Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

part of a generation whose defining moment had been the nationalist 
demonstrations in Yerevan in 1965–1967. As a result of those protests, 
an open-air memorial with a constantly burning flame was opened in 
the city to commemorate the 1915 Genocide, and 24 April was made Ar­
menia’s Genocide Day. They were pursuing the “Armenian cause,” or 
Hai Dat: the old goal of uniting Armenians across the world, from Beirut 
to Los Angeles, around common nationalist aims. 
Two years later the committee and its successor, the Armenian Na­
tional Movement, were the first non-Communist group to come to 
power in a Soviet republic. To a large degree, they owed this new suc­
cess to the organizing skills of its two main leaders, Vazgen Manukian 
and Levon Ter-Petrosian. Much later, they quarreled and violently dis­
puted the results of the 1996 presidential elections, but in the preinde­
pendence period, they made a strong tandem. 
Manukian was a mathematician with an owlish look and an impul­
sive streak. He was also the organizer and fixer for the group, and col­
lected the new-style Karabakh Committee in his apartment. Manukian 
says he deliberately picked people who were “not offended by fate,” or 
who, in other words, were not joining the movement merely out of a 
personal grudge against the authorities. He argues that the Karabakh 
issue was a means of waking Armenians from their Soviet-era slumber 

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57 
and that other political goals, such as democracy, were secondary: “In 
Armenia the dominant issue for people was the national question. . . . 
The idea of democracy could not in itself create such a wave. In Arme­
nia, that wave was created by the question of Karabakh. In the Baltic re-
publics, it was the issue of independence.”
4 
Levon Ter-Petrosian was the committee’s chief strategist. His father 
had been a founding member of the Syrian Communist Party and had 
brought his family to Armenia in the 1940s. Ter-Petrosian was a scholar 
of ancient Semitic languages and this purely academic background 
shaped his political outlook. He has a quiet power to him and intense 
hooded eyes that seem to suck the energy from you. Throughout an in­
terview, he took long puffs from cigarettes planted in a long holder and 
considered every question as if it were a text for exegesis. He batted 
away questions about “public opinion” almost wearily, as though they 
were secondary to the real stuff of politics. Ter-Petrosian conceded that 
the unification of Nagorny Karabakh and Armenia was the “catalyst” of 
the 1988 movement but not necessarily its central goal: 
The first Karabakh Committee—Igor Muradian, Zori Balayan, Silva 
Kaputikian, and others—thought only about Karabakh. For them, is-
sues like democracy or the independence of Armenia simply did not 
exist. And this was the ground where the split occurred. When they 
felt that we were already becoming dangerous for the Soviet system, 
they left. A natural change took place. They thought that the Karabakh 
question had to be solved, by using the Soviet system. And we under-
stood that this system would never solve the Karabakh issue and that 
the reverse was true: you had to change the system to resolve this 
problem.
5 
THE POLITBURO PERPLEXED 
In early 1988, the leadership in Moscow was already worried about the 
implications of the crisis in Armenia and Azerbaijan. “A cardinal ques­
tion is being decided,” Gorbachev told the Politburo on 21 March. “We 
are talking about the fate of our multi-national state, about the fate of 
our nationalities policy, laid down by Lenin.”
6 
It seems as if the leaders 
half-anticipated the slow descent into conflict—even though they failed 
to halt it. 

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58 
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On one point, a refusal to countenance any changes in Soviet bor­
ders, the Politburo was absolutely inflexible. According to Andrei Gi­
renko, who was serving as an official in the new Sub-Department on 
Nationalities Policy at the time: “Proposals came from Tajikistan for 
them to receive several mountain pastures as a concession from Kirgizia 
[Kyrgyzstan]. I personally swept them aside because if you try to trans­
fer something, then what had happened in Nagorny Karabakh would 
start there.”
7 
On 21 March, the Politburo spent most of its session debating how 
to shore up the Party’s crumbling authority in Armenia. The morato­
rium on protests, agreed upon by Gorbachev and the Armenian writers, 
was due to expire in five days’ time, and Politburo members feared that 
the new opposition might simply try to take power. The discussion re­
veals the contradictions at the heart of Gorbachev’s reform policies. On 
the one hand, he opposed the use of force to crush the Armenian oppo­
sition movement. On the other, he outlined a series of autocratic meas­
ures to undermine the Karabakh Committee. These included tightly 
controlling the local media, cutting telephone lines between Armenia 
and abroad, barring foreign correspondents from visiting the region, 
and keeping under review a possible arrest of the Karabakh Committee 
activists. Yet Gorbachev also spoke about the need to mobilize “healthy 
forces” and engage people in debate. These contrary impulses show up 
in the constricted language the Soviet leader used to the Politburo. In 
one sentence he talked about openness and isolation in the same breath, 
saying: “It seems that in the press we need to speak more openly and to 
isolate [the Karabakh Committee], but do it in such a way so as not to 
make heroes out of them.” 
The Moscow leaders’ efforts to maintain control were severely 
hampered by the fact that their principal agents on the ground, the 
Communist leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, were no longer fully 
obedient, but were, instead, tacking between the demands of Moscow 
and their own societies. At the 29 February Politburo session, Gorba­
chev complained: “We need information and it’s hard to obtain it—both 
sides are hiding it. Everyone is involved. Comrades from the Central 
Committee of the Communist Party in Azerbaijan and the Communist