Armenia’s Leader Seeks Support on U.S. Visit : Soviet Union: Thrust to the fore by events, the former dissident is due in L.A. on a mission to gather help from ‘our brothers abroad.’

A scholar in the history of ancient Armenia and Syria left his books two years ago and took to the streets to try to free his people from Communist rule. After six months behind bars for his dissident activities, Levon Ter-Petrosyan is now the president of the smallest Soviet republic.

Changes are coming so rapidly in the Soviet Union that dissidents do become presidents and sit down to negotiate with the Kremlin leaders who had jailed them. The visions that seemed so dangerous just months ago now are official policies.

“Everything flows by so fast,” Ter-Petrosyan said about the pace of events in Armenia. “We haven’t even had the chance to ponder the changes.”

Ter-Petrosyan is due in Los Angeles as part of a nine-day visit to the United States that has also taken him to New York and Washington to meet with U.S. officials, including President Bush, and Armenian groups to lobby for support.

“I look on my trip as a consolidation of the Armenian diaspora to help create an independent Armenian government,” Ter-Petrosyan said. “We need moral, material, economic and political help from our brothers abroad.”

Help from abroad is especially important to Armenia now, Ter-Petrosyan said, because it must learn to live without Moscow’s control or support.

At home, Armenians’ faith in Ter-Petrosyan and his government of former dissidents gives him a mandate previous Communist-led governments never enjoyed.

“It’s our only asset,” Ter-Petrosyan, 45, said in an interview. “We have no experience in managing the state, we have no authority as politicians as yet, and so we have only the people’s trust to work with.”

Ter-Petrosyan, who has written extensively on the cultural relations between ancient Armenia and Christian Syria, put his studies aside in 1988 to join forces with several other scholars in the Karabakh Committee, a tight circle of intellectuals that became the heart of the Armenian nationalist movement.

The scholars regularly drew tens of thousands of people into the streets of Yerevan, the Armenian capital, to protest violence against Christian Armenians in the neighboring Muslim republic of Azerbaijan and to call for an end to the Communist Party and central government’s rule in Armenia.

The central topic of many of the rallies was the long-festering conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. An Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh has voted to join Armenia, but Azerbaijanis consider the territory historically theirs.

The protests brought Ter-Petrosyan to the fore. A tall man with a calm disposition, he spoke more often than anyone else at these rallies and worked from dawn to midnight for the movement.

“He’s a good orator because he explains things very well,” said Babken Ararktsyan, another member of the Karabakh Committee and Armenia’s new vice president. “His personality is very attractive to the people.”

Two years ago, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was far from pleased with the activities of Ter-Petrosyan and his fellow nationalists. While on a trip to view the devastation of the Dec. 7, 1988, earthquake in Armenia, Gorbachev accused the Karabakh Committee of exploiting the tragedy to further Armenian claims to Nagorno-Karabakh, then under virtual siege by Azerbaijanis.

Over the next weeks, Ter-Petrosyan and several other nationalists were jailed. Formal charges were never brought against them. Their detention only increased the committee’s popularity. When Ter-Petrosyan was released, he was suffering from a back ailment so painful that he was hospitalized for four months in France.

“He was imprisoned to free his people,” Mager Airapetyan, 36, a supply manager for a private construction firm, said. “Levon Ter-Petrosyan is our king. Thank God our people finally have a king again. If the Communists do not thwart him in his struggle for democracy, he will surely be successful.”

Ter-Petrosyan had been jailed before for his political activity. As a university student in 1966, he spent 10 days in jail for organizing nationalist demonstrations and meetings.

“Most of my friends from the Karabakh Committee started in politics as student activists in the ‘60s,” he said referring to the period of political thaw under Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev. “We’re part of the Khrushchev generation.”

Ter-Petrosyan’s activities contrasted sharply with the political beliefs of his father, a founder of the underground Syrian Communist Party, who brought his family back to their homeland in 1946 when Ter-Petrosyan was a year old.

But after university, Ter-Petrosyan largely stuck to his study of ancient Armenian-Syrian relations, writing six books and more than 70 scholarly articles.

And, until Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the government allowed little nationalist expression.

Although Ter-Petrosyan’s ascent to the Armenian presidency seems lightning fast, he said it was natural for the Armenian Parliament to elect him almost two months ago. Since last year, he has headed the Armenian All-National Movement, which won two-thirds of the seats in the parliamentary elections in May; the movement had only four seats in the previous Parliament.

Soon after Ter-Petrosyan’s election, Gorbachev telephoned to congratulate him and made it clear that he would not treat him as a former dissident.

Although Gorbachev seems to have revised his opinion of Ter-Petrosyan, the Armenian leader has little complimentary to say about the Soviet president.

“In the very beginning, 1985, Gorbachev was the initiator of the reforms,” Ter-Petrosyan said. “But since then he has always been the rear guard. He is always behind the pace of events.”

Ter-Petrosyan, nonetheless, said he intends to work with the Soviet president to achieve his aims for the republic.

Right after his election Aug. 4, Ter-Petrosyan flew to Moscow and persuaded Gorbachev to extend by two months the deadline for paramilitary groups in Armenia to disarm. Then he began to disarm the bands himself. He had convinced Gorbachev, he said, that it would be dangerous if troops from Moscow were used.

“The people would not have understood if the Russian army was punishing Armenian militia, and would have stood up against the army,” Ter-Petrosyan said. “When we did it ourselves, the people understood and said we did the right thing.”

Most of the weapons have been turned over, Ter-Petrosyan said, and those militia members who kept their arms pledged allegiance to the Parliament.

The people will respect Ter-Petrosyan’s decrees, Ararktsyan said, “because he is the first Armenian leader who really represents the people.”

But Ter-Petrosyan needs more than public popularity to salvage Armenia’s economy, reconstruct the areas destroyed by the earthquake, establish a democracy and assert Armenia’s independence from the Kremlin after more than 70 years of Communist rule from Moscow.

Soon after Ter-Petrosyan came to power, the Armenian Parliament passed a declaration on the republic’s independence.

“It calls for gradual increase in the republic’s sovereignty,” he said. “I mean economic independence and our own foreign policy. We haven’t had this for more than 70 years because we have been monopolized by Moscow. Now we want independence here, too.”

Lending A HAND: Armenian-Americans bring help, money and hope to Soviet republic. A18