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parties about the meeting. These included not only the governments of
Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, who were supposed to be sending
observers, but also the Russian Foreign Ministry’s recently appointed
mediator for the conflict, Vladimir Kazimirov, who was in Baku at the
time. Kazimirov says: “I had brought a message from Yeltsin to El
chibey for the settlement of the conflict, but I knew nothing about the
fact that on 19 September, the next day, Grachev was organizing that
meeting in Sochi.”
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Kazimirov learned about the meeting only when a
fellow diplomat pointed out to him a report on it in the International
Herald Tribune. By the time he tried to join the meeting, it was too late
for him to take part.
A week later, Grachev sent fifty-six Russian observers to the com
bat zone but had to withdraw them when the fighting carried on.
Gaziev had failed to consult most of his colleagues in the Azerbaijani
leadership and, as a result, faced a row when he got back to Baku. The
details of what he had agreed to are not clear, but according to Tofik
Zulfugarov, then a senior Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry official, the
Russians had identified the “Lachin corridor” between Armenia and
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Karabakh as their strategic prize. “[Gaziev] gave his agreement to tem
porary use of the so-called Lachin corridor” by the Russians, said
Zulfugarov. Whatever the truth of this, Gaziev had certainly not re
ceived President Elchibey’s approval for the document he signed and
this drew wrath on his head. The Azerbaijani interior minister Is
kender Hamidov declared on 28 September, “It is perfectly clear that
[the] bringing of the Russian peacekeeping forces into Azerbaijan is
nothing less but a veiled form of aggression.”
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This strong anti-Russ
ian stand isolated Gaziev and pushed the Russian Defense Ministry
further toward the Armenians.
ARMENIA BESIEGED
Independent Armenia barely survived 1992. Politically, the country was
stable. The taking of power by the nationalist opposition had been
bloodless, and many old Communists served the new Ter-Petrosian ad-
ministration. Ter-Petrosian’s main critics were in the nationalist opposi
tion, especially the Dashnaktsutiun Party, which organized the first
hostile administrations to his government in the summer of 1992. Over-
all, however, he commanded broad support.
Armenia’s problem was sheer economic survival. One of the Soviet
Union’s most prosperous republics only a few years before, Armenia
was now destitute. Azerbaijan’s economic blockade deprived it of elec
tricity, goods, and railway connections. Russia was far away and the
country’s other three neighbors were all unreliable. Turkey expressed
solidarity with Azerbaijan and, after a tentative thaw in relations, com
pletely closed its borders with Armenia in 1993. The northern neigh
bor, Georgia, was in permanent crisis and its gas pipelines, roads, and
railways were all frequently shut down. Iran thus became Armenia’s
friendliest neighbor, but it was remote and could be reached only by
winding mountainous roads. Nonetheless, without Iranian trade, Ar
menia might not have survived the two miserable winters of 1991–1992
and 1992–1993.
Over these winters, Armenian citizens were forced back into pre-
modern living conditions. City dwellers collected their water from
wells, cut down trees to feed wood-burning stoves, and lived by can
dlelight. One ingenious method of heating hot water was to suspend a
wire with a razor blade attached to it from a trolleybus cable, whose
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low voltage would eventually transmit enough electricity to boil a
saucepan of water. Armenia recovered a decent power supply only in
1996 with the—extremely controversial—reopening of the Metsamor
atomic power station.
The shortages did have a perverse psychological effect in that they
induced a spirit of wartime solidarity. In that respect, hardship mobi
lized Armenian support for the war in Karabakh. Yet the reality be-
hind the economic misery was more complex. When the war was over,
there were allegations that Armenia had actually produced plenty of
electricity, which had been sold to Georgia for large profits, and that
political leaders had used the wartime situation to take over sectors of
the economy.
Armenia’s “mafia” was also a powerful behind-the-scenes actor. It
suddenly became visible in January 1993, when an Armenian gangster
named Rafik Bagdasarian, known as Svo, was murdered in his Moscow
prison cell. Svo’s body was flown home to be buried in the most presti
gious section of Yerevan’s Toghmagh cemetery. The Soviet criminal fra
ternity paid no heed to ethnic conflict, and so Svo’s old comrades from
Azerbaijan decided to fly in to Yerevan to pay their last respects. For
the first and only time in the 1990s, planes traveled between Baku and
Yerevan and the gangsters arranged for gas and electricity supplies to
be switched on for the three days around the funeral. Only when all
the mafiosi guests had left did the blockade resume, and darkness de
scended once again.
IMPROVISED ARMIES
Behind the Armenians’ victory and Azerbaijan’s defeat in 1994 lay three
factors: Azerbaijan’s political and military chaos, greater Russian sup-
port for the Armenians, and the Armenians’ superior fighting skills.
The last factor had historical roots. Like the other highland rebels
in the Caucasus, the Chechens, the Karabakh Armenians had a strong
warrior tradition. In 1993, Karabakhi fighters were offered cash rewards
if they could immobilize a tank by hitting it in the treads, so that it could
be repaired; if they hit it in the turret, destroying the tank, they would
not be paid. The Armenian journalist Vartan Hovanisian remembers
being in the Martakert region when three Azerbaijani tanks suddenly
attacked. The group of fighters he was with had only one grenade
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launcher. As Hovanisian pleaded with them to open fire, they began to
argue as to who would shoot at the first tank and claim the reward; they
had already come with some old grudge from their village past. The
tanks were almost two hundred meters away when one of the fighters
finally seized the weapon and opened fire. He hit one tank in the treads,
stopping it dead—and incidentally thereby not killing the crew inside.
The other two tanks fled.
At first, the Armenian volunteer army was chaotic. “No one was in
charge,” says Samvel Danielian. “A unit would stop fighting and go off
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