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.