Angry Azerbaijanis Walk Out of Moscow Talks : Ethnic strife: Defense Minister Yazov’s speech defending the use of force in Baku sparks a quick exit.

An unusual closed-door session of the Soviet legislature, called to seek ways of ending ethnic conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, adjourned abruptly Monday evening after Azerbaijani delegates stormed out in the middle of a speech by Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov.

Gen. Yazov offended the Azerbaijanis with his defense of the conduct of army and Interior Ministry troops who broke through nationalist barricades to impose a state of emergency in the Azerbaijan republic’s capital of Baku last month, according to impartial deputies who attended the closed session.

At least 143 Azerbaijanis were killed during the army operation on Jan. 19-20, and hundreds more were injured. The action came a week after Azerbaijani pogroms in the city ended in the deaths of a reported 72 Armenians and forced thousands of others to flee their homes.

Azerbaijanis claim that the death toll from the army action is several times the official figure, and they charge that the troops were sent specifically to crush a popular democratic movement that threatened the Communist hold on power in the republic.

But Yazov, during comments to the closed legislative session, reportedly blamed the deaths on Azerbaijani “extremists,” charging that they intended to take power by force.

At that, said one deputy, the Azerbaijani delegates “didn’t wait for Yazov to finish his address. They simply walked out.”

Earlier, according to another deputy, the Azerbaijani delegation attacked Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev for his role in sending the troops to Baku.

Authorities said Monday’s special session of the Supreme Soviet, or legislature, was closed in order to avoid the possibility that the debate would further aggravate the already tense situation. Normally, legislative sessions are broadcast on radio and television here.

Both deputies said the debate was postponed until later this week, probably Wednesday or Thursday, to give the two sides time to cool off. Their verbal clash at Monday’s session was described by one witness as “savage.”

Neither side was reported to have offered any constructive suggestions to end the longstanding hostility between the neighboring Transcaucasian peoples, who have been in a state of virtual civil war for two years.

“For now, this particular issue on the agenda has been put aside for a few days,” said one deputy. When debate reopens, he added, “By all indications the Supreme Soviet will set up a commission similar to the Tbilisi one, and that will be the end of it for the time being.”

The earlier commission was established to look into the violent army and Interior Ministry troop attack on demonstrators in Tbilisi, capital of Soviet Georgia, last April 9, during which 19 people were killed and more than 4,000 affected by the use of toxic gas against the crowds.

The question of who authorized that action remains controversial here. Just last week, leading Politburo conservative Yegor K. Ligachev and Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze got into such a heated argument over it at a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee that Gorbachev was forced to intervene. The text of their remarks was printed in full in Pravda, the party newspaper.

The Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict centers on the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominately Armenian enclave within the republic of Azerbaijan. Armenia has demanded that Nagorno-Karabakh be put under its jurisdiction, but the Azerbaijanis are adamantly opposed.

There have traditionally been large minorities of each nationality living in the republic territory of the other. But since the latest round of violence flared into the open with the murders of 32 Armenians in the Azerbaijani town of Sumgait in February, 1988, a total of about 500,000 individuals, about 250,000 from each side, have either fled or been forced to evacuate their homes, becoming refugees.

The official Soviet news agency Tass reported from the Armenian capital of Yerevan on Monday that more than 25,000 railroad cars full of supplies for the republic have been stopped by an Azerbaijani blockade. The only other rail connection between Armenia and the Soviet Union goes through the republic of Georgia, but it cannot meet all of Armenia’s needs.

The republic lacks both fuel and electric power, and its industries have been prevented from delivering products worth 180 million rubles (about $290 million) because of “the lack of adequate railway communication,” Tass said.

The head of the Armenian Interior Ministry’s inspection department, meanwhile, told Tass that citizens there have returned only about 30% of weapons that they stole from the army and other sources during the height of last month’s ethnic fighting.

In a separate report from Baku, the news agency said that 15 people were injured in Nagorno-Karabakh on Sunday when the bus in which they were riding hit a mine planted by unidentified “extremists.”

The Supreme Soviet faces the task of dealing with several other instances of ethnic-based unrest in the Soviet Union. For instance, according to the British news agency Reuters, it is expected to begin discussion in the next few days of a draft law that for the first time would lay out conditions under which Lithuania, and the country’s other 14 constituent republics, may leave the union.

In Vilnius, Lithuanian Communist Party leader Algirdas Brazauskas called Monday for negotiations with the Kremlin, Reuters reported.

“The aim of these negotiations must be the establishment of permanent neutrality, legalization of mutually advantageous trade relations, borders, customs and tariffs and foreign relations,” Brazauskas said in a speech to the party Central Committee broadcast on the republic’s radio. “This must be understood not as an expression of separatism or a revision of borders but as the restoration of legal statehood.”

Lithuania and the neighboring Baltic republics, Estonia and Latvia, were independent states between the two world wars but were absorbed into the Soviet Union after the Red Army moved in during 1940.