Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 20 – Vladimir Putin
and his supporters blame Mikhail Gorbachev for the disintegration of the USSR,
arguing that his liberalization allowed the non-Russians to escape from Moscow.
But in this, as in so many other things, the Putinists get it wrong – and there
is no better evidence of that than the tragic events that took place in Baku 30
years ago today.
The Soviet Union in fact fell apart
not because Gorbachev offered reforms and liberalization but because, having offered
them, he showed he didn’t really mean it and tried to take them back by using
force rather than persuasion and the same divide-and-rule tactics and violence
that his Soviet predecessors had.
As the Azerbaijani foreign ministry said
yesterday, “after January 21, 1990, Azerbaijan was a different place” than it
had been only two days earlier. It became “finally anti-Soviet” and its people recognized
that they had to go their own way because they could not trust Msocow too live
up to its promises (kavkaz-uzel.eu/blogs/83772/posts/41371).
Baku today, 30
years after the event, stresses the ways in which Moscow promoted the Armenian
secessionists in Karabakh and started the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan which
continues now a generation later. But at the time, Azerbaijanis were more horrified
by the introduction of Soviet troops who indiscriminately killed and wounded several
hundred people.
The behavior of the Soviet forces
who acted under Gorbachev’s authority can only be described as a form of state
terrorism just as when these forces were deployed against the Georgians, the Lithuanians,
the Latvians and others. But it was more
than that: it was a signal that Gorbachev, for all his talk of “new thinking”
wasn’t prepared to change.
And because Gorbachev and his minions
weren’t prepared to change, peoples and leaders across the USSR showed that
they were more than ready to do so, precisely because of the Kremlin leader’s willingness
to engage in this kind of violence and duplicity, and to seek a new future for
themselves independent of the Soviet system.
A year ago, I argued in a Window on
Eurasia that Black January in Baku was the time and place when the Soviet Union
died. I see no reason to change anything
I wrote at that time and so append that essay to this one. But there is one point
that I do not think I made strongly enough and that matters profoundly for the
future of the Russian Federation.
That is this: empires do not die
because rulers make concessions to those they rule over or because they make no
concessions at all. Rather they die because their leaders are ultimately compelled
to make concessions as Gorbachev and others have been but then decide they can take
everything back by means of violence and duplicity.
Such rulers do not understand that
violence and duplicity can transform people who are prepared to cooperate into a
nation irreconcilably opposed to any form of cooperation with their oppressors.
They become almost instantly, a new and
different people, as the Azerbaijani foreign ministry has pointed out.
It is bad enough that Gorbachev
never learned this lesson. It is worse that Putin has not only not learned it
but has drawn exactly the opposite and wrong conclusion. Consequently, the
current ruler in the Kremlin appears likely to act in ways that will cause him
to lose even more of his country than his predecessor did of his.
***
Black
January in Baku – the Time and Place the Soviet Union Died
Staunton, January 20 [2019] –
Twenty-nine years ago today, Soviet forces attacked the people of Baku, killing
and wounding hundreds and illegally arresting many more. That date remembered
in Azerbaijan to this day as Black January is less well-known to many now than
the events in Vilnius and Riga a year later or in Moscow in August 1991.
Soviet and Russian apologists have
with more or less success sought to justify what Moscow did by pointing to the
war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Karabakh, but in fact, Moscow sent in
forces to try to block the Azerbaijani people from overthrowing the communist
authorities and installing a government responsive to the population.
As such, it deserves to take its
place as the time and the place the Soviet Union died because the powers that
be in Moscow in effect invaded a territory the rulers claimed was their own and
thus snapped any remaining ties of loyalty between the population and the
Soviet imperial center.
That is because, in trying to save
that empire, Moscow showed that it had been reduced to relying on the use of
massive and murderous force alone and thus it might act against other nations
within the borders of the USSR in much the same way as it had done against the
Azerbaijanis.
For that reason alone, Black January
should be better known. The chronology is complicated. In the weeks before Moscow invaded, Azerbaijanis
tore down the border fences dividing them from the much larger community of
ethnic Azerbaijanis in Iran, and the Popular Front of Azerbaijan took over many
government offices around the republic.
