Repression and maneuvers against national movements
DIRECT RULE from Moscow over Nagorno-Karabakh was decreed on January 13. It is to go into effect on Friday,
January 20. A team appointed by the Soviet central government will be empowered to remove the formally elected authorities in the autonomous region, as well as to suppress unofficial organizations.
Thus, this measure continues the repressive campaign to crush the Armenian national movement. It follows by a few days the arrest of the last four Karabakh Committee leaders who managed to go into clandestinity after the
Kremlin's crackdown on the movement in the wake of the
December 10 earthquake. GERRY FOLEY A T THE SAME TIME, the removal of control of the region from the Azerbaijan SSR ayparently represents a concession to the Armenian movement, which argued that the Azerbaijan authorities had been trying to destroy the Armenian character of the region. As a tactic, the Kremlin's move might be compared with the British government's introduction of direct rule in Northern Ireland in 1972, which was at once a concession to the nationalist population and an operation designed to clear the way for the London government to repress the movement of the oppressed people more effectively
The campaign to crush the Armenian movement is very grave, because this is the first time that Moscow has resorted to a general crackdown against any of the democratic movements that have emerged through the cracks opened up by Gorbachev's promises of democratization. It was also the strongest and most militant of these movements, having led demonstrations and general strikes that mobilized a very large proportion of the population of the Armenian SSR and Nagorno-Karabakh.
It seems clear now also that Soviet authorities had a real fear that the situation was getting out of hand in Azerbaijan also, that there was a real rise of Azerbaijani national feeling. Such sentiments could be expected to turn against the Soviet central authorities, since it is obviously not the Armenians who are responsible for the frustrations of the Azerbaijanis.
Nearly a full-page article in Pravda of December 26, 1988, denounced the most recent mass Azeri demonstrations and the leadership that developed in them:
"What sort of personalities were the ringleaders in the square in Baku, what ideas did they they set spinning in the minds of the people? Very quickly, leadership of the rallies was won by Neimat Panakhov, who called himself a lathe operator at the Lieutenant Schmidt machine-building factory....He declared himself a zealous supporter of perestroika...Few could guess that this passionate supporter of renewal,' the 'frantic' Neimat... was really an exponent of the views and basic goals of antiperestroika forces, of the corrupt local cliques... "A 'bouquet' of slanderous phrases"
"In his speeches, N. Panakhov, an inciter, a dangerous demagogue, raised calls and slogans that cannot but arouse dismay among honest workers, among the Azerbaijani people. Here is a 'bouquet' of slanderous phrases directed at the soldiers, the sons of the Soviet people, risking their lives to defend the honor, dignity and the lives of the working people, and base fabrications about the national policy of the Soviet state, calls to leave the framework of the USSR. And this hysterical type, posing as a 'hero' of the ancients dastans
USSR LOP? EES (Turkish epic songs], drunk on his own words, said, 'We are not afraid of freezing on the square. We will cut down the trees around the square, we will burn the government building and warm ourselves at it!' "
The article included a broadside against "incompetent" but "elitist" intellectuals, whose poor scholarship was said often to lead to nationalism.
However, it seems that the Gorbachev leadership still hopes that it can deal with such problems by political maneuver, combined of course with threats. For example, in a page-long discussion on "restoring the Leninist concept of the party" in Pravda of January 2, the example of Armenia and Azerbaijan, cited such problems as examples of the need to reform the CP: "Delay in the development of internal party democracy and therefore the growth of passivity on the part of important parts of the lower party masses was revealed with disturbing clarity in events to which we are or demonad salime strikes, dinardess 11 or demonstrations. Remember, Alma Ata,
International Viewpoint #155 • January 23, 1989
USSR Nagorno Karabakh, Sumgait, Erevan, Baku, the Baltic republics."
Representatives of the unionist movements formed to oppose the People's Fronts in the Baltic republics have explained in the columns of Pravda that they considered it necessary to form such organizations because the passivity of the local party organizations in the face of the rise of nationalist demands.
Concessions made by
Gorbachev leadership
In fact, the Gorbachev leadership made its attitude clear to demands for national rights both in the campaign against so-called Kazakh nationalism after the ouster of the local party chief Dinmukhamed Kunaev (see IV 116) and in its attempt to introduce amendments to the Soviet constitution removing the formal right of the republics to secede. In his November 26, 1988, speech, the high point of his campaign for the amendments, Gorbachev said that the objective of perestroika was "not to loosen the ties among the republics, but to strengthen them."
