Million Mourn in Azerbaijan : Ethnic strife: Muslims lament those killed by Soviet troops and throw away Communist Party membership cards.

As sirens wailed throughout the Azerbaijani capital of Baku today, hundreds of thousands of Muslims poured onto the streets in a massive funeral procession to bury those killed when Soviet troops burst into the city to put a bloody end to a nationalist uprising.

The ceremony was also part protest as Azerbaijanis threw their Communist Party membership cards into garbage pails carried by some of the mourners and hoisted signs opposing the Soviet party and its leader, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, participants said.

One sign showed a picture of Gorbachev with crossbones and read: “Executioner. Who Is Next?” Soviet soldiers kept a watchful distance and did not interfere with the ceremony, in which residents said more than 1 million people out of a population of 1.7 million participated.

Those same troops stormed into Baku before dawn Saturday, breaking through human blockades with tanks and gunfire after three days during which residents manning makeshift barricades prevented their entrance into the city. The troops were sent to Baku after at least 72 Armenians were killed in a spiral of violence that began Jan. 13.

Throughout the morning, ambulance sirens wailed, car horns blared and whistles were sounded in factories that have been closed in a protest strike.

“We are going to strike until the Soviet army leaves. The Russians will find here a dead city,” said Elmira Akhmedova, a journalist working with the republic’s Ministry of Culture.

“The arrival of the army has changed Baku beyond belief,” the government daily Izvestia said in a dispatch today from Baku. “The city lives in a horrible tension. The shoulders of highways are littered with twisted remnants of trucks, buses and passenger cars used before Saturday to block the army from entering. The remnants are covered with flowers.”

It was becoming increasingly clear that Moscow will have a hard time in the coming days reasserting its authority over Baku, where calls to separate from the Soviet Union are being heard with growing frequency.

The Azerbaijani Parliament, which met in emergency session from 2:30 a.m. to 7 a.m. today, declared that if the Soviet troops did not leave Baku within two days, it will begin constitutionally sanctioned procedures to secede from the union, Baku resident Arif Unisov, a member of the nationalist Popular Front, said in a telephone interview.

The Parliament also condemned the army action as unnecessarily brutal, noting that among the dead were children and a doctor who had been trying to help the wounded, and said Baku citizens need not heed the Kremlin-imposed emergency regulations, which among other things impose a nighttime curfew, Unisov said.

Azerbaijanis, predominantly Muslim, and Armenians, who are mostly Christian, have fought fiercely for two years for control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mostly Armenian-populated enclave that is part of Azerbaijan.

But last week’s ethnic violence in Baku, during which some Armenian victims were tossed from balconies and others were burned alive, was the bloodiest between the two peoples.