party to build a political roof for ourselves.” The AAI made itself into a
political party and, after the sovereignty declaration, formally laid
down its arms. Its two thousand former fighters swore allegiance to the
new Armenian Interior Ministry.
8
The new Armenian administration did not want armed fighters in
Armenia who would threaten its authority and provoke Moscow, but
was happy to see them go to Karabakh, where after the Polyanichko
administration had arrived, a low-intensity conflict had begun. “We un
derstood that they would simply use the hands of the Soviet Interior
Ministry forces to strangle us,” says the Karabakh Armenian leader
Arkady Gukasian. “And then partisan units began to form, which
struck at the Soviet Interior Ministry Forces. We understood that war
was inevitable.” Inside Karabakh, weapons were either bought from
soldiers or were homemade. One former fighter tells how Stepanakert’s
furniture factory was secretly producing homemade pistols and mine
cases during this period. It was searched by the OMON several times,
but its secret was never discovered.
9
Increasing numbers of militiamen from Armenia now joined the
struggle, infiltrating the hills of Karabakh and Armenian villages of
Azerbaijan. The new rebel units adopted names that had been out of use
since the Armenian partisan campaigns at the turn of the century. They
formed djogads, or “hunter’s groups.” And they called themselves fe
dayin, a word taken from the Arabic, meaning sacrificial fighters willing
to risk their lives for the cause. The Armenian writer and activist Zori
Balayan tells of more than two hundred operations against the Pol
yanichko administration carried out by Armenian partisans. They blew
up bridges and sections of railway track, fired on columns of vehicles,
and took hostages, whom they exchanged for Armenian prisoners in
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the Shusha jail.
10
Polyanichko responded by sealing all roads between
Nagorny Karabakh and Armenia.
OPERATION RING: THE PLANNING
Armenia and Azerbaijan began the last year of the Soviet Union, 1991,
heading down different political paths. Gorbachev was working on a
new Union Treaty, which he hoped would preserve the Union, while
delegating greater powers to the republics. Armenia, along with Geor
gia, Moldova, and the Baltic republics, had begun moving toward in-
dependence and refused to work with Gorbachev. Azerbaijan agreed to
work on the treaty and stay in the Union, for a price.
The Azerbaijani Party boss Ayaz Mutalibov was becoming a pivotal
figure in the bargaining process. In Black January, he had become leader
of the republic almost by accident but was now hanging on tenaciously.
Mutalibov was unusual for an Azerbaijani politician mainly in that he
was from Baku, not Heidar Aliev’s home region of Nakhichevan. He
had had a conventional Party career, working for many years as head of
a machine-building factory. Cultivated but rather vain, he lacked the
natural authority of Aliev but proved adept enough at playing Moscow
politics. He used his loyalty to extract maximum popular support from
Moscow.
In January 1991, Mutalibov’s written report to the Central Commit-
tee was full of alarming predictions about the prospects for Azerbai
jan. An 11 January memo on the report by Vyacheslav Mikhailov, the
Central Committee’s nationalities expert, survives in the archives. He
quoted Mutalibov as saying that the situation in Azerbaijan was deteri
orating because of “the claims of the Republic of Armenia on Nagorny
Karabakh. The telegram draws attention to how large quantities of
weapons are piling up in the hands of armed formations, legalized by
the Supreme Soviet of Armenia, and points out the possibility of an es
calation of armed conflict.”
From Mikhailov’s summary, it appears that Mutalibov’s letter was
half warning, half threat:
Further developments could lead to a wide-scale armed confrontation
between Azerbaijan and Armenia, a serious destabilization of Azer
baijan and, in the final analysis, the seizure of power by extremist
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circles of the Popular Front of Azerbaijan. It is entirely possible that in
the case of a failure to adopt extreme measures, the Supreme Soviet of
the Azerbaijani SSR will take the decision to create a national army,
abolish the autonomy of the Nagorny Karabakh Autonomous Region
and refuse to sign the new Union Treaty. The position of the Commu
nist Party and its authority, won at elections to the Supreme Soviet of
the republic, will be undermined in the most serious way.
11
Mikhailov recommended that “the Minister of Defense, the Interior
Ministry and the KGB of the USSR immediately carry out a special op
eration in the region together with the republican organs of Armenia
and Azerbaijan to disarm illegal armed formations.” On 17 January
1991, the Central Committee agreed to the recommendations.
