SOVIET TURMOIL: ETHNIC RAGE : Bottled Up So Long, and Now So Bloody : The events in Baku are a tragic reminder of the legacy of suppressed passions. For Gorbachev, the only way out may be a loose commonwealth.

Watching blood run in the streets in Baku is yet a another reminder of the terrible cost that 70 years of communism has exacted upon the peoples of the Soviet Union.

Communism did not create the hatreds between Azerbaijanis and Armenians. But communism did prevent the normal, open expression and gradual adjudication of national passions and rivalries, thereby serving only to bottle them up until they burst out into the latest exercise of rage between the nationalities.

The real tragedy is that Baku might not have had to happen--at least in quite the same way--if Mikhail Gorbachev rather than Josef Stalin had succeeded the dying Lenin in 1923. Not that Gorbachev possesses some magic wand to will away national hatreds. But a Soviet Union under glasnost might have addressed its nationality problem openly, rather than through application of the Stalinist big lie.

Armenians and Azerbaijanis--along with Georgians--have a legacy of rivalry in the Caucasus that predates communism by centuries. The conflict grew more into the open in the late 19th Century with the urbanization of Baku as the leading oil-producing capital of the world. This created an upper-class strata of wealthy Armenian and other foreign entrepreneurs in positions of power over the native Azeris, who shared less directly in the power and wealth of Azerbaijan’s oil resources.

These problems might have worked their way out into some kind of modus vivendi with the establishment of the Transcaucasian Federative Republic in 1918. But the Russian civil war and the advent of Bolshevik power put an end to that tentative experiment. As the hand of Communist rule grew heavier over the next decade, nationalist expression was outlawed and most nationalist leaders were systematically eliminated by Stalin. Local Communist parties hewed to the Moscow line at literal pain of death. There was no longer any representative body that could tell Moscow what the local realities and passions were. A new image prevailed--happy nationalities, joyfully coexisting in the new age of communism.

The incredible irony today is that the sins of Stalin have been visited upon Gorbachev. What Moscow now needs more desperately than anything else is precisely that nationalist interlocutor, the leader or organization that can honestly and directly represent the local nationalities to Moscow with the authority and backing of the people themselves. It does Gorbachev no good to negotiate about the future with local Communist puppets who cannot represent popular feelings. And that is why local Communist Party leaderships all over the Soviet Union, if they want to hold onto power a little longer, are now embracing the once-forbidden nationalist cause.

Today the only road Gorbachev can follow is to permit the frank expression of national aspirations and passions in the hope that this process in itself will somehow help purge the legacy of bitterness and rage that is felt by nearly all nationalities at their enforced incarceration within the Soviet system. Never mind that there have probably been some advances and benefits through membership in the Soviet system; overall, no nationality is willing to cede its right to self-expression and national self-fulfillment by subordinating itself to another nation. Gorbachev hopes that improvement of the system will now eliminate the desire for secession. But it will not. The very improvability of the system is in question and besides, the hour is too late.

So the blood on the streets of Baku is a tragic reminder of the legacy of nationalist passions suppressed for too long. Indeed, nationalism is often ugly in its expression, doubly so when artificially contained by force and fear. Violence can hardly fail to emerge. And what can Gorbachev do? It would seem that some form of democratic process is the least bad route for Moscow now to follow: The slow, painful expression of national aspirations and resentments; the creation of genuinely representative local bodies, and the gradual adjudication of grievances that can begin to produce more responsible national leaderships on all sides. By going this route, Moscow is in for one helluva ride, with maybe only a loose commonwealth of nationalities coming out the other end. But the alternative--a reversion to the savage suppression of Stalinist days--has already proven that it can only create a deeper cancer in the body politic and hasten the demise of what Gorbachev is trying to save.