Troops, Militants Clash in Capital of Soviet Azerbaijan : Ethnic strife: Gorbachev says he ordered the army into Baku to avoid an ‘abyss of chaos and suffering.’ The death toll is at least 57.

The Azerbaijani capital of Baku echoed with gunfire Saturday as Soviet army troops, who entered the city by force before dawn, fought skirmishes throughout the day with Muslim militants near a military barracks and fired over the heads of citizens who clustered in the city’s center to exchange news, residents said.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, in a solemn nationwide address, said the country’s leadership was compelled to order the army to use force to end the actions of extremists who were “dragging the people into an abyss of chaos and suffering.”

Gorbachev said the tanks and soldiers who smashed through human blockades surrounding Baku were “met with fire from terrorists in some places. They had no choice but to fire back. There were casualties. Some families will miss their relatives. For this, I express deep condolences.”

The death toll from Saturday’s fighting in Baku, a Caspian Sea oil port of 1.8 million, remained uncertain. The Interior Ministry reported 51 Azerbaijanis and six soldiers killed; the mayor’s office in Baku reported at least 60 dead, and nationalist Popular Front spokesmen said that more than 200 had been killed. The Interior Ministry also reported that 287 civilians and 36 soldiers were wounded.

“The street is covered with blood,” Vadim Korsh, an editor of Azerbaijan’s official news agency, Azerinform, said in a telephone interview.

“The morgues are overflowing, and the hospitals are jammed with wounded,” Popular Front spokesman Abalyas Mamedov said in a separate interview from Baku.

The main Soviet television evening news program, Vremya, broadcast an unusual appeal from Russian Orthodox Patriarch Pimen for an end to the killing of women and children and increased tolerance on both sides.

The republic’s Communist Party leadership declared three days of official mourning for those killed. At the same time, the Kremlin imposed an indefinite state of emergency on Baku, enforcing a nighttime curfew on the city and banning all gatherings.

The Kremlin almost immediately felt the first reverberation from its decision to clamp down in the capital of the mostly Shiite Muslim republic. In solidarity, the legislature of the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic, where Muslims also live, voted to secede from the Soviet Union and asked for support from Iran and Pakistan.

Moscow hesitated a week before using force, reportedly in part in fear of inflaming passions among the country’s 50 million Muslims, who make up the majority in six of the country’s 15 republics.

The army action came after Azerbaijani militants expelled thousands of Christian Armenians from their Baku homes, beating and killing dozens, and as Azerbaijanis were involved in fierce guerrilla fighting with neighboring Soviet Armenia.

In addition, Baku residents blocked Soviet troops from patrolling the city for three days before the soldiers broke through the barricades.

The Popular Front increasingly had been asserting its power in the southern republic’s capital in recent days. Tens of thousands of people had demanded in rallies in front of Communist Party headquarters that the republican government resign, that Soviet power end and that Azerbaijan be established as an Islamic state.

“We attempted to act in a patient and balanced way, trying to solve difficult problems by exclusively peaceful, political means . . . to find a way out of this dark alley,” a grim-faced Gorbachev said in his 12-minute address to the nation. “We based our actions on the belief that violence will poison the situation even more and lead to more human victims.

“But the people did not demonstrate the required responsibility and reason. . . . They didn’t make a secret of their goal of seizing power,” he said. “This had to stop.”

He said the Soviet army troops are now in control of all key posts in the city “and are taking resolute measures against the pogrom organizers and instigators of violence. Weapons and ammunition are being confiscated.

“Don’t be provoked by extremists,” he said in a last appeal to the Baku population. “I deeply believe reason and wisdom will take over.”

Residents of Baku said the city was tense Saturday. Although virtually all residents reportedly obeyed the curfew and emptied the streets at nightfall, guerrilla-like attacks against troops continued throughout the day.

“The situation is dangerous and frightening,” Aitekin Imranova, a spokeswoman for the Popular Front, said in a telephone interview from Baku at nightfall. “Troops are posted every five feet, and there are tanks, armored personnel carriers and military vehicles everywhere.”

As neither television nor radio were working, she said, people were clustering in the streets to try to exchange news. “But, whenever a group of people forms, the soldiers fire above their heads to disperse them,” she said.

Skirmishes also continued throughout the day at the military barracks on Salyansky Street, with Azerbaijanis and Soviet troops exchanging sporadic gunfire, she said. On Friday, Soviet troops were trapped in those barracks by crowds of Azerbaijani militants who barred them from entering the city.

Tass, the official Soviet news agency, said nationalists in Baku were “setting up new barriers made up of trucks and buses, and are opening fire in some places.”

“The streets of the city are jammed with armored personnel carriers. The squares are cordoned off by soldiers. Tension remains very, very high,” a Radio Moscow correspondent reported from Baku.

“There are many mourning flags in the streets. Cars are draped with black ribbons. Ships in the Caspian shipyards and in Baku Bay are sounding long, loud blasts on their horns,” the correspondent said.

Azerbaijan’s Communist Party chief, Abdul-Rahman Vezirov, was dismissed after troops and tanks shot their way into Baku, Tass said, adding that government and party leaders were on their way to Moscow for urgent talks.

More than 13,000 Armenians have been evacuated from Baku, but attacks against those who remain were continuing, with 43 Armenian homes ransacked in the last 24 hours, Tass reported Saturday evening.

It is not clear whether attacks against Armenians took place even as the army struggled to regain control of the city. Foreign journalists have not been permitted into Azerbaijan.

Clashes between rival nationalists continued elsewhere in Armenia and Azerbaijan and in the Azerbaijani-controlled region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which has been at the heart of the dispute between the two peoples since Armenians began an effort two years ago to wrest control of the mostly Armenian-populated enclave.

In Armenia, nationalists from both ethnic groups carried out separate raids against army posts, confiscating 190 weapons over a 24-hour period, Tass reported Saturday evening. The government has said that extremists on both sides are armed with stolen helicopters, tanks and even missiles.

In a clash in the Armenian border region of Ararat, two people were killed and 20 wounded, including one soldier, Tass said.

The news agency also reported without details that 100 Iranian police officers are in Azerbaijan. Soviet authorities have accused Azerbaijanis of going into Iran and returning with weapons used in the last week’s battles against both Armenians and Soviet soldiers.

Before February, 1988, about 500,000 Armenians lived in Azerbaijan, including 200,000 in Baku. But after 32 Armenians were killed in a clash over the future of Nagorno-Karabakh, 217,000 Armenians fled to Armenia and about 150,000 Azerbaijanis, practically the entire Armenian-based community, moved from Armenia to Azerbaijan.