Soviet Army Meets Strong Resistance : Ethnic strife: Fighting escalates as fierce Azerbaijani and Armenian militias block peacekeeping efforts. Casualties in militias’ ranks are believed heavy.

The thousands of peacekeeping troops sent to the Soviet Union’s southern republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia were ordered Wednesday to open fire if attacked, and they met strong resistance from rival militias fighting around the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Carried into the battle zones by helicopters after Azerbaijani residents blocked roads throughout the area, the troops themselves came under fire, according to the Soviet Interior Ministry and the official Tass news agency. They made little progress in restoring order as they struggled to take up their positions.

Although more troops were deployed Wednesday in the mountainous strife-torn districts around Nagorno-Karabakh, the heavily armed Azerbaijani and Armenian militias continued to battle fiercely, Soviet correspondents reported from the area. Casualties in the militias’ ranks and among civilians are believed to be heavy.

The sound of rifle fire already had been replaced by that of heavy machine guns, and that sound now is being succeeded by rockets and grenade launchers in a further escalation, one front-line dispatch said as hundreds more militia members arrived with additional and bigger weapons.

Soviet authorities in Moscow, acting under the state of emergency proclaimed Monday, authorized the troops to open fire after a number had been killed or wounded in the attacks upon them and after further raids by the militias on police and military arms depots to seize more weapons.

“As these situations have become intolerable, the leadership of the Defense Ministry, the Interior Ministry and the Committee for State Security (the KGB) have given instructions to their personnel to use their weapons in strict accordance with military regulations and Soviet laws,” the government declared Wednesday evening.

The tougher measures are intended not only to allow the police and soldiers to defend themselves but also to halt the continuing attacks on civilians and prevent further raids on arsenals in the two republics, the government said.

The security forces also have begun detaining those suspected of involvement in the anti-Armenian violence in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital; the state of emergency permits detention for 30 days without charge.

Troops also began deploying Wednesday evening along the railway line through Azerbaijan to Armenia, Tass reported, and Moscow increased its border units along the frontier with Iran, the scene of Azerbaijani rioting earlier this month.

The government’s intention, Soviet commentators said Wednesday, is first to stop the escalation of violence, a cycle of ever-greater reprisals. Next, they said, the goal is to restore order to provide the time necessary for a further attempt at a negotiated settlement of the dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

“Violence gives birth only to violence,” the government newspaper Izvestia said in a dispatch from Baku, the Azerbaijani capital and the scene of horrific anti-Armenian violence over the weekend. “Shots on the border echo in the pogroms in Baku and the clashes in Karabakh and other areas, and this leads to a new spiral of violence.

“Is it not clear that this escalation is the road to nowhere? The people are demanding: ‘Stop this flow of blood.’ ”

The problem is one of the most intractable ethnic issues facing President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and the Soviet leader has made an unusual effort this week to demonstrate that he is not fazed by unrest and that he remains in charge despite Western speculation about the impact of the conflict on his ability to lead the country.

Top Soviet Communist Party officials are in both Baku and Yerevan, the Armenian capital, while attempting to calm the situation. But suspicions of the central government among Azerbaijanis and Armenians run nearly as deep as those of each other.

The official death toll after six days of violence now stands at 60 throughout the region, according to the Soviet Interior Ministry. But reports from other government agencies, Tass and Soviet journalists indicate that it is much higher.

“It is quite impossible to get a full and objective picture of what is happening in the republic, as it is impossible to get in touch with many areas in Azerbaijan and to travel through the territory,” a correspondent of Izvestia wrote.

Soviet authorities on Wednesday reaffirmed their decision to close both Azerbaijan and Armenia to foreign journalists, although a number of television crews and correspondents had already made their way to Yerevan and beyond.

The central government’s action in declaring a state of emergency was denounced at rallies in Baku and then in Yerevan, but for different reasons.

Christian Residents

A mountainous enclave of good, upland farming area, Nagorno-Karabakh is inhabited mostly by Christian Armenians but since 1923 has been administered by Azerbaijan, most of whose people are Shiite Muslims. Both Armenia and Azerbaijan claim the region, which now has a population of about 160,000, on historical grounds, and the issue of sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh is the focus of the resurgent nationalism of both peoples.

More than two years of efforts to reach a political compromise have failed, however. The Communist Party newspaper Pravda justified the government’s decision to use force to end the conflict as the only means left to the Soviet leadership, which, under Gorbachev, insists on political solutions to political problems.

“All earlier measures have failed to calm the situation, and reason has not overcome emotions,” Pravda said in a front-page commentary Wednesday. “This is why enmity has to be halted by force: by force in the name of life, in the name of humanism. By force that aims not at bloodshed, but at ending it. It depends on both parties drawn into confrontation how soon the state of emergency will be lifted.”

Tensions were described as undiminished throughout both Azerbaijan and Armenia on Wednesday.

Much of the additional peacekeeping force sent by Moscow was to land at the military airfield in Gyandzha, formerly Kirovabad. Then it was to move south toward Nagorno-Karabakh, through the Khanlar and Shaumyan districts, where Azerbaijani militias have been besieging Armenian villages in the heaviest fighting.

But the Azerbaijan Popular Front organized massive blockades of all the roads leading out of the airport, according to the Soviet Interior Ministry. When the army began to use helicopters to airlift the troops over the blockades and avoid an unwanted confrontation with the large groups of civilians on the roads, more blockades were organized farther away.

Snipers, believed to be Azerbaijanis, later took up ambush positions in another effort to slow the army’s advance, according to Soviet press reports.

More attempts to capture tanks and armored personnel carriers also were reported, but authorities said that the vehicles lost were later recovered.

The new orders to open fire when attacked are certain to be welcomed by the officers commanding the peacekeeping forces, made up of internal security troops, units from the army and detachments of the KGB.

Capt. Viktor Spiridonov, wounded while defending an Armenian village north of Nagorno-Karabakh several days ago and now in a Yerevan hospital, said his troops had quickly found they were not fighting “bandits” but a well-organized, heavily armed partisan force.

“We will have to take tough measures against the militias, because we are on the verge of civil war,” he said in an interview from his hospital bed in Yerevan.

Spiridonov said he had taken a small squad to Manashit, which had been surrounded for several days by the Azerbaijani Popular Front’s armed militia. The Armenian villagers were manning Manashit’s borders, he recalled, but they were armed with only hunting rifles and knives, while the Azerbaijanis had Kalashnikov assault rifles, the standard Soviet army weapon. When he and his eight-man squad arrived, the Azerbaijanis surrounded them, Spiridonov said, and he and several of his soldiers were wounded.

Fewer attacks on Armenians were reported in Baku, where more than 40 Armenians were massacred by mobs over the weekend, but four more charred corpses, apparently of Armenians burned alive, were found.

Even with 7,720 policemen, 5,900 internal security troops and more than 3,300 police auxiliaries on duty, Baku, a city of 1.7 million, remains “very tense,” as Izvestia put it. Armenians continued to flee.

Times contributor Esther Schrader reported from Yerevan for this story.