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Party officials. The then Party leader, Aram Sarkisian, has accused Ter-
Petrosian of wanting to sell out the Shaumian region in return for a
more favorable deal on the rest of Nagorny Karabakh.
25
All of this
shows that in 1991 the Armenian nationalist movement was far less
monolithic and more fragile than it seemed on the surface.
Yet while some were talking compromise, Armenian armed resist
ance continued. In Shaumian, it took several weeks for the numerically
superior Soviet and Azerbaijani forces, even using the tanks and heavy
artillery of the 4th Army, to force out Armenian irregulars. Three wit
nesses who saw the Armenian fighters at the time were struck, vari
ously, by their “vitality,” “esprit de corps,” and the fact that they were
“strongly superior in the moral-psychological sense.” In Armenia, the
operation spurred a big recruiting drive for the fedayi movement, there-
by undermining one of its main objectives. Shabad commented:
Evidently Mutalibov had persuaded Gorbachev that there was a pow
erful partisan army of fedayin there and that its actions would lead to
the secession of Armenian populated territories from Azerbaijan, that
they were bandits and that they had to be liquidated. And Gorbachev
—it was a great stupidity on his part of course—agreed to this opera
tion. He probably understands now that an operation of that sort was
doomed, it was impossible. We see in Chechnya that a war against par
tisans is an empty undertaking.
In the fall of 1991, when events had suddenly turned in their favor, the
Armenians managed to recapture most of the villages in Shaumian with
relative ease. In purely military terms, then, the operation was flawed:
its planners had underestimated the strength of the partisan movement
they were facing.
Operation Ring was made possible by the increasingly desperate
political situation in Moscow. It was supported by the security chiefs
who were already plotting to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev. Several of
1 9 9 0 – 1 9 9 1 : A S OV I E T C I V I L WA R
123
the confused motives they showed in staging their coup d’état—trying
to preserve the Soviet Union, putting on a show of strength, meting out
punishment—were also present in the operation. Gorbachev himself,
consistent with the vacillations and uncertainties he was prey to during
this period, seems to have supported the operation without fully un
derstanding what was going on. It is possible that he was being misled
by those around him. The then Armenian Party boss, Aram Sarkisian,
recalls a heated incident with the Soviet president during an interval at
a session of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow in July 1991. If nothing else,
his story suggests the chaotic state of decision making at the top:
During the interval, I suddenly noticed that Mutalibov, Yazov, and
Kryuchkov were all standing with Gorbachev, and Yazov was inform
ing Gorbachev of something. I realized that they were talking about
[Operation Ring] and went up and stood behind Gorbachev, knowing
that that was not quite the “done” thing. Yazov saw me and stopped
talking. Gorbachev turned round, took me by the arm, and said, “Let’s
go.” We moved to one side and he said to me, “What are your Arme
nians up to down there?” I said, “What’s that?” “Causing explosions,
killing, driving people out, and so forth.” I said, “Excuse me, that is in-
formation from the Azerbaijani side, and do you have any information
from the Armenian side?” He said, “What meaning does that have?” I
said that in actual fact Armenians were being deported and small
groups of Armenians, more or les organized, were trying to resist
them. He told me, “There can’t be any deportations because I did not
give any orders. I said, “I beg you, there is Kryuchkov, chairman of the
KGB, let’s invite him over and let him say in front of me that no de
portations are happening.” [Gorbachev] understood that something
was not right and said, “OK, I will sort it out myself.”
26
Polyanichko, a supporter of the coup plotters, exemplified this mix of
Soviet patriotism and brute force. Scott Horton, one of the American
members of the human rights delegation that visited Karabakh in July
1991, received the impression that Polyanichko had no real loyalty to
Azerbaijan as such, but he believed that by sowing discord in the re
gion, he was entrenching Soviet power. Horton sat next to Polyanichko
on the short flight from Baku to Stepanakert and got into a conversation
with him about his past:
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1 9 9 0 – 1 9 9 1 : A S OV I E T C I V I L WA R
He started talking about Afghanistan and told me how he had played
an important role in the war in Afghanistan. He had been a scholar of
Oriental affairs and he understood the tribal nature of the Afghanista
nis and was responsible for formulating and implementing Russian
strategy designed to get advantage from that or something like that. I
asked, “What did that mean?” He said that, for instance, they would
transport ethnic groups and move them around. They would take a
group that had a very hostile relationship with one group and put it
right in the middle so it was surrounded by the others, to cause dis
cord and tension and so forth. And then I said, “That’s very interest
ing because that seems so much like Operation Ring, exactly what’s
going on here, with the way groups were being transported.” He
didn’t want to talk about that at all.
Another American member of that delegation, William Green Miller,
who was head of the Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations, drew another
conclusion from the same trip:
It was very clear that the complications of the end of the Soviet Union
were evident there: the loyalties to the Soviet past, confusion about the
future of the Soviet Union, the confusion about the use of force in the
presence of foreigners, even as observers. All of that was very evident
. . . I thought [Polyanichko] was in a kind of confusion that represented
the Soviet Union itself at the time.
27
The Soviet Union was in fact going through its very last days. Between
19 and 21 August, it received the terminal shock of the attempted
putsch in Moscow and its collapse. Like all other Soviet citizens, the
people of Armenia and Azerbaijan emerged from the chaos of the coup
attempt into a different world.
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