Azerbaijan: National Fury Fans Disorder at the Border : Rebellion: The southern Soviet republics see themselves as victims of a Moscow-led Mafia. Last week’s riots on the border with Iran were a cry for decentralization.

Soviet TV viewers, already inured to glasnost ‘ s shocking revelations, were served a particularly disturbing bit of news Wednesday evening.

Azerbaijan extremists, said to be under the influence of drugs and alcohol, had attacked and dismantled installations along a stretch of the Soviet border with Iran. This message immediately conjured up images of crazed Islamic mobs bent on destruction and havoc, much like the Iranian fanatics of yesteryear.

Although the truth, as it turned out, was considerably different, the latest events in Azerbaijan and the official reaction to them provide yet another indication of the acute crisis gripping the Soviet multinational state and Moscow’s abject inability to deal with it systematically. For Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s regime, already beleaguered by independence-bent Balts and a disastrous economic picture, the crisis could not have come at a worse time.

This is what actually happened in Nakhichevan, an Azerbaijani enclave in Armenia that borders a region of Iran populated by ethnic Azeris:

In early December, the local chapter of the Azerbaijani Popular Front, a national movement supported by the vast majority of the population, presented a list of demands that were hardly extremist. The two key ones were calls: first, for opening the border to free movement of divided families; second, to allow cultivation of the land along the KGB-controlled, mile-wide, border zone.

Both issues were critically important to the Nakhichevan people, since more than 50% of them have family roots across the border, and the river valley land is the most fertile and valuable in the narrow, mountainous territory. The closed, heavily guarded border stood as a morbid anachronism at a time when even the Berlin Wall had crumbled and Soviet society itself enjoys unprecedented openness.

Repeated calls by the Popular Front for discussions with the authorities, however, were ignored by both local and Moscow officials.

On New Year’s Eve, the people marched, unarmed, to the border and accomplished what their government had refused to discuss. Whether the Soviet central government will now acquiesce to the demands of the Nakhichevanis or try to re-establish its authority by force remains to be seen.

There is a larger significance in these events, however, and rising nationalism is the message sent by the people in Azerbaijan--and in other Soviet republics--when they decide to take matters into their own hands.

Azeri nationalism first erupted as a reaction to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory. The conflict was between the two peoples who, until then, had lived side by side, often in mixed communities, in relative harmony. Then it turned ugly and brought violent strife, pogroms and huge refugee populations in both republics.

Nagorno-Karabakh was surely the trigger but certainly not the main cause of a remarkable resurgence of nationalism that followed in Azerbaijan, and in Armenia.

As with most other nationalities issues, Azeri grievances against the Soviet Union were deep-seated and intense. A national history had been falsified and rewritten, an Islamic faith proscribed and a Turkic culture repressed to the point of having to use the Russian alphabet.

More recently, as the Soviet economy deteriorated, charges of economic discrimination by Moscow have been added to the long list of historic complaints. Along with other groups in the predominantly Islamic, rural and underdeveloped Soviet “South,” the Azeris have claimed to be victims of rigid central controls, low prices for their main exports, social neglect and outright colonial exploitation.

Whatever the legitimacy of these grievances, living conditions in the region have clearly stagnated and may be declining. Infant mortality is twice as high as the Soviet average; health care and education are inadequate and unemployment reached a staggering 27.6% in the late ‘80s.

Discontent has grown as the popular perception of the local Communist Party has fallen. The people see their leaders as a corrupt and Moscow-beholden Mafia, incapable of defending the republic’s best interests.

The soil was right for a grass-roots organization. The Azerbaijani Popular Front emerged, with a strongly nationalistic posture on Nagorno-Karabakh but an otherwise moderate program patterned on the Baltic examples and emphasizing local autonomy rather than separatism.

The founding of the front was met with unremitting hostility by the party, unable to tolerate a local rival. Front leaders were termed “extremists and hooligans.” Front literature was branded as “ideological AIDS” by the hard-line first secretary.

As time passed without reconciliation and as Moscow policies on Nagorno-Karabakh were increasingly perceived as anti-Azerbaijan--not surprisingly, the Armenians feel the same policies are anti-Armenian--the Popular Front’s popularity grew and the group became radicalized.

By mid-August, the front was able to organize strikes and huge demonstrations involving 500,000 people, just by announcing them. In September, the front led a successful effort to impose an unprecedented economic blockade on Armenia. Only a few months after the organization was born, the front became a national movement and the ruling Communist Party was forced to pay attention, even pay local respects and lip service, if the official leadership was not to become completely irrelevant.

Radicalization has continued because it has become increasingly clear that Moscow is not seriously willing to consider any of the major economic and political decentralization reforms.

Nothing less than decentralization, in fact, is capable of arresting this powerful nationalist current.

Last November, a power struggle in the leadership of the Popular Front resulted in a victory for the more radical faction. Shortly thereafter, an organization calling itself National Salvation emerged in the capital city of Baku and began advocating an openly separatist program based on reunification of Soviet and Iranian Azerbaijan. Last week, the Popular Front and National Salvation held a highly symbolic joint demonstration in Baku.

For Gorbachev and the Kremlin, the lessons of Azerbaijan are urgent. They can continue to deceive themselves with tales of drunk and drugged “extremists” but not for long.

What is happening in Azerbaijan today is certain to be repeated on a larger scale in Central Asia tomorrow. The levels of popular frustration and lack of a political culture for compromise in Central Asia suggest that even greater disturbances may be in store there, a violent contrast to the dignified and methodical Baltic quest for independence.

What could still save the Soviet Union as a federal state and, in the process, preempt a violent denouement to the last great European empire, is a prompt devolution of economic and political power from the center.

The urgency is to set up legitimate and representative national governments in the republics. This, however, will almost certainly hasten the demise of the Soviet Communist Party and dramatically weaken Moscow’s authority.

But there is no sign, so far, that the Kremlin is prepared to do what is required.