Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

Party officials from the (still suspended) Regional Soviet passed a reso­
lution expressing their intention to change “the course from a policy of 
confrontation to a policy of dialogue and negotiations.” They appeared 
to be offering a political bargain: in return for the re-creation of Party or­
gans and the “demilitarization” of Nagorny Karabakh, they would vote 
to suspend their secession from Azerbaijan. This looked to be a major 
concession. A delegation headed by the Party functionary Valery Grigo-

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rian went to Moscow to put these proposals. Mirzoyev of Azerbaijan’s 
Organizational Committee says proudly: “The people understood that 
there was authority in Nagorny Karabakh and began to take account 
of that.”
19 
Despite this, the violence between Azerbaijan and the Armenian 
villages continued. When operations began in the Shaumian region in 
July, a commander named “Colonel Felix” led a more professional de­
fense of Armenian villages. Helicopters from Armenia, machine guns 
pointing out of their windows as they crossed Azerbaijani territory, 
landed at the nearby village of Gulistan, site of the famous Russo-Iran­
ian peace treaty of 1813.
20 
The signal for the start of the operation in Shaumian was a decree, 
signed by Gorbachev, lifting the State of Emergency in the region on 4 
July 1991 on the grounds that the situation was “normalizing.” This was 
a cynical ploy, which forced the recall of Interior Ministry troops, who 
were either neutral or protecting the Armenian villages. As they moved 
out, the aggressive soldiers of the 23rd Division and the Azerbaijani 
OMON moved in and surrounded the villages of Erkech, Buzlukh, and 
Manashid. 
The Bulgarian journalist Cvetana Paskaleva captured on film the 
drama of the final days of Erkech. In the footage, a helicopter buzzes 
over the village while a Russian officer from the 23rd Division warns 
over a loudspeaker that troops will come into the village to “check the 
passport regime.” If the villagers do not cooperate, they will be sub­
jected to the “most decisive measures.” Frightened villagers show their 
children to Paskaleva’s camera to prove that Erkech is not merely a nest 
of fighters. They complain that they have been under a blockade for six 
months, without proper food, water, and electricity. In another part of 
the village, we see the fighters: a group of bearded, swarthy men with 
ammunition belts twisted around their dirty olive uniforms. Resistance 
here is stronger than formerly. The men smoke, argue, and sing fedayi 
songs.
21 
The artillery bombardment begins, and the villagers start to 
leave. The fighters make their way out in single file before the OMON 
moves in. A shell hits a lorry, killing two of the fleeing villagers. 
Paskaleva returned to the village in September, when it was recap­
tured by Armenian fighters, and in her footage from that trip, we see 
what happened to Erkech after the Azerbaijanis moved in. It is now 
semidestroyed, and the names of the recent Azerbaijani tenants, already 
driven out, are written in white paint on the metal gates of the houses. 

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After the Shaumian operation, the Karabakh Armenian Party dele­
gation traveled to Baku on 20 July for peace talks with Mutalibov. In a 
letter to the Azerbaijani leader, they declared that they were prepared 
to hold negotiations “on the basis of the constitution of the Soviet 
Union and the Republic of Azerbaijan and Union documents on Na­
gorny Karabakh” and wanted to discuss the timing of new local elec-
tions.
22 
This was, in effect, an offer of capitulation in return for guaran­
tees of self-government within Azerbaijan. It is interesting to speculate 
what might have happened had negotiations on this basis taken place 
in 1988 or if events had not canceled the peace initiative. By this point, 
however, it seems unlikely that the delegation had enough authority to 
deliver a compromise deal and it was heavily criticized on its return to 
Stepanakert. 
Then on 10 August, Valery Grigorian, the man who had spear-
headed the push for compromise, was shot and killed in the street in 
Stepanakert. It seems likely that he was assassinated by his fellow Ar­
menians as a collaborator. The nationalist activist Zhanna Galstian told 
the Swedish scholar Erik Melander: “Anyone who signed such a docu­
ment—a document that was invalid because neither we nor the people 
could have abided by it—we would have threatened his life; he would 
simply have been shot, even if this was a close friend of ours.”
23 
The at-
tempt at compromise was over. 
THE RECKONING 
Operation Ring marked the beginning of the open, armed phase of the 
Karabakh conflict. In that sense it is part of a process. It is also an im­
portant story in itself, in that it is arguably the first and last “Soviet civil 
war” in which units of the Soviet army were engaged in fighting on So­
viet territory. The messy and brutal way in which this was done reveals 
much about the condition of the Soviet military and, by extension, of 
the Soviet state in 1991. 
The official Azerbaijani version of the operation is that Azerbaijanis 
faced a genuine threat from the Armenian guerrillas who were infiltrat­
ing Karabakh. The Armenian fedayin were using the Khanlar and Shau­
mian regions as a route to Nagorny Karabakh and “terrorizing the Ar­
menian population,” says the former Azerbaijani president Mutalibov. 
Seiran Mirzoyev, Polyanichko’s assistant, and by character a moderate 

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man, was insistent that they had complaints from the Armenians vil­
lagers themselves about the fighters. For example, six old men from the 
Hadrut region had begged him to help them to leave; apparently they 
were unprotected in a village bereft of young men, and armed partisans 
from Armenia were coming and going at will. 
There may be some truth in this. Fanatical fighters, wanting provi­
sions and places to hide, can cause serious problems for ordinary folk 
who want a peaceful life. There were frequently scenes during the war 
in Chechnya in 1994–1996, when villagers would beg a group of fight­
ers to leave in order to spare them an assault by Russian forces. Yet this 
does not mean the villagers wanted to leave their villages altogether, 
with no right of return—and it is wildly implausible that the people of 
Hadrut or Getashen wanted to see the Azerbaijani OMON enter their 
villages instead. If these villagers had a problem with Armenian fight­
ers, an armed assault on their villages followed by their own mass de­
portation was not the solution they were anticipating. And the rapid 
settlement of Azerbaijani refugees in the villages the Armenians had left 
shows that this was about more than just “unmasking terrorists.” 
Two human rights groups who interviewed refugees found evi­
dence of systematic violence. One of them concluded: 
Officials of Azerbaijan, including the chairman of the Supreme Soviet 
of the republic Ayaz Mutalibov and the Second Secretary of the Cen­
tral Committee of the Communist Party Viktor Polyanichko, continue 
to justify these deportations, representing them as voluntary resettle­
ment by the residents of Nagorny Karabakh. However we possess ir­
refutable testimony that these actions were carried out with the use of 
physical force and weapons, leading to murders, maiming and loss of 
personal property.
24 
What, then, was the real agenda behind the operation? Clearly, there 
was a strategic motive. By emptying Armenian villages on the edges of 
Karabakh, the Azerbaijani authorities were trying to block the Armen­
ian fedayin, cut off their supply routes, and create a new “ring” of Azer­
baijani villages around Karabakh. However, politics seems to been even 
more important. 
The Soviet authorities were trying to win Azerbaijani support by 
taking a tough line on Nagorny Karabakh. They were trying to sup-
press the Karabakh Armenian movement—and to a degree they were 

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successful. Azerbaijan’s pressure showed not only on local Karabakhis 
but on the new Armenian leader, Levon Ter-Petrosian. On 20 July 1991, 
he put in his one and only attendance at the talks on Gorbachev’s Union 
Treaty at Novo-Ogarevo outside Moscow, suggesting that he was also 
ready to make concessions. At the same time, a row developed in Yere­
van between the nationalist ANM administration and Communist