Who gains from the anti-Armenian
International Viewpoint #153 • December 12, 1988
USSR
ESPITE the international scandal
D
of the communal violence and the reported tens of thousands of refugees, the immediate effect of the anti-Armenian pogroms is to strengthen Moscow's hand. The rule of the Soviet bureaucracy depends, in large part, on its ability to play an arbiter's role, including among the nationalities of the Soviet. In particular, in the context of mass mobilizations for national rights, communal conflict restores that role. (Azeri mass demonstrations have been manipulated by the bureaucracy in the past. The most recent ones seem to be more contradictory. We will take up this aspect in a future issue.)
There has been an awareness of this problem among national rights fighters. The nationalist hard-core of the Karabakh movement has from the beginning put the responsibility for the communal violence squarely on Moscow, and avoided the temptation to raise the old cry against the "abominable Turk."
This attitude was reported by Grigoriants at the beginning of the mass demonstrations. It was confirmed by the exiled Armenian nationalist leader, Parouir Airikiyan in an interview in the Soviet Nationality Survey (London), August 1988: "The [Armenian] nation was selecting democracy and freedom. It also rejected extremism, anti-Azerbaijanian and anti-Muslim sentiments. All of this was an expression of broadly democratic principles."
In a statement in July, the Executive Committee of the Ukrainian Helsinki Association warned about the bureaucracy's attempts to stir up inter-nationality conflicts. It began...."Recently, in connection with the growing strength of the nationalpatriotic movement in Ukraine, the party bureaucracy...has taken up the old imperialist watchword of 'Divide and rule.' For this purpose, it has exploited its monopoly
Among examples of this tactic, the statement mentioned an article by the Lviv paper Vil'na Ukraina, which claimed that the mass rallies for national rights in the city in July had given "a hint for a Lviv variant of the events in Sumgait."
The statement ended, "On our native Ukrainian land, we — as genuine democrats and not phoney internationalists — will be able to achieve understanding among ourselves without the deceitful mediation of this new bureaucratic class that was born in the bloody shirt of Stalinist terror and flourished in the rotten swamp of Brezhnevite stagnation." 28 responses of suppunties oo the centrat bir In the Baltic countries, one of the main pogroms?
### POGROMS against
Armenian communities in the Azerbaijan republic have both served as a pretext and a cover for a clampdown on the mass movement in the Armenian
SSR and Nagorno-Karabakh.
The fact that a curfew was imposed on the Armenian capital of Erevan on
November 24, when no serious disorders had occurred in the republic, and that a general strike in protest was apparently suppressed by a military occupation has been effectively buried in horror stories of communal conflict in the international press.
### GERRY FOLEY reaucratic authorities has been to create loyalist or unionist movements called specifically "Internationalist Fronts." Only representatives of these organizations have been invited to present their views in Pravda and apparently in the rest of the all-Union press.
### Rallying the "healthy
The Soviet Communist Party daily of November 26, for example, carried an interview with representatives of the Latvian "Internationalist Front." In it, E. Aboltinsh complained that the Latvian People's Front was made up of "about 88% Latvians" and that "in a republic where about half the population is Russian-speaking (to use the current term), such a front cannot really be
S. Bukashkin said that the aim of the "Internationalist Front" was to rally the "healthy forces" in Latvian society. It was supposedly the "healthy forces" in Czechoslovakia that supported the "internationalist" intervention of the Soviet army in 1968. A. Alekseev complained that the Latvian Literatura un Maksla had talked about "continuing occupation of Latvia by Soviet
In its November 26 issue, Pravda interviewed Vassili Gennadievich Koltakov, one of the seven deputies to the Estonian Supreme Soviet who voted against the prosovereignty resolutions adopted on November 16. Needless to say, it has not opened its columns to the majority. Koltakov claimed that the deputies of the Estonian Supreme Soviet had voted for the sovereignty resolutions because of "pressure."
Despite his attempt to discredit the vote of the Estonian Supreme Soviet, Koltakov paid an involuntary tribune to the extent of the mass mobilization in support of Estonian national rights. He said for example there was a threat to the place where the Supreme Soviet session considering the resolutions was to meet, that a unionist rally had to be called off because of a threat of a protest strike against it, and that the Internationalist Front was "ridiculed." He claimed that the term "migrant" had started to be used, referring to Russian speakers in Estonia.
Actually, Pravda's Lithuanian correspondent, D. Shynukas, a few weeks ago signed an article giving a negative view of Russian immigrants into Lithuania. (see /V 151), but in the November 22 Pravda, he condemned the "irresponsibility" of the Lithuanian movement, Sajudis, in mobilizing opposition to the constitutional amendments proposed by Gorbachev that would limit the formal rights of the republics. Shynukas also noted the formation of a loyalist movement, made up essentially of Russian speakers, in Lithuania, called "Edintsvo" ("Unity"), in order to oppose Sajudis.
In fact, in the weeks preceding the start of the Soviet Supreme Soviet session that was to take up the Gorbachev amendments, there were a series of articles attacking the national movements under the common rubric, "USSR, Our Common Home." The high point of this campaign was Gorbachev's speech on November 26, in which he said notably that the objective of perestroika was "not to loosen the ties among the republics, but to strengthen them."
Clearly, the Soviet leader felt compelled to confront the sovereignty movements head on, although he and the Soviet press retained a more nuanced and tactical tone than that displayed toward the first mass Armenian demonstrations earlier this year. It is in this context that the recent developments have occurred in Armenia and Azerbaijan. *