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For nine days, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators jammed the square in front of Yerevan's opera house, chanting "Karabakh," singing patriotic songs and holding banners bearing such inscriptions as SELF-DETERMINATION IS NOT EXTREMISM. Police did not interfere with the protests, and Soviet army troops maintained a low profile, but the implicit threat of a crackdown mounted with each passing day.
Gorbachev, meanwhile, was striving for a peaceful solution. After sending four top-level troubleshooters to the region and issuing a public plea for restraint, the Soviet leader met secretly in the Kremlin with two well-known Armenian writers, Zori Balayan and Silva Kaputikyan. Gorbachev promised them that he would personally study the Armenian demands. As soon as that message was relayed to Yerevan, the protest leaders agreed to suspend the demonstrations for one month. In Nagorno-Karabakh, however, at least two Azerbaijani youths were killed in clashes with Armenians.
It was apparently the news of those casualties that sparked last week's rioting in Sumgait (pop. 223,000), situated about 20 miles north of the Azerbaijani capital of Baku. According to a local television worker reached by telephone, the trouble started when a group of some 50 Azerbaijanis arrived in Sumgait from Nagorno-Karabakh bearing word of ethnic fighting there. The apparent result was a murderous backlash aimed at local Armenians. An Armenian resident of Sumgait, sobbing into the telephone, told Reuters that Azerbaijanis had gone on a rampage of rape and murder against Armenians. He said that seven members of a single family had been killed and that many Armenians were trying to flee the city. At midweek a government spokesman reported that Soviet troops had managed to "normalize the situation" by arresting rioters and imposing an 8 p.m.-to-7 a.m. curfew.
The Azerbaijani-Armenian clashes apparently stemmed more from centuries of bitter ethnic rivalries than from separatist urges. Says a senior Western diplomat in Moscow: "I think it would be a mistake to consider them a challenge to Soviet rule as such, or to a socialist system." Nonetheless, the turmoil has once again shattered the ritual claim that Communist "internationalism" and "Soviet patriotism" have overcome the primitive instincts of nationalism.
While Moscow is in no imminent danger of losing control over its non-Russian & nationalities, the problem is likely to become more critical in the future. Today ethnic Russians constitute about 51% of the Soviet Union's 285 million population. That proportion will shrink to 48% by the year 2000 and to only 40% by 2050, mainly because of the high birthrate of the Muslim populations of Central Asia. Russian domination will become increasingly hard to maintain.
Gorbachev's reforms are a more immediate factor threatening Moscow's control. Western experts on the Soviet Union generally agree that his policies of economic restructuring (perestroika) and political openness (glasnost) are feeding the centrifugal forces of nationalism. "If Gorbachev wants to do something, he has to carry out perestroika," says French Sovietologist Helene Carrere d'Encausse. "But he can't do it without letting people express themselves. This leaves the door open to air all their frustrations, and the easiest ones to express are national frustrations."