Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

August 1991– May 1992 
War Breaks Out 
INDEPENDENCE DAYS 
Early on the morning of 19 August 1991, the Russian parliamentary dep­
uty Anatoly Shabad woke up in the village of Haterk in the northern 
hills of Nagorny Karabakh. He was there to try to negotiate the release 
of forty Soviet Interior Ministry soldiers who had been taken hostage 
by Armenian partisans. Soviet troops from the 23rd Division, based in 
Azerbaijan, had surrounded the village and been given orders to free 
the hostages by force. There were fears that it would end in bloodshed. 
Then Shabad switched on the radio and heard shattering news. In 
Moscow, a newly declared State Committee for Emergencies (or, in its 
Russian initials, the GKChP) was announcing the resignation of the So­
viet president, Mikhail Gorbachev. A coup d’état had taken place. This 
changed everything in the Soviet Union. With the security elite now in 
charge in Moscow, the Soviet army commanders in Karabakh became 
more aggressive. Emissaries arrived from Yerevan and secured an 
agreement for the release of the captured soldiers. 
The next day, Shabad went into up into the thickly forested hills 
above Haterk to meet the freed men and escort them down to the vil­
lage. As they were descending the mountain paths, he noticed that the 
young well-built soldiers were lagging behind him, a Moscow intellec­
tual of slight build. He was worried: 
I said, “What happened to you? Did they beat you? Perhaps they 
haven’t fed you for two weeks?” They said, “No, no, everything is 
fine.” Later it turned out that they had drunk very heavily the night 
before with their captors because Gorbachev had been overthrown. 
Both sides were terribly pleased that Gorbachev had been deposed 
and so all of them had got dead drunk.
1 
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For the leaders of Azerbaijan, Ayaz Mutalibov and Viktor Polyanichko, 
the takeover by the hard-liners in Moscow looked like a vindication of 
their loyalty to the Soviet system; they could now expect support for a 
tougher crackdown on the Karabakh Armenians. On 19 August, Mutal­
ibov was on a visit to Iran. His chief foreign policy adviser, Vafa Gu­
luzade, says that he counseled Mutalibov to wait until he got back to 
Baku before commenting on the situation in Moscow. However, the 
Azerbaijani leader did not stick to the advice: 
In Tabriz [Mutalibov] had a telephone call from Polyanichko, the 
second secretary, who said, “I congratulate you, it’s our victory” and 
Mutalibov was very happy. . . . And in the memorial of Shahriar, the 
Azeri poet, when he was under the lights of lamps, I was just inside. 
Journalists asked him what happened there, and Mutalibov began to 
say that the policy of Gorbachev was wrong, et cetera et cetera.
2 
Yet within three days everything was turned on its head as the coup at-
tempt collapsed. Gorbachev was reinstated, the coup plotters went to 
jail, and the Russian leader Boris Yeltsin was triumphant. In Azerbai­
jan, the damage had been done. Polyanichko had reportedly told Baku 
Radio, “I am ready to give my Karabakh experience to the GKChP of 
the Soviet Union.”
3 
He left Azerbaijan. Mutalibov’s more cautious re-
marks in Iran allowed him to cling to power, but with much reduced 
authority. 
The events created a power vacuum in Nagorny Karabakh. The last 
members of Polyanichko’s Organizing Committee left the province in 
September, and the Soviet army, which had been enforcing Azerbaijan’s 
authority, was demoralized and leaderless. No longer facing proper re­
sistance, the Armenian fighters moved back into Shaumian region, re-
capturing the villages of Erkech, Manashid, and Buzlukh, which they 
had lost during Operation Ring. 
The August events accelerated the breakup of the Soviet Union, and 
the Union Republics began to make declarations of independence. Mu­
talibov declared Azerbaijan independent on 30 August 1991, and the 
Azerbaijani Communist Party dissolved itself on 14 September—al­
though the same leadership stayed in charge. On 8 September, Mutali­
bov was elected Azerbaijan’s first president, but it was a mechanical 
victory: his was the only name on the ballot after all the opposition con-
tenders either boycotted the polls or withdrew. In the same week, Hei-

