The first official reports spoke of "rampage and violence" caused by "hooligans." As sensational rumors reverberated around the country, a Soviet government spokesman admitted to "certain injuries" and even "several" deaths in the southwestern city of Sumgait. The full extent of the carnage was only revealed at week's end, when an anchorman of the national television newscast Vremya read a four-paragraph TASS dispatch in a somber voice. "Criminal elements committed violent actions and engaged in robberies," he reported. "They killed 31 people, among them members of various nationalities, old men and women."
The rioting in Sumgait, an industrial center in the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, was one of the worst known cases of ethnic disorder in Soviet history. Coming after two weeks of nationalist unrest in two southern republics, it confronted Communist Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev with a problem that is not likely to go away and could blossom into the most serious political crisis of his three years in power.
The violence erupted in the wake of nine days of demonstrations in neighboring Armenia. By promising to examine local grievances, Gorbachev had managed to calm protests involving hundreds of thousands of marchers in the Armenian capital of Yerevan. But marches were reportedly continuing in Nagorno-Karabakh, an autonomous district that is mainly populated by Armenians but lies within the borders of the Azerbaijan republic. Protests demanding the enclave's annexation by the Armenian republic led to violent clashes between Armenians and Azerbaijanis and, finally, to last week's bloody upheaval in Sumgait.
The explosive complexity of those southern disturbances highlighted the difficulties of controlling a vast empire comprising more than 100 distinct nationalities and ethnic groups living in 15 republics. Russia's rulers have been dealing with restive nationalities since the days of the Czars, but rarely has the problem assumed such urgency. At least two people died 15 months ago, when riots broke out in Alma-Ata, capital of Kazakhstan, to protest the naming of a Russian to head the local Communist Party. A band of Crimean Tatars demonstrated in Red Square last July, seeking the right to return to their homeland on the Black Sea; a smaller group briefly pressed the same demand near Moscow's Lenin Library last week until they were hustled away by plainclothes police. In August and again last month, demonstrators in the Baltic republics commemorated their brief independence between the two world wars. Faced with this surge in nationalist sentiment, Gorbachev has called for a special Central Committee session to deal with the issue.
The roots of the latest disturbances go back to 1923, when the mountainous Nagorno-Karabakh region, 75% of whose population is ethnic Armenian, was included in the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. Since then, the enclave's mostly Christian Armenians, complaining of discrimination by the Muslim majority in Azerbaijan, have sought a union with the Armenian republic. Last month officials of the Armenian republic petitioned Moscow to allow it to ^ annex the territory. Moscow's refusal touched off protests in Nagorno-Karabakh that spread to Yerevan.