Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

Party leaders that they should use only “Party methods”—persuasion, 
rather than force—to resolve the dispute. Gorbachev also decided that 
neither local Karabakh Armenian nor republican Azerbaijani security 
forces could be relied on to keep order and had a motorized battalion of 

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12 
F E B RUA RY   1 9 8 8 :  A N  A R M E N I A N   R E VO LT 
160 Soviet Interior Ministry troops dispatched from the neighboring re-
public of Georgia to Karabakh. As it turned out, Interior Ministry sol­
diers were to stay there for almost four years.
4 
The demonstrators in Stepanakert became more vocal. Within a 
week there were several thousand people in Lenin Square. Zhanna Gal­
stian remembers an almost religious exaltation as people began to 
shake off the fear inbred in all Soviet citizens. “There was the highest 
discipline, people stood as though they were in church,” she com­
mented. The Armenian political scientist Alik Iskandarian, who went to 
Stepanakert to investigate, says he found “a force of nature”: “I saw 
something elemental, I saw a surge of energy, energy that could have 
been directed in another direction. Actually, the conflict began very be­
nignly at the very beginning . . . it was an astonishing thing. I had never 
seen anything like it in the Soviet Union—or anywhere.”
5 
Yet Nagorny Karabakh was not only an Armenian region. Roughly 
a quarter of the population—some forty thousand people—were Azer­
baijanis with the strongest ties to Azerbaijan. This sudden upsurge of 
protest in the mainly Armenian town of Stepanakert, however peaceful 
its outer form, could not but antagonize them. You had only to tilt your 
head in Stepanakert to see the neighboring town of Shusha—90 percent 
of whose inhabitants were Azerbaijani—high on the cliff top above. The 
Azerbaijanis there were angry and began to organize counterprotests. 
Events moved with speed. Eighty-seven Armenian deputies from 
the Regional Soviet exercised their right to call an emergency session of 
the assembly for Saturday, 20 February. Two top officials—the local Ar­
menian Party leader, Boris Kevorkov, who was still fully loyal to Azer­
baijan, and the first secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, 
Kamran Bagirov, tried and failed to stop the session’s taking place. The 
emergency session finally began at about 8 p.m., four or so hours behind 
schedule and in an explosive atmosphere. Late in the evening, 110 Ar­
menian deputies voted unanimously for the resolution, calling for 
Nagorny Karabakh to join Soviet Armenia. The Azerbaijani deputies re-
fused to vote. In a scene of high farce, Kevorkov tried to swipe the 
stamp needed to confirm the resolution.
6 
Journalists at the local newspaper, Sovetsky Karabakh, doubled the 
impact of the resolution by working late into the night on a special edi­
tion. Next morning, amid the usual dull TASS bulletins and reprints of 
Pravda, the paper published two columns on the right side of the front 
page announcing the local Soviet’s intention to leave Azerbaijan. 

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F E B RUA RY   1 9 8 8 :  A N  A R M E N I A N   R E VO LT 
13 
“SOMETHING COMPLETELY NEW” 
On 21 February 1988, the Politburo met in the Kremlin to hold the first 
of many sessions devoted to the crisis. Heeding a keen instinct of self-
preservation, members began by rejecting out of hand the Regional So­
viet’s demand. Gorbachev said later that there were nineteen potential 
territorial conflicts in the Soviet Union and he did not want to set a 
precedent by making concessions on any of them. The Communist