Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War

8. 1990–1991: A Soviet Civil War

8 1990–1991 A Soviet CivilWar POLYANICHKO’S HOUR In January 1990, as order broke down in Baku, the area around Nagorny Karabakh slid out of control. On 15 January, Moscow imposed a State of Emergency on the province and the border regions with Armenia. A delegation sent by the Politburo flew into Karabakh but was turned back at the airfield by Armenian villagers. There was fighting in the villages of the Khanlar region. Then, after the bloodshed of 20 January, Arkady Volsky and his team pulled out of the region, leaving it without any working administration. This was Viktor Polyanichko’s hour. After Black January, Azerbaijan ’s Russian second secretary had stayed in place as deputy to the new Party boss, Ayaz Mutalibov. When Volsky’s team left Nagorny Karabakh , 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, Azerbaijan ’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 troubled outpost. He formed a strong relationship with the leaders of the security 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. Polyanich108 ko’s chief assistant Seiran Mirzoyev says that they were “completely besieged ” 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 political 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, recalled 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 Nagorny Karabakh, who was sent to prison in the Russian town Rostovon -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 separatists ,” Seiran Mirzoyev remembers. “When we came to Nagorny Karabakh they were a single core. By the end of 1990 we had managed 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 conservative Party official Genrikh Pogosian and the young radical Arkady Manucharov. Ahigh 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 1990–1991: A SOVIET CIVIL WAR 109 in February 1988 and Volsky had tried to administer. Karabakh was formally 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, whereupon the...