TURMOIL IN THE EAST BLOC : Armenians Show an Angry Joy Over Killings of Azerbaijanis : Ethnic strife: ‘Let them all be killed,’ one refugee from Baku exclaims. Others blame Gorbachev for acting too late.

They were not crying for Azerbaijanis in Armenia on Monday.

Even as hundreds of thousands marched in Baku to mourn the 83 people killed when Soviet troops stormed the Azerbaijani capital over the weekend, Armenian refugees arriving here from Baku were celebrating the killings.

“My God, I am glad they are dead!” Satenik Karapetian, 84, said at the Yerevan airport. “Let them all be killed. If I had one of them here--and I am an old woman--I would tear him apart, limb from limb!”

For the more than 6,000 Armenians who have arrived in the Armenian capital over the last week from Baku, the overwhelming reaction to the events last weekend was an angry kind of joy.

The Armenians had called Baku home. Many had lived there all their lives. They had friends and family there, and a very different life from Armenians in Yerevan.

But now they were saying vehemently that they never want to return. They said they are glad that soldiers are occupying their city and that they have no sorrow for the Azerbaijanis killed last weekend.

These people are the survivors of an earlier weekend of violence directed at the 22,000 Armenians who had continued to live there despite rising ethnic tension. This pogrom, as Soviet authorities have termed the methodical hunting down of Armenians, left at least 72 dead and more than 200 wounded, according to estimates from the Soviet Interior Ministry.

After a week of violence, Soviet troops moved into Baku under a state of emergency on Saturday, but not until most of the surviving Armenians had been forced to flee.

Thus, the anger the Armenian refugees feel toward Azerbaijanis is mixed with disgust toward Soviet authorities for waiting so long to take control of Baku, where they say trouble had been building for more than six weeks.

“They had to go in before now to stop this genocide against us,” said Samuel Avakian, 61, who had fled Baku naked. “It is too late. They should have foreseen all these events. They knew that one day it would take place, and they did not take steps to prevent it.”

The enmity between Armenians and Azerbaijanis goes back centuries, and the tragedy in Baku in the last week is only the latest in a history marked by wars, conquests and massacres.

The Armenians have seen their nation squeezed and shrunk, and in the process have been slaughtered, as Persians, Greeks, Romans, Mongols, Russians and Turks have pressed north and south, east and west through the Caucasus Mountains to extend their power. Armenians have been Christians from the 3rd Century and have held tenaciously to their beliefs, culture, language and customs.

The Azerbaijanis, a Muslim, Turkic-speaking people who spilled out of the Persian and Ottoman empires as they expanded, regard much of what was ancient Armenia as their homeland.

The resulting rivalry has led to much strife. In 1918, in the vacuum left by the collapse of the Russian Empire, Armenia and Azerbaijan both enjoyed a brief period of independence--and fought over Nagorno-Karabakh, a farming area midway between Baku and Yerevan that is still a key element in their hostility.

Baku was for a thousand years the focus of the struggle for wealth and power that resulted in the great migrations from the East toward Europe, but it became a cosmopolitan city of 1.8 million where Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Asians and Jews lived in relative peace.

The 220,000 Armenians who lived there until two years ago lived relatively well, but in the last two years, tension between Armenians and Azerbaijanis rose to intolerable levels, according to Armenians who have arrived here in the last few days. They tell of being fired from their jobs, threatened on the street, of becoming afraid to walk alone after anti-Armenian riots two years ago in which 32 people were killed in Sumgait, Azerbaijan’s second-largest city.

While grief for the dead and wounded has mounted in Baku after the weekend of fighting, Armenian refugees said they feel sorrow neither for Azerbaijanis nor for the city where most were born and had lived. Instead, they curse the people who forced them from their homes.

“I wish them the worst in the whole world,” Karapetian, the elderly woman, said. “Not only I wish this; all Armenians do. We are a peaceful people. It pains me to wish this on anyone. But they have been killing women and children, throwing them out of high buildings.”

Karapetian does not have the kind of face that takes well to hatred. She is a grandmother. She lived 70 years in the same house. She wears a wool scarf around her silver hair, and her eyes twinkle through a maze of wrinkles.

But when she talks about Azerbaijanis, her face contorts in anger and her mouth curls into a sneer.

“There is no good in them, none at all,” she said. “God guard you from seeing the things I have seen.”

Boris Asratian, 50, who came to Yerevan after fleeing Baku five days ago, echoed her sentiment.

“There is no word for what they are,” he said. “There is no word for what I wish on them. (Soviet President) Mikhail Gorbachev knew what would happen. Why didn’t he come in and save us before this latest genocide?”