Then, on January 9, ten days before Moscow moved, the
Supreme Soviet of the Armenian SSR voted to make Nagorno-Karabakh, the
predominantly ethnically Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, de facto part of
Armenia by including it within the Armenian SSR budget and allowing residents of
Karabakh to vote in Armenian elections.
That outraged many Azerbaijanis, but they were especially
angry Moscow did not respond to the Armenian action. And often employing
“heavily anti-Armenian rhetoric,” according to Human Rights Watch, Azerbaijanis
then called for full independence from the USSR and prompted the Popular Front
to set up committees for defense of the nation.
Azerbaijani officials were unable to gain control of the
situation, and Baku directed the 12,000 troops of the Interior Ministry to stay
in their barracks lest their appearance spark violence in the city. That led to
a breakdown in public order in parts of Azerbaijan and to attacks on Armenians,
many of whom appealed to the Soviet government to help them leave.
The Azerbaijan Popular Front took control in many regions
of the republic, and on January 18, it called on residents of Baku to block the
main access routes into the Azerbaijani capital in order to block any Soviet
forces that might be sent against them and its activists surrounded Soviet
interior force barracks there as well.
That led the Soviet officials on the ground to pull back
to the outskirts of the city where they established a new command post to
direct the Soviet response. That response was not long in coming. On January19,
Mikhail Gorbachev signed a decree calling for the introduction of forces to
restore order, block the actions of the Peoples Front, and prevent
anti-Armenian pogroms.
Almost immediately an estimated 26,000 Soviet troops
entered the Azerbaijani capital. To justify their acts of violence which
claimed at least 100 lives and perhaps as many as 300, Moscow propagandists
claimed that Azerbaijanis had fired on them. But a subsequent investigation by
a Russian human rights group found no evidence of that.
Moscow worked hard to block information about what was
going on from reaching the West or even reaching Azerbaijanis. It blocked power
to Azerbaijani state radio and television and banned all Azerbaijani print
media. As a result, the main source of
news as the violence continued became the Azerbaijani Service of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty.
Soviet forces occupied the city, but they did not break
the Azerbaijanis’ drive for independence. Hundreds of Azerbaijanis turned in
their communist party cards, and on January 22, after the Soviet violence had
died down, the Supreme Soviet of the Azerbaijan SSR met and condemned the
actions of the Soviet forces, hardly the response Moscow hoped for.
Moscow’s Memorial Human Rights Society and Helsinki Watch
were among the organizations which denounced these Soviet attacks against
unarmed civilians and even ambulances. And with time, the world came to know
what had happened in Baku, although these events never received the attention
the far less murderous attacks in Lithuania and Latvia did.
After Azerbaijan succeeded in restoring its independence
at the end of 1991, Azerbaijani officials called for bringing charges against
Gorbachev for his actions in January 1990, appeals that continue to be heard in
Baku. And Azerbaijanis since that time
have marked January 20th as the day of martyrs.
Black January may seem a long time ago to many, but it
continues to reverberate for Azerbaijanis and it provides some important
lessons for all concerned, lessons that some have learned but that others for
various reasons have refused to accept.
Three seem especially important now:
First, even Russian leaders who some see as reformers
have not been shy about playing the worst kinds of ethnic politics or using
massive violence against non-Russians in pursuit of their own interest. In the
years since Black January, Gorbachev did so in the Baltics, Yeltsin did in
Chechnya, and Putin is doing the same in Ukraine.
Second, Moscow has invariably tried to control the media
environment in order to muddy the waters about what it is doing and to shift
the blame away from its own repressive policies to the actions of others. That did not start with Putin’s “hybrid war”
against Ukraine, however much some want to insist on that idea.
And third – and this is especially important for
Azerbaijanis to remember now given recent government actions against
independent media outlets and human rights activists – it is precisely media
outlets like Radio Liberty and independent organizations like Human Rights
Watch that from the start have defended the Azerbaijani people.
