Soviet Union Breaking Up Is Hard to Stop

By Bruce W. Nelan

Activists of the Azerbaijan Popular Front in Nakhichevan, a region bordering Iran, made no secret of their preparations for an incendiary New Year's Eve. They stockpiled axes, shovels and wire cutters, assembled trucks and buses, and held rallies demanding the dismantling of frontier barriers that separate them from Azerbaijanis living in Iran. On the last day of 1989 they struck. A mob of some 7,500 tore up boundary markers and pulled down border posts and watchtowers. Similar attacks over the next two days spread along 500 miles of the border, crippling the communications network in a string of towns from Zangelan to the Lenkoran region on the Caspian Sea. Thousands of Soviet Azerbaijanis gathered on the banks of the Araks River, the natural divide between the Soviet Union and Iran, set up loudspeakers and urged their Iranian kinsmen to join in a crusade for a unified homeland.

This latest sign of fragmentation in Mikhail Gorbachev's multi-ethnic empire comes just as he is trying to defuse the growing threat of secession by the three Baltic republics. Lithuania's Communist Party has already declared its independence from Moscow headquarters, and the Estonian and Latvian organizations are considering similar moves toward local autonomy. Gorbachev plans to visit the area this week in search of compromise. Now he must look southward as well, to festering nationality problems in Azerbaijan -- and the long-feared spread of Islamic fundamentalism from Iran into the six predominantly Muslim republics of the U.S.S.R.

Battled over for centuries by Arabs, Turks, Mongols, Russians and Persians, Azerbaijan was divided by treaties in 1813 and 1828. Today about 6.7 million ethnic Azerbaijanis, who share a Turkic language and the Shi'ite Muslim religion, live on the Soviet side of the line and about 4 million in the adjoining Iranian province of Azerbaijan. Stalin, ever expansionist, coveted that part of Iran and moved troops into it during World War II. Before Western pressure forced him to withdraw, he encouraged Azerbaijani nationalism and rigged an "autonomous" local government in hopes the province would break away from Iran.

Last week's eruption had been building for a month. Early in December demonstrators in Nakhichevan, an autonomous region separated from the rest of the republic by a strip of Armenian territory, formed a human chain along the Iranian border and called for the union of the two parts of Azerbaijan. Two weeks later the Popular Front sent an ultimatum to KGB troops guarding the frontier: if fences and barriers were not removed, the Front would tear them down on Dec. 31. KGB commanders made a few concessions -- some crossing points were opened for those who had business or wished to visit cemeteries in Iran -- but the threatened attacks were carried out anyway. Unable to quell the disorder, the party chief in Nakhichevan was forced to resign.

Iran, which has been working to improve relations with Moscow since the death of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini last year, seemed embarrassed by the turmoil. In fact, Khomeini's successor, Hashemi Rafsanjani, may have inadvertently fueled the rise of ethnic nationalism in Soviet Azerbaijan when he stopped off there last June after visiting Moscow. He told large crowds in Baku that bilateral agreements he had just signed would lead to increased tourism and trade between the two Azerbaijani regions.

Azerbaijan is turning into a permanent crisis for Gorbachev. There have been two years of something approaching civil war over the republic's mostly Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, where more than 120 people have been killed. In Baku, Azerbaijani gangs have systematically terrorized Armenians. Violence has also broken out in the southwestern city of Jalilabad, where two weeks ago mobs took over the local Communist Party headquarters and police station, and are threatening to elect their own leaders.

Officials in Moscow conceded last week that the domestic pressures on Gorbachev have become so intense that he will devote the rest of January almost exclusively to them, cutting back on his normally hectic schedule of meetings with foreign visitors. Given the complexity of his problems at home, Gorbachev is likely to find Feb. 1 arriving sooner than he would like.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo and John Kohan/Moscow