The two documents show how closely the Nagorny Karabakh issue
was tied to Moscow politics. Mutalibov was using the specter of do
mestic trouble in Azerbaijan to secure support for an even tougher
crackdown on the Armenians. The Moscow establishment accepted the
trade-off and gave strong backing to both Mutalibov and Polyanichko.
In the short-term this played to the advantage of the Azerbaijani lead
ership as Soviet army and police units were deployed against the
Karabakh Armenians. In the longer-term, however, it proved disastrous
for Azerbaijan, as the republic lagged behind Armenia in building its
own security forces.
On 17 March 1991, the Soviet leadership held a nationwide refer
endum on the future of the USSR. Azerbaijan took part and dutifully
delivered a yes vote for preserving the Soviet Union in a new Union
Treaty. Armenia, now ruled by the ANM, was one of six dissident re-
publics that boycotted the referendum altogether. Instead, Armenia
declared that it would hold its own referendum in September, on inde
pendence.
The Azerbaijani leadership’s act of loyalty was a necessary condi
tion for the next phase of its strong-arm tactics in and around Nagorny
Karabakh: the implementation of the plan to “disarm illegal armed for
mations.” The operation was referred to in Azerbaijan as a “passport-
checking operation,” but it became notorious by its code name, Opera
tion Ring. The documents being “checked” were the internal passports
carried by all Soviet citizens that stated their propiska, their official reg
istration in a town or village. The declared intent of the Azerbaijani au
thorities was to check the internal passports of residents in a series of
1 9 9 0 – 1 9 9 1 : A S OV I E T C I V I L WA R
115
Armenian-inhabited villages on the borders of Karabakh that were
sheltering Armenian fedayin, expel the interlopers, and therby restore
order.
Mutalibov now contends that the plans for what he called an oper
ation for the “liquidation of terrorists” had existed on paper since 1989
and only needed implementing. He is candid about how he sold it in
Moscow to the leadership as politically expedient: “I presented it in po
litical terms, and I knew that you have to work here in Moscow.”
12
What followed was a small Soviet civil war, fought on very unequal
terms. On one side were units of the Soviet 4th Army, based in Ganje,
whose entire 23rd Division, complete with tanks and artillery, was
made available for the operation. They were joined by units of the Azer
baijani OMON and groups of Azerbaijani villagers, who engaged in
looting and intimidation. On the other were the Armenian fedayin.
There were far fewer of them, perhaps a few hundred in all, but their
morale was extremely high; they had not-so-secret backing from the
new authorities in Armenia, logistical support from Armenian vil
lagers, and even helicopters to fly them back and forth.
One of the ANM leaders, Ashot Manucharian, had become Arme
nia’s interior minister in 1991. He helped the paramilitaries by giving
them illicitly bought weapons and transport to Karabakh. Most of the
arms, Manucharian admits, came from Soviet army bases. “We bought a
lot of weapons in Georgian military units.” They were mostly hand-held
weapons, automatic weapons, and grenade launchers that could be taken
either by helicopter or on foot across mountain paths into Karabakh.
13
In the spring and summer of 1991, the violence escalated into a par
tisan-style conflict between villages; raids were made and hostages
were taken. Six Azerbaijani villagers were killed in one attack by Ar
menian fighters on the village of Karadogly.
14
The Armenians started
using a new weapon, the Alazan rocket, a device that had not been de-
signed for warfare. It consisted of a thin shaft about two feet in length,
capped by a small rocket head that the Soviet Meteorological Service
fired into clouds in mountain regions to disperse gathering hailstorms.
Alazans caused considerable damage and could kill if they hit a human
directly. The Armenians first used them as a combat weapon in April,
when they fired several into Shusha, hitting several houses and wound
ing three people.
A month later, on 10 May 1991, an Armenian partisan’s rocket-pro
pelled grenade struck Viktor Polyanichko’s office. He survived the
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attempt on his life. (The military leader Safonov also escaped an Armen
ian assassination attempt, in April 1991, in Rostov-on-Don, which killed
another Russian officer by mistake.) Polyanichko was eventually assas
sinated, long after he had left Karabakh. In July 1993, he was killed by
Armenian assailants in the North Caucasian republic of North Ossetia.
OPERATION RING: THE EXECUTION
In the spring of 1991, the main battleground in the Armenian-Azerbai
jan partisan war was not Nagorny Karabakh itself but the wooded hills
to the north of the Khanlar and Shaumian regions.
15
Both had mainly
Armenian populations. Fedayin had infiltrated their Armenian villages,
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