New Violence Reported in the Soviet Caucasus : Ethnic strife: A Communist official narrowly misses death. Nine soldiers are ambushed, and an Armenian village is attacked.

After a 24-hour holiday lull, violence erupted anew Friday in the Soviet Caucasus, with the No. 2 official of Azerbaijan’s Communist Party narrowly escaping assassination by grenade launcher.

In other developments, a group of Soviet troops was ambushed in an early morning attack that wounded nine soldiers, and Armenians said military helicopters machine-gunned one of their villages in apparent reprisal.

In Stepanakert, capital of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh district, flash point for the ethnic feud between the neighboring Armenians and Azerbaijanis, unknown assailants fired a grenade into government headquarters shortly after 8 p.m.

The grenade exploded in the office being used by Viktor P. Polyanichko, an ethnic Russian who is the top government official in Nagorno-Karabakh and the chief deputy to Azerbaijani party leader Ayaz Mutalibov.

“By a lucky coincidence” Polyanichko was not injured, the official Soviet news agency Tass reported from Stepanakert, without elaborating.

Polyanichko, 54, a historian and member of the national Parliament, told Tass it was the fourth attempt to kill him. As the Azerbaijani party’s second secretary, he assures liaison between local Communists and the Kremlin.

At dawn, nine Soviet soldiers including a major were reportedly wounded in an ambush staged by Armenian militants in the mountainous Kazakh area of northeastern Azerbaijan, near the border with Armenia. They were the first military casualties reported since a sweep to disarm Armenian nationalist units began two weeks ago on orders from Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Azerbaijan’s unofficial Assa-Irada news service said one of the Soviet soldiers died while being rushed to the hospital, but there was no immediate confirmation from Moscow-based media or officials of the national government.

According to Assa-Irada, Armenians attacked a 14-man military unit at 5:30 a.m. with grenades and submachine guns and set fire to two trucks. Some reports said the Soviet soldiers had been riding inside the trucks.

Hours later, as many as 50 tanks and armored vehicles crossed the Armenian-Azerbaijani border and encircled the nearby village of Paravakar, according to Razmik Sumaryan of the Armenian National Movement’s information center in Yerevan.

Village leaders came out to negotiate, Sumaryan said, but three were reportedly detained and a fourth was sent back with an ultimatum for villagers: Surrender a captured tank and firearms or the village will be destroyed.

The Armenian Interior Ministry reported Friday night that Soviet helicopter gunships had fired machine-gun rounds into Paravakar, but once again, there was no independent confirmation. No casualties were immediately reported.

It was relatively quiet in the border area Thursday, a holiday in the Soviet Union marking the anniversary of the 1945 defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.

By Armenian count, at least 48 Armenians have died in the operation to disarm Armenian militants in the border zone, only the latest flare-up of violence linked to the rancorous territorial dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, now in its fourth year.

The nationalist Armenian leadership, citing the republic’s claim to sovereignty, calls the operation by Soviet Defense and Interior Ministry forces illegal, and Acting Foreign Minister Ashot Yegiazaryan asked Friday for “moral and political support from the West” to force the Kremlin to end it.