Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

1988 –1989 
An Armenian Crisis 
THE KARABAKH COMMITTEE 
In May 1988, hostility between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, spreading 
like an infection through Nagorny Karabakh, reached the village of Tug. 
It was a fateful moment. Tug, in the South of Karabakh, was the only vil­
lage in the region with a mixed population. Both nationalities lived side 
by side, with only a small brook separating them; if intercommunal har­
mony could not be maintained there, it could not survive anywhere. Yet 
on 3 May, Interior Ministry units were called out to Tug to prevent fight­
ing between hundreds of villagers. The Moscow official Grigory Khar­
chenko had visited the village in February 1988, and came back seven 
months later. He saw how enmity had taken hold in the intervening 
months: 
It was an old village. All the Armenians and Azerbaijanis had inter-
married. . . . They divided everything, resolved these national issues 
among themselves. I remember their words when they told me, “This 
won’t affect us, this is a landslide from out of nowhere, which won’t 
make us quarrel.” Then in September I went there with a company of 
soldiers and billeted them in the school. By that time they had al­
ready divided the square and drawn a border. One half of the vil­
lage had gone to the Armenians, the other to the Azerbaijanis. An 
Azerbaijani husband had even stayed in one half with three children 
and the Armenian wife had gone over to the other half with three 
children.
1 
The cause of unification with Armenia now had almost all the Karabakh 
Armenians in its grip. The only disagreement was over tactics. Com­
munist Party officials still wanted to work with Moscow; the radicals 
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were already planning more confrontational tactics. In March 1988, the 
radicals formed a new grouping called Krunk, the Armenians’ word for 
the bird crane, a symbol of yearning for the “motherland,” Armenia.
2 
Robert Kocharian, the head of the Party organization in the Stepanakert 
Silk Factory, was put in charge of Krunk’s “Ideological Section.” Krunk 
was the first organization in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union to use the strike 
as a political weapon. 
Armenia in 1988 was the stage for the growth of the first big mass 
opposition movement in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Its leaders, the 
eleven-man “Karabakh Committee,” had all but eclipsed the Commu­
nist Party by the end of the year. The committee—mostly composed of 
Yerevan intellectuals—edged aside the two original leaders, Igor Mura­
dian and Zori Balayan, both Karabakh Armenians and Party members, 
in May and formed a permanent committee with no single leader. Seven 
of the committee members were academics, and four were to become 
the leaders of post-Communist Armenia.
3 
Although the new leaders still called themselves the Karabakh 
Committee, their agenda was broader than just Karabakh. They were all