Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

Party boss, Ayaz Mutalibov. When Volsky’s team left Nagorny Kara­
bakh, Polyanichko now took personal charge of the new Organizing 
Committee set up to run the province. A realignment was taking place 
in Soviet politics, which suited Polyanichko perfectly. In Moscow, Azer­
baijan’s continuing loyalty was deemed essential to the survival of the 
union, and he played the role of Moscow’s de facto viceroy in the trou­
bled outpost. He formed a strong relationship with the leaders of the se­
curity establishment—men like Dmitry Yazov, the defense minister, and 
Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB—and apparently also won 
the trust of Mikhail Gorbachev. 
On 26 January 1990, Polyanichko flew into Nagorny Karabakh, 
where he was met by the new enforcer of the State of Emergency, 
General Vladislav Safonov, and moved into the Regional Committee 
building in Lenin Square in Stepanakert to inaugurate the ten-member 
Organizing Committee that had been created on paper the previous 
November. The square itself was the staging area for Armenians who 
demonstrated against the presence of the Baku emissaries. Polyanich-
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ko’s chief assistant Seiran Mirzoyev says that they were “completely be-
sieged” for two months: “It was impossible to get out of the building, it 
was impossible to feed ourselves properly.”
1 
Polyanichko and Safonov were the political and military prongs 
of Azerbaijan’s new strategy for Karabakh. They wanted to put on a 
display of power that would force the Armenians to submit to rule 
by Baku. Safonov and several thousand extra Interior Ministry troops 
would impose order, and Polyanichko would wrench the region’s po­
litical institutions back under Baku’s control. According to witnesses 
who met Polyanichko during this period, he approached his role with 
gusto, in the manner of a Wagnerian Heldentenor taking on a heroic feat. 
He inspired fearful respect, but Scott Horton, an American lawyer and 
human rights activist who visited Karabakh in the summer of 1991, re-
called an “extremely high level of distrust of Polyanichko.” According 
to Horton, “He was viewed as almost an evil person. Over and over 
again people wouldn’t speak directly about [Polyanichko]—they didn’t 
want to be overheard. But they would speak about Arkady Volsky and 
they would say really positive things about Volsky—both Armenians 
and Azerbaijanis.”
2 
The new administration showed its intent by arresting several 
dozen Armenian activists and holding them for up to thirty days. Over 
the following eighteen months, many were detained more than once, 
among them the journalist Arkady Gukasian, now the leader of Na­
gorny Karabakh, who was sent to prison in the Russian town Rostov-
on-Don.
3 
Simultaneously, Polyanichko—doubtless using methods he had 
perfected in both Afghanistan and Azerbaijan—was trying to sow 
discord among the rebels. “We did everything to split the separa­
tists,” Seiran Mirzoyev remembers. “When we came to Nagorny 
Karabakh they were a single core. By the end of 1990 we had man-
aged to split this core, or, to be more accurate, we had noticed the 
first cracks in this core.” Mirzoyev declared that by spreading rumors 
and false allegations, they caused a public quarrel between conserva­
tive Party official Genrikh Pogosian and the young radical Arkady 
Manucharov. 
A high priority for Azerbaijan was to reimpose economic control. In 
May 1990, Mutalibov returned from a trip to Moscow with news of the 
abolition of the separate “line” for Nagorny Karabakh in the budget of 
the Soviet planning agency Gosplan, which Gorbachev had announced 

