Facing Up to Intractable Problems : Armenian, Economic Issues Boil, but Soviets Finally Pay Heed

It is easy to list the things that are not going well for Soviet reformers in the fourth year of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s party leadership.

Although many sensible economic reforms have already been introduced on paper and many more are being seriously considered, Soviet consumers are still no better off economically than they were under the late and unlamented Konstantin U. Chernenko.

And while nationality problems are being admitted, studied and dealt with much less crudely than in the past, Gorbachev’s reward (the lot of many a reformer of an authoritarian regime) has been serious unrest in Soviet Armenia and the neighboring republic of Azerbaijan.

There are no simple solutions to the problems of the economy and of national relations. The economic reform is meeting enormous resistance from within the industrial ministries and the middle and lower levels of the Communist Party apparatus; many of its departments (together with the careers of the officials who man them) will disappear if and when an economic reform with a serious market element is actually implemented.

As for the nationality problem, its intractability is illustrated by the present impasse between the Armenians and the Azeris (the titular nationality of Azerbaijan who make up 78% of its population). Mere concessions from Moscow in the form of greater decentralization of power by themselves can solve nothing.

Paradoxical though it may seem at a time when the Armenian capital of Yerevan has been gripped by large-scale strikes and demonstrations, the Armenians as a whole remain pro-Gorbachev, pro- perestroika and comparatively pro-Russian. They have long looked to Russians to protect them against their traditional enemies, the Turks and the Persians.

The predominantly Russian leadership in Moscow, while extremely hesitant about making boundary changes between one Soviet republic and another for fear of setting dangerous new precedents, is probably rather more sensitive to Armenian than to Azeri complaints. It has already authorized a substantially greater “Armenianization” of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory within Azerbaijan than existed hitherto. This, however, has failed to satisfy the majority of Armenians who want to settle for nothing less than Nagorno-Karabakh’s incorporation in the Soviet Armenian republic.

With the removal of Geidar Aliev from the Politburo in 1987, the Azeris lost their sole representative in the top political leadership in Moscow. The Armenians are now in a more advantageous position than that, for though they have not had one of their own nationals in the Politburo since Anastas Mikoyan was dropped from the Leonid I. Brezhnev leadership in 1966, they are much better represented at a policy advisory level in Moscow than any of the nationalities of Turkic or Persian origin.

One of Gorbachev’s personal assistants, Georgi Shakhnazarov--a prominent reformer in his own right--is an Armenian who was born in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. One of the general secretary’s main economic advisers, Abel Aganbegyan, is an Armenian of Georgian birth. Aganbegyan has actually gone on record as supporting the reincorporation of Nagorno-Karabakh in Armenia, and for that he has been roundly attacked in the mass media of Azerbaijan. It is indeed a sign of the greatly changed times that not only will one Soviet newspaper take a radically different line from another but that some will also severely criticize an adviser known to be personally close to the general secretary.

This very openness is the greatest achievement so far of the Gorbachev era, and in its own way provides hope for those who want to see the Soviet Union move further down the path of what Gorbachev calls “socialist pluralism.” Though the old mixture of coercion and concessions kept Soviet nationality problems under control at least to the extent that they did not lead to the unraveling of the Soviet state, they did little to solve the underlying disputes or to change subjective perceptions for the better in areas like the Caucasus, where ethnic rivalries have deep roots.

Now the leading Soviet specialists on ethnicity are hard at work on documents that will be presented to a plenary session of the Central Committee to be specially devoted to the national question. It is scheduled to take place sometime after the party conference, which will be convened next week. Social scientists, to an even greater extent than journalists, are being given their head and are expected to help the politicians come up with better answers than hitherto to the country’s problems.

The politicians themselves, however, cannot wait for the experts, and it would be naive to think that the latter could do their job for them. Yet the greater openness at least means that real problems are being addressed, and though some of them do nothing to simplify the task of Gorbachev and the reform wing of the Soviet leadership, their new-found willingness to face up to the nature and scale of the national and other problems is itself a giant step forward.