The mass campaign against the proposed amendments in the Baltic republics was the number two bête noir of the Soviet central press, after the Karabakh movement. Nonetheless, the Gorbachev leadership ended up by making concessions to it. The final version of the amendments did not eliminate the formal right of secession and thus the basis for claiming the rights of sovereignty.
In an interview published December 5 in the West German left daily Tageszeitung, the chair of the Latvian People's Front, Danis Ivans, said: "In general, the Supreme Soviet moved toward our demands and toward a compromise. The amendments that would have meant a limitation of the sovereignty of the republics have fallen. In this respect, we have no improvement but also no worsening of the status quo ante."
The Gorbachev tried to avoid resorting to outright repression of the mass national movements. Thus, for example, the Lithuanian first secretary, Songaila, resigned in the fall after he made himself odious by repressing a large demonstration. His successor, Brazauskas, who aroused some hopes, managed to head off a move for get the local Supreme Soviet to follow Estonia's lead in proclaiming sovereignty, and, for the moment, to divide the Lithuanian national movement.
Such maneuvering, like Gorbachev's democratic promises in general, requires some yielding. For example, the main purpose of the article by the Latvian first secretary, Ya. Vagris, in Pravda of January 13 on the seventieth anniversary of the first Soviet republic of Latvia was clearly to reassert his republic's continuing loyal12 tino the Sosiderestem. Buriat the same time, he considered it appropriate to voice
AMAALASTE certain Latvian complaints.
"Serious tensions in inter-ethnic relations have been created by excessive migration into the republic and hypertrophied urbanization. A real danger has arisen that the Latvian people will become a minority in their own country. Unfortunately, irresponsible people, who put their own interests or ambitions before everything else are trying to play on quite understandable national feelings."
At another point, Vagris said: "Our people will never agree with those who who say that nothing good was done after 1940 [the date of Latvia's incorporation into the USSR]....On the other hand, a lot was done without considering the specific features of the republic, to the detriment of harmonious development of the society and economy, which led in natural course to the inevitability of perestroika."
The Latvian secretary also put the People's Front and the "Internationalist" Front on the same level, as two movements sup-
On January 10, Pravda published an interview with a "worker" delegate to the Latvian CP plenum, K. Niuksha, who pointed with alarm to the growth of "dark forces" in the republic:
"The problem is that some participants in perestroika, groups of people not infrequently present their opinion as the only true one, and what is worse, try to impose it on the society. Pickets are being organized, rallies, leaflets and resolutions, collections of signatures and shaping of the consciousness of people with the help of other organs of mass information. You don't have to go far to see examples. I just walked out onto the street after the plenum and I saw a group of pickets in the shadows. What happened, you wonder. What are they protesting against? We discussed in a comradely and principled, businesslike way questions that are very important for everyone. But no, someone wants to heat up the situation, create tension.
"In fact, it was said outright in the plenum that there are forces in the republic pulling us away from democracy. There are small but quite aggressive groups that, speculating on the economic, social, interethnic and ecological problems, are undertaking active actions to whip up anti-Soviet and separatist movements.
"This applies above all to such groups as Helsinki 86, the Movement for the Nationalist Independence of Latvia and its leaders, Yu. Vidinsh and E. Berklavs. The latter are trying to cover themselves with the authority of the People's Front of Latvia. Both belong to its parliament. The question has rightfully been raised about what the People's Front thinks about their extremist statements. For Communists compromises of that sort are impossible, because they have nothing in common with democratization or with socialism pluralism, or with the idea of perestroika itself."
Massive explosion of independent journals
Further on, Niushka said that actually the People's Front had done a lot of good work, and therefore it was especially offensive that "the extremist statements of some of its leaders have undermined the confidence of working people in this organization."
Niushka's reference to "other organs of mass information," presumably unofficial ones, is interesting. In Latvia's neighbor, Lithuania, it has become clear that there has already been a massive explosion of independent journals. In the November 25 issue of Sirp ja Vasar, the Estonianlanguage organ of the Estonian Cultural Committee and Union of Creative Workers, Rein Raud wrote of dozens of independent publications, of which three were officially printed — Atgimimas ["Rebirth"], , Kauno Aidas ["Kaunis Echo"] and Mazajoi Lietuva. ["Little Lithuania"].
As for Estonia, Pravda carried a vituper-
January 23, 1989 • #155 International Viewpoint ous article by Lembit Annus, editor of Eesii Kommunist on December 3, attacking a number of official publications in Estonian, most notably Looming, a literary magazine; and Vikerkaar, a monthly magazine of the writers' union. He wrote: "Today we talk a lot about Stalinist repression, about distortions of socialism and 'blanks' in our history. It is correct and inevitable to recognize mistakes so that they will not be repeated. But when this essential analysis turns into outright denigration of socialist society, when, as in the journal Looming (No. 11,1988), the 1940 revolution in Estonia is termed a 'Bolshevik occupation, ' when it is proposed to rename the Estonian SSR "The Zhdanov Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic,' that is not any kind of pluralism, that is outright extremism, an anti-Soviet bacchanal."
