Soviet Union When the Earth Shook

In the central square of Leninakan, the hands on the clock tower stood frozen at 11:41 a.m., as if to record for posterity that terrifying moment when the city of 290,000 was, without warning, shaken violently by a rumble from the earth. Concrete and stone snapped like brittle twigs, hospitals and schools crashed down on patients and children, and workers were entombed in factories. Within minutes the city was split apart like an accordion. Forty-five miles to the north, the town of Spitak, population 30,000, was virtually “erased from the face of the earth,” in the words of a Soviet television commentator. Said a local news-agency editor: “Ninety-nine percent of the population is gone.”

The earthquake that shattered much of the Soviet Republic of Armenia last week brought a horrified world images, via unprecedented Soviet TV coverage, of trapped victims in twisted piles of smoking rubble and of as many as 400,000 bewildered people left homeless, many of them wandering in shock through buildings crumpled like paper. As the hours went by, the death toll climbed: 10,000, then 30,000, then, on Saturday, the first official estimate of 40,000 to 45,000. But the numbers continued to rise. The only sign of hope amid this swath of misery was the outpouring of aid to the Soviet Union that began flooding in from around the world.

The shock wave, which registered 6.9 on the Richter scale, spread far beyond the battered towns and villages of Armenia. When the temblor struck, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was spending his first night in New York City. During lunch later that day with Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Gorbachev mentioned the earthquake briefly, noting that the damage was thought to be “very serious in some places.” Some time after that, news of the growing toll reached him. Just after midnight, a visibly shaken Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze summoned the press to the Soviet U.N. mission on Manhattan’s East 67th Street and announced that Gorbachev would go home later that day to direct the recovery effort.

Gorbachev’s sudden departure, a day earlier than planned, meant the canceling of many arrangements: a sight-seeing tour of Manhattan for Gorbachev and wife Raisa, and then visits to Cuba and Britain. “I have to be there,” Gorbachev said simply in a farewell speech at Kennedy International Airport. Arriving in Moscow on Friday morning, he flew on to Leninakan on Saturday, which had been declared a day of national mourning.

Gorbachev’s mission was more than humanitarian: it was a major test of his reformist leadership. He knows that out of the despair of Armenia’s disaster he must find a way to regain the political trust of a people who over the past ten months have become estranged from Moscow and embittered toward Gorbachev because of his rejection of their nationalist aspirations.

The outside world responded almost as quickly as Gorbachev did to the devastation. Medical supplies, rescue equipment and trained search teams from France, West Germany, Britain, Switzerland, Bulgaria and Poland were flown + into the Soviet Union, and more aid was offered by countries from Latin America to the Far East. Perhaps the most striking symbol of change was the Kremlin’s formal request for American help. Washington responded immediately with offers of medicine and medical equipment, doctors and trained rescue teams, the first time that large-scale U.S. assistance had been given to the Soviet Union since the end of World War II. Over the weekend the first U.S. cargo plane arrived in Yerevan, carrying rescue experts and sniffer dogs. On Sunday tragedy struck again: a Soviet military transport plane carrying soldiers to help rescue victims crashed at the airport in Leninakan, killing 79 people.

At the same time, private U.S. groups, many of them organized by Armenian Americans, were amassing money, clothing and other supplies under the auspices of the American Red Cross. In Glendale, Calif., home to many of the state’s 300,000 Armenians, a relief group quickly collected $7 million in pledges. In Cambridge, Mass., sister city to Yerevan, a disaster relief fund was launched to send medical supplies to Armenia. This outpouring of aid from Americans helped underscore Gorbachev’s words when he told the U.N. General Assembly last week that “our common goal” can only be reached through cooperation.

The earthquake was the latest catastrophe for the Armenians, an ancient people who through the ages have been massacred, conquered and divided. Their home is a region of mountain ranges and fertile valleys, roughly the size of Maryland, lying in what the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov called the “high Caucasian maze.” Of the republic’s 3.5 million people, 90% are Armenian.

The quake’s epicenter was 25 miles northeast of Leninakan, the republic’s second largest city. Rumbling through a fault only twelve miles below the surface, the quake toppled all buildings higher than two stories within a radius of 30 miles, an area with a population of about 700,000. Armenian towns and cities such as Kirovakan, Stepanavan, and Leninakan were largely destroyed. Even Yerevan, 65 miles from the epicenter, suffered damage. The earthquake came in a minute-long tremor, followed four minutes later by a sharp aftershock, measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale. The timing could not have been worse: at midmorning, public buildings were full of people.

