Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

party to build a political roof for ourselves.” The AAI made itself into a 
political party and, after the sovereignty declaration, formally laid 
down its arms. Its two thousand former fighters swore allegiance to the 
new Armenian Interior Ministry.
8 
The new Armenian administration did not want armed fighters in 
Armenia who would threaten its authority and provoke Moscow, but 
was happy to see them go to Karabakh, where after the Polyanichko 
administration had arrived, a low-intensity conflict had begun. “We un­
derstood that they would simply use the hands of the Soviet Interior 
Ministry forces to strangle us,” says the Karabakh Armenian leader 
Arkady Gukasian. “And then partisan units began to form, which 
struck at the Soviet Interior Ministry Forces. We understood that war 
was inevitable.” Inside Karabakh, weapons were either bought from 
soldiers or were homemade. One former fighter tells how Stepanakert’s 
furniture factory was secretly producing homemade pistols and mine 
cases during this period. It was searched by the OMON several times, 
but its secret was never discovered.
9 
Increasing numbers of militiamen from Armenia now joined the 
struggle, infiltrating the hills of Karabakh and Armenian villages of 
Azerbaijan. The new rebel units adopted names that had been out of use 
since the Armenian partisan campaigns at the turn of the century. They 
formed  djogads, or “hunter’s groups.” And they called themselves fe­
dayin, a word taken from the Arabic, meaning sacrificial fighters willing 
to risk their lives for the cause. The Armenian writer and activist Zori 
Balayan tells of more than two hundred operations against the Pol­
yanichko administration carried out by Armenian partisans. They blew 
up bridges and sections of railway track, fired on columns of vehicles, 
and took hostages, whom they exchanged for Armenian prisoners in 

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113 
the Shusha jail.
10 
Polyanichko responded by sealing all roads between 
Nagorny Karabakh and Armenia. 
OPERATION RING: THE PLANNING 
Armenia and Azerbaijan began the last year of the Soviet Union, 1991, 
heading down different political paths. Gorbachev was working on a 
new Union Treaty, which he hoped would preserve the Union, while 
delegating greater powers to the republics. Armenia, along with Geor­
gia, Moldova, and the Baltic republics, had begun moving toward in-
dependence and refused to work with Gorbachev. Azerbaijan agreed to 
work on the treaty and stay in the Union, for a price. 
The Azerbaijani Party boss Ayaz Mutalibov was becoming a pivotal 
figure in the bargaining process. In Black January, he had become leader 
of the republic almost by accident but was now hanging on tenaciously. 
Mutalibov was unusual for an Azerbaijani politician mainly in that he 
was from Baku, not Heidar Aliev’s home region of Nakhichevan. He 
had had a conventional Party career, working for many years as head of 
a machine-building factory. Cultivated but rather vain, he lacked the 
natural authority of Aliev but proved adept enough at playing Moscow 
politics. He used his loyalty to extract maximum popular support from 
Moscow. 
In January 1991, Mutalibov’s written report to the Central Commit-
tee was full of alarming predictions about the prospects for Azerbai­
jan. An 11 January memo on the report by Vyacheslav Mikhailov, the 
Central Committee’s nationalities expert, survives in the archives. He 
quoted Mutalibov as saying that the situation in Azerbaijan was deteri­
orating because of “the claims of the Republic of Armenia on Nagorny 
Karabakh. The telegram draws attention to how large quantities of 
weapons are piling up in the hands of armed formations, legalized by 
the Supreme Soviet of Armenia, and points out the possibility of an es­
calation of armed conflict.” 
From Mikhailov’s summary, it appears that Mutalibov’s letter was 
half warning, half threat: 
Further developments could lead to a wide-scale armed confrontation 
between Azerbaijan and Armenia, a serious destabilization of Azer­
baijan and, in the final analysis, the seizure of power by extremist 