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161 
dar Aliev began his political comeback, being elected speaker of parlia­
ment in the exclave of Nakhichevan and acquiring a new independent 
power base. 
In Armenia, the referendum on independence scheduled for 21 Sep­
tember 1991 became a technicality and 95 percent of the population 
voted in favor. Three weeks later, on 16 October, Levon Ter-Petrosian 
was elected president with a large majority. Ten of the original eleven 
members of the Karabakh Committee were given senior state posts in 
government or parliament, completing their triumph. 
The independence of Azerbaijan and Armenia—recognized inter-
nationally early in 1992—raised their conflict to a new interstate level. 
Azerbaijan immediately felt it possessed an even stronger argument 
than before. Formally, the new states retained their old borders and so 
Nagorny Karabakh was—and is—an internationally recognized part of 
Azerbaijan. The Armenians risked international opprobrium, by laying 
claim to a part of an independent country. They sidestepped this prob­
lem by declaring Nagorny Karabakh “independent”—and thus no 
longer the responsibility of Yerevan. The regional Soviet in Stepanakert 
declared the independence of the new “Nagorny Karabakh Republic” 
on 2 September 1991, three days after Azerbaijan had declared inde­
pendence. It asserted that under Soviet law autonomous regions had 
the right to secede from newly independent states. 
The declaration of “independence” by Nagorny Karabakh—a re­
gion with little more than 100,000 inhabitants—was primarily a sleight 
of hand that allowed Armenia to say that it was only an interested ob­
server, not a party to the conflict. However, it was also an act of self-as­
sertion by the Karabakh Armenians whose agenda never fully coin­
cided with that in Yerevan. The speaker of Karabakh’s newly elected 
parliament and de facto leader of the region was a young historian 
named Artur Mkrtchian. He and many of his comrades were mem­
bers of the nationalist Dashnaktsutiun Party, whose relations with the 
Ter-Petrosian administration in Yerevan were poor. On 14 April 1992, 
Mkrtchian died in mysterious circumstances. The official version was 
that he had accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun; other ac­
counts said that he had committed suicide or been murdered by politi­
cal rivals. After his death, relations with Yerevan improved. 
The internationalization of the conflict brought a new generation of 
mediators to Nagorny Karabakh. The first was Boris Yeltsin, who came 
to Stepanakert in September 1991, fresh from his triumph defeating the 

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coup plotters in Moscow and accompanied by the president of Kaza­
khstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Negotiations followed in the Russian 
spa town of Zheleznovodsk, and a Russian-brokered “Zheleznovodsk 
declaration” was signed, which set out a framework peace agreement. 
Yeltsin’s precarious peace agreement was blown apart on 20 No­
vember, when an Azerbaijani helicopter carrying twenty-two passen­
gers and crew crashed over the Martuni region in southern Karabakh, 
apparently after being shot down by Armenian fighters. Among the 
senior Azerbaijanis who died were the head of Shusha Region, Vagif Ja­
farov, and President Mutalibov’s press spokesman. The dead also in­
cluded Russian and Kazakh officials who had come to implement the 
peace deal. In Azerbaijan, both government and opposition erupted in 
anger. Bowing to opposition pressure, Mutalibov transferred most of 
the powers of the 360-member parliament to a smaller (50-seat) Milli 
Shura or National Council, half of whose members were from the op­
position. On 26 November, Azerbaijan’s new National Council voted to 
revoke Nagorny Karabakh’s autonomous status and declared it to be an 
ordinary province of Azerbaijan, without any special rights. It also for­
mally renamed Stepanakert “Khankendi.” The Karabakh Armenians 
responded on 10 December by holding a referendum on independence, 
in which, naturally, no Azerbaijanis took part. According to the returns, 
108,615 people had voted in favor of Nagorny Karabakh’s independ­
ence and 24 had voted against. The “war of laws” had reached its re­