At Elementary School No. 9 on Leninakan’s Gorky Street, “the earthquake killed children on the spot during their classes,” said a correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Communist youth newspaper. Police Sergeant Valeri Gumenyok and his men pulled 50 children’s bodies from the wreckage of the building. The paper described an end-of-the-world scene of people huddled around bonfires, and roads out of the city clogged with fleeing residents. As workers tried to clear away fallen masonry, “you could hear the terrible cries of people waiting for help,” wrote a reporter for Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper. In devastated Spitak, a correspondent for Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya said, rescue workers heard a small girl trapped under a pile of rubble cry for her mother and ask for water. They lowered a pipe for her to drink through, but were unable to free her.

Rescue workers put out a frantic call for heavy equipment to help in the search for people who might be trapped. But Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, in charge of the rescue effort, admitted, “There is a shortage of equipment.” The need was critical. “Every hour of delay means another 20 dead out of every thousand buried,” said Soviet Health Minister Yevgeni Chazov. Doctors from several sister republics were rushed into the region to minister to 19,000 injured people, nearly a third of them crowding hospitals in Yerevan and neighboring towns. Their efforts were hindered by a desperate lack of antibiotics, disposable syringes and blood supplies. About 6,500 Soviet soldiers were dispatched to aid in the rescue. By Saturday, 1,500 survivors had been pulled from the ruins, but untold thousands remained buried beneath the rubble.

Among the victims of the earthquake, it is believed, were some of the more than 100,000 Armenian refugees who in the past three weeks fled across the border from neighboring Azerbaijan. For ten months the two republics have been locked in a bloody dispute over Armenia’s territorial claim to Nagorno- Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. The turmoil has revived the historic blood feud between Armenians, who are largely Christian, and Azerbaijanis, who are mainly Muslim. Violence between the two sides has claimed at least 60 lives and forced Gorbachev to send thousands of troops into the area to restore order. The Soviet leader has firmly rebuffed the territorial claim, and his hurried departure for home prompted speculation that he feared that the effects of the quake, if not dealt with promptly and sensitively, could inflame the situation and lead to further upheaval. In fact, shortly after Soviet troops left the Azerbaijan capital of Baku for the earthquake zone, an Armenian spokesman reported that rioters in the city had set fire to Armenian houses. The government newspaper Izvestia urged people to “first be human beings, and then Russians, Armenians or Azerbaijanis.”

This ethnic clash has become Gorbachev’s most explosive domestic issue because other restive Soviet republics, from Estonia on the Baltic to Georgia in the Caucasus, are watching how he deals with the fiercely nationalistic Armenians. The Armenians are likely to have taken note of the emotion in his voice at Kennedy Airport when he spoke of the urgency of helping victims of the earthquake. This tragedy thus gives Gorbachev an opportunity to present himself as a caring leader who seeks to heal rather than divide.

Gorbachev’s other major domestic problem will be coping with the cost of the earthquake, likely to rise to the tens of billions of rubles. The long restoration of the quake-stricken region will drain money from an economy already reeling from a series of setbacks. The cleanup costs for the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster swallowed 8 billion rubles, about $12.8 billion. This year the Soviet budget is already expected to run a 36 billion-ruble deficit. The government has also suffered falling revenues from declining international oil prices and from its campaign to crack down on vodka consumption. Now the country faces a sizable loss of income from Armenia, important for its manufacture of technical and electronic equipment.

In terms of the death toll, the temblor was among the century’s worst. In terms of the magnitude of the shock, though, it was a good deal less severe: the quake that hit Mexico City in 1985, for example, was a considerably more destructive 8.1 seismic shock, yet fewer than 10,000 people died. Experts laid much of the blame for last week’s shocking toll on the shoddy construction of the buildings in Armenia’s cities and towns. According to Brian Tucker, acting state geologist of California who has visited Armenia, many buildings in the region are made of 8-in.-thick concrete slabs held together by metal hooks and mortar. Poorer Armenians, he says, tend to live in “very fragile, very deadly houses” made of unreinforced mud and rock. Yet geologists have long known that the region affected by the quake is interlaced with small faults in the earth’s crust and has been shaken by dozens of serious tremors this century. “Where were the seismologists, the architects and the construction workers that drafted and built the houses that fell apart like matchboxes?” Komsomolskaya Pravda asked. Many new nine-story prefabricated panel buildings, Pravda noted, simply collapsed into heaps of rubble that became “common graves for many.”

But this was not the time for recriminations, as the Soviets, aided by an outpouring of worldwide concern, sought to shoulder the burden of their great tragedy. It was bitter irony that a leader who had just traveled half a world to talk of peace should return to a land that was, in the words of a Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent, “like coming into a war, a cruel and modern one.”