"Why did no-one oppose this dictatorship?"
Annus went on: "I open the journal Vikerkaar (No. 11, 1988), and I cannot believe my eyes, in an article entitled "Time of Horrors,' M. Laar writes "We were saved from worse by the June 21, 1941, military conflict between Hitlerite Germany and Stalinist Russia, that the 'forest brothers,' helpers of the fascists, acted first of all to defend themselves and then to defend their homeland, that the primary cause of the bloodshed was the Soviet occupation and the establishment there of a regime of terror."
Actually, the offending article was a small one, about two pages. Its author wrote as a representative of the Estonian Historical Society [Eeste Muinsuskaitse Selts], and appealed for personal testimonies of the war and immediate postwar period. He began by writing: "We start with the knowledge that in Estonia there is not a single family that did not have someone sent to Siberia, that did not have someone killed, repressed, or driven into exile. Over ten years, the Estonian people lost about 25 per cent of its members, precisely the most active and educated part." [Estimates of Estonians deported to Siberia run as high as 40,000, which proportionately is equivalent to about 9 million in the US or 2.2 million in the UK, the Estonian diaspora numbers about 100,000].
Later on, he wrote: "Recently, in history the question has often been raised, why did no-one oppose this dictatorship, which was one of the bloodiest in human history. Naturally, there were those who resisted it, they have been described up until now as anti-Soviet elements, narrow nationalists, terrorists, agents of the West and so on. Or so they so wrong to see the Soviet power as primarily Stalinist violence and an empire of injustice?"
A similar demand for rehabilitation of the nationalist guerrillas who fought that Soviet forces after the second world war was raised in Lviv in the western Ukraine in mass demonstrations last summer.
A number of times in his article, Laar stressed that the "hangmen" responsible for the atrocities against the Estonian people were being allowed end their lives in peace, comfort and honor.
There were a number of very outspoken articles in the issue of Vikerkaar attacked by Annus. It is surprising, or is it, that he did not refer to one that equated Stalinism and Leninism or to a letters column entitled "Fascism in one way or another," in which a letter quoted compared the murder of Soviet prisoners of war in Austria, who were sprayed with water and left to freeze to death, with the Stalin regime's slaughter of trainloads of people by the same method in the Byelorussian locality of Kuropaty before the war.
In his address to a meeting of leading cultural personalities on January 6 (published in Pravda of January 8), Gorbachev made intimidating noises. "I cannot fail to say that under cover of glasnost attempts are being made to attack the CPSU, to attack the party that worked out and pro-
USSR Mass meeting in Estonia: Photo Ame Saar (DR) posed perestroika, which today is leading the work for democratization, stimulating all the processes of perestroika and which itself is undergoing profound renewal, and together with this performing the most important unifying and integrating role in this transitional stage in the development of our country.
"The point of view of the Central Committee of the CPSU, and I am convinced that it reflected the prevailing view in our society, is that such views, regardless of the subjective motivations that underlie them and what pressures produce them, are fundamentally wrong and contrary to the interests of the people, and in essence, directed against perestroika."
At the same time, he played more soothing cords. "And this sense of realism will help us now to find the way to resolve accumulated problems related to the development of all nations and nationalities in our country, their economies, cultures and languages. It is true that this process is partially contradictory. Above all, it is linked again with the complexity of the reflection of inter-ethnic relations in the public
"I think we have to act here in such a way that everything positive in the course of perestroika that promotes the goals of harmonizing inter-ethnic relations is maintained and developed. And in this sense, I want to support the responsible and constructive proposals of our scholars and creative intellectuals that relate to the sphere of human relations." The Soviet leader pledged that there was no idea of allowing any small people to disappear.
Importance of protests against the repression
The indications given by the Soviet press over the past six weeks, therefore, is that Moscow is far from getting the explosion of mass national movements under control, and feels obliged to maneuver politically with them and to make concessions to them where it thinks this possible or necessary.
The implication of that is that it is vulnerable to pressure inside the USSR and from the outside also. After all, it seems clear that the fundamental reason it does not repress these movements outright is because that would destroy the credibility of its democratization promises both inside and outside the USSR. This points up the importance of protesting attempts at repression of the mass national movements, especially the Armenian one, which is suffering the harshest attack, and of publicizmovemereal views and problems of these 13 movements. *