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in February 1988 and Volsky had tried to administer. Karabakh was for­
mally a full part of the Azerbaijani economy once again. 
At the same time the Baku authorities buttressed the Karabakh 
Azerbaijani population by resettling Azerbaijanis in Khojali, where-
upon the village in the plains was officially upgraded to town sta­
tus. Its newcomers were several hundred Azerbaijanis and a group of 
Meskhetian Turks, recently deported from Central Asia. 
In the spring of 1990, Polyanichko deployed his most powerful 
weapon. Under new Soviet legislation, Union Republics had the right 
to form their own special police forces, which were in effect legal­
ized paramilitaries. Armenia’s force was called OMOR; Azerbaijani’s 
force, like those of several other republics, was called OMON, and its 
members were often called “Black Berets” because of their distinctive 
headgear.
4 
The Azerbaijani OMON was deployed almost exclusively in and 
around Nagorny Karabakh. The ten thousand or so militiamen manned 
checkpoints, went on patrols, and made searches for weapons. They 
took over Karabakh’s airport at Khojali, where they gained a fearsome 
reputation for shaking down passengers to whom they took a dislike 
and sexually harassing women. In July 1990, the members of an inter-
national human rights delegation complained vociferously that the 
OMON had abused them and detained five accompanying Armenians, 
and said that almost all the OMON men to whom they had spoken were 
Azerbaijanis who earlier had been deported from Armenia.
5 
A year after his arrival, Polyanichko reported that his tough tactics 
were working. His assistant Seiran Mirzoyev claims that by the spring 
of 1991 Armenian farm workers were sending their milk, meat, and 
wine to Azerbaijan and had accepted the inevitability of rule from 
Baku. “Political influence was restored, if not in the whole of Nagorny 
Karabakh, then in a significant part of it, the Nagorny Karabakh pop­
ulation clearly accepted the authority of the Republican Organizing 
Committee.” 
Others give a different view. Vadim Byrkin, who was correspon­
dent for the Soviet news agency TASS in Nagorny Karabakh at the time, 
says that Polyanichko’s authority was purely provisional: 
[Polyanichko] had no real mechanisms of administration because he 
had no power structures at his disposal. He had his Organizing Com­
mittee of ten people, which held meetings that the Armenians didn’t 

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111 
attend. There were reports to Baku that everything was fine here, that 
the Armenians had begun to cooperate. In fact there was no coopera­
tion. . . . There was only one Armenian, Valery Grigorian, who at-
tended the committee meetings, but he was later killed. . . . The only 
mechanism they had was the Soviet army through the commandant, 
General Safonov.
6 
ARMENIA: THE TAKING OF POWER 
In the summer of 1990, the Armenian National Movement (ANM) com­
pleted its takeover of power. In the May 1990 elections to the new 
Supreme Soviet of Armenia, ANM members had won a majority of 
seats and they decided to use this as a bridgehead to make a bid for 
power. 
Levon Ter-Petrosian was elected speaker of Armenia’s Supreme 
Soviet on 4 August, a post that made him the de facto leader of the re-
public. On 23 August, the Supreme Soviet passed a declaration of sov­
ereignty, which stated that Armenia was moving toward independence. 
Lenin’s statue in the center of Yerevan was taken down. Another ANM 
leader, Vazgen Manukian, was made prime minister. 
The leaders of the ANM were the first non-Communists to take 
power in a Soviet republic, and their first worry was that they be al­
lowed to keep it. Manukian and Ashot Manucharian flew to Moscow 
and in a two-hour meeting with Politburo member Yevgeny Primakov 
tried to present themselves as pragmatists who posed no danger to the 
Soviet state. According to Manukian, the cautious Primakov had to 
weigh whether “the game was worth the candle”—whether Moscow 
should crush the new administration—and he decided against inter-
vention.
7 
The Moscow leadership was most worried about Armenia’s illegal 
armed paramilitaries. On 25 July 1990, Gorbachev signed “On the Pro­
hibition of the Creation of Armed Formations,” a decree aimed pri­
marily at Armenia, where two small private militias had appeared in 
1989. The Armenian Army of Independence (AAI) was founded by 
Leonid Azgaldian, who was killed in Karabakh three years later. The 
Armenian National Army (ANA) was founded by Razmik Vasilian and 
Vartan Vartanian. Together, the militias had perhaps two thousand men 
under arms, arms they had stolen or bought from Soviet bases. Several 

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shootouts between paramilitary members and Soviet troops in Yerevan 
took place in 1990. 
In August, three days of violence broke out between armed Ar­
menian and Azerbaijanis on a section of the northern border between 
the two republics. Soviet Interior Ministry troops were called out but at 
least sixteen people were killed and fifty wounded on both sides. Ter-
Petrosian used the fighting to try to bring the Armenian militias under 
his control, and his parliamentary administration formally dissolved 
one of the groups. “We were told we were next,” remembered Levon 
Eiramjiants, one of the founders of the AAI. “When it became clear they 
would do the same to us as they had to the ANA, we decided to form a