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circles of the Popular Front of Azerbaijan. It is entirely possible that in 
the case of a failure to adopt extreme measures, the Supreme Soviet of 
the Azerbaijani SSR will take the decision to create a national army, 
abolish the autonomy of the Nagorny Karabakh Autonomous Region 
and refuse to sign the new Union Treaty. The position of the Commu­
nist Party and its authority, won at elections to the Supreme Soviet of 
the republic, will be undermined in the most serious way.
11 
Mikhailov recommended that “the Minister of Defense, the Interior 
Ministry and the KGB of the USSR immediately carry out a special op­
eration in the region together with the republican organs of Armenia 
and Azerbaijan to disarm illegal armed formations.” On 17 January 
1991, the Central Committee agreed to the recommendations. 
The two documents show how closely the Nagorny Karabakh issue 
was tied to Moscow politics. Mutalibov was using the specter of do­
mestic trouble in Azerbaijan to secure support for an even tougher 
crackdown on the Armenians. The Moscow establishment accepted the 
trade-off and gave strong backing to both Mutalibov and Polyanichko. 
In the short-term this played to the advantage of the Azerbaijani lead­
ership as Soviet army and police units were deployed against the 
Karabakh Armenians. In the longer-term, however, it proved disastrous 
for Azerbaijan, as the republic lagged behind Armenia in building its 
own security forces. 
On 17 March 1991, the Soviet leadership held a nationwide refer­
endum on the future of the USSR. Azerbaijan took part and dutifully 
delivered a yes vote for preserving the Soviet Union in a new Union 
Treaty. Armenia, now ruled by the ANM, was one of six dissident re-
publics that boycotted the referendum altogether. Instead, Armenia 
declared that it would hold its own referendum in September, on inde­
pendence. 
The Azerbaijani leadership’s act of loyalty was a necessary condi­
tion for the next phase of its strong-arm tactics in and around Nagorny 
Karabakh: the implementation of the plan to “disarm illegal armed for­
mations.” The operation was referred to in Azerbaijan as a “passport-
checking operation,” but it became notorious by its code name, Opera­
tion Ring. The documents being “checked” were the internal passports 
carried by all Soviet citizens that stated their propiska, their official reg­
istration in a town or village. The declared intent of the Azerbaijani au­
thorities was to check the internal passports of residents in a series of 

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Armenian-inhabited villages on the borders of Karabakh that were 
sheltering Armenian fedayin, expel the interlopers, and therby restore 
order. 
Mutalibov now contends that the plans for what he called an oper­
ation for the “liquidation of terrorists” had existed on paper since 1989 
and only needed implementing. He is candid about how he sold it in 
Moscow to the leadership as politically expedient: “I presented it in po­
litical terms, and I knew that you have to work here in Moscow.”
12 
What followed was a small Soviet civil war, fought on very unequal 
terms. On one side were units of the Soviet 4th Army, based in Ganje, 
whose entire 23rd Division, complete with tanks and artillery, was 
made available for the operation. They were joined by units of the Azer­
baijani OMON and groups of Azerbaijani villagers, who engaged in 
looting and intimidation. On the other were the Armenian fedayin. 
There were far fewer of them, perhaps a few hundred in all, but their 
morale was extremely high; they had not-so-secret backing from the 
new authorities in Armenia, logistical support from Armenian vil­
lagers, and even helicopters to fly them back and forth. 
One of the ANM leaders, Ashot Manucharian, had become Arme­
nia’s interior minister in 1991. He helped the paramilitaries by giving 
them illicitly bought weapons and transport to Karabakh. Most of the 
arms, Manucharian admits, came from Soviet army bases. “We bought a 
lot of weapons in Georgian military units.” They were mostly hand-held 
weapons, automatic weapons, and grenade launchers that could be taken 
either by helicopter or on foot across mountain paths into Karabakh.
13 
In the spring and summer of 1991, the violence escalated into a par­
tisan-style conflict between villages; raids were made and hostages 
were taken. Six Azerbaijani villagers were killed in one attack by Ar­
menian fighters on the village of Karadogly.
14 
The Armenians started 
using a new weapon, the Alazan rocket, a device that had not been de-
signed for warfare. It consisted of a thin shaft about two feet in length, 
capped by a small rocket head that the Soviet Meteorological Service 
fired into clouds in mountain regions to disperse gathering hailstorms. 
Alazans caused considerable damage and could kill if they hit a human 
directly. The Armenians first used them as a combat weapon in April, 
when they fired several into Shusha, hitting several houses and wound­
ing three people. 
A month later, on 10 May 1991, an Armenian partisan’s rocket-pro­
pelled grenade struck Viktor Polyanichko’s office. He survived the 

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attempt on his life. (The military leader Safonov also escaped an Armen­
ian assassination attempt, in April 1991, in Rostov-on-Don, which killed 
another Russian officer by mistake.) Polyanichko was eventually assas­
sinated, long after he had left Karabakh. In July 1993, he was killed by 
Armenian assailants in the North Caucasian republic of North Ossetia. 
OPERATION RING: THE EXECUTION 
In the spring of 1991, the main battleground in the Armenian-Azerbai­
jan partisan war was not Nagorny Karabakh itself but the wooded hills 
to the north of the Khanlar and Shaumian regions.
15 
Both had mainly 
Armenian populations. Fedayin had infiltrated their Armenian villages,