A Misreading on Nationalities Puts Gorbachev in a Trap

Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the rest of the Soviet leadership were always likely to reject, as they finally did last week, the demand by Soviet Armenia for the return of the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh from the neighboring republic of Azerbaijan.

Indeed, Gorbachev’s worst mistake when hundreds of thousands of Armenians started to demonstrate in January was not to state immediately that there was no chance of territorial boundaries being changed. By leaving the question open, he raised expectations in Armenia that he was never in a position to satisfy.

If Nagorno-Karabakh and its population of 165,000 are returned to Armenia, the immediate result is likely to be an explosion of anger in Azerbaijan, most probably directed against local Armenians. In February, news that two Azerbaijani had been killed provoked the massacre of 32 Armenians in the city of Sumgait.

Worse, from Gorbachev’s point of view, the Soviet leadership dares not set any precedents for territorial or constitutional changes favoring Armenia because of the effect on other minorities elsewhere in the Soviet Union. One in five Soviet citizens, 50 million to 60 million people, live outside their home republics, and any or all might start to demand a change in their status.

In probably the most serious political mistake that he has made since becoming the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, Gorbachev failed to make this clear when demonstrations first began. His own career, unlike those of all other Soviet leaders since 1917, has been spent entirely in the Russian part of the Soviet Union. This may explain his lack of sureness of touch in dealing with non-Russian nationalities.

Given that there are 22 Soviet nationalities with more than 1 million members, this lack of experience in ethnic relations is a major weakness for any Soviet politician. Certainly Gorbachev sounded baffled and upset in his speech slamming the door on any possible transfer of Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijan to Armenia and denouncing “wrangling and ethnic mistrust” for undermining perestroika .

Unfortunately, he may have learned his lesson on how to handle Soviet nationality problems too late. The political uncertainty of the last six months, the belief that everything might be up for grabs, has raised hopes and fears of territorial change in Armenia and Azerbaijan that will not disappear overnight and perhaps never.

The result is a serious defeat for Gorbachev. Soviet leaders favoring reform have always argued that there is sufficient consensus in the Soviet Union about the way in which the country is run to allow, without provoking an explosion, greater diversity of opinion in the press and on the streets. Nagorno-Karabakh has proved them wrong. Conservatives in the leadership have used the events in Armenia to demand the re-establishment of law and order.

This they should be able to do. Belief that demonstrations in Armenia mean that the Soviet empire is breaking up is premature. The population of the Armenian republic is only 3 million out of a total Soviet population of 285 million. Mass demonstrations in the Ukraine, a Soviet republic of 50 million, would be far more threatening. And it is precisely because Moscow did not want to set a precedent for the bigger republics that the Armenians were always going to be disappointed.

The best that the Armenians can probably hope for is that Nagorno-Karabakh, whatever its formal position, will in fact be directly ruled from Moscow. No constitutional or territorial change is feasible now or in the future.

For the rest of the Soviet Union and the world, the importance of the crisis in Armenia is that Gorbachev has suffered the worst defeat of his career. This is not because he has been forced into a clampdown that he did not want by hard-liners in the Politburo, but that his belief that a less authoritarian rule would not spark an explosion has been proved false.