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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."