands throughout the multiethnic Soviet Union for greater cultural freedom and broader political independence.

General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s enemies blame his more liberal policies for encouraging Armenian nationalism. They are probably right. They are no less right to fear that whatever may be decreed in Moscow in response to the territorial dispute, nationalistic unrest among the Armenians, Tatars, Latvians and others will likely grow. Glasnost or not, times are changing, and the Soviet empire faces uneasy days ahead.