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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."