How many civil revolts can Moscow put down at once? At the outset of what promises to be a hot summer, it is an urgent question. It took thousands of security troops to quell unrest in Armenia last month after 24 people died. Thousands more are bogged down in Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed region of Azerbaijan. The porous Moldavian border with Romania needs extra policing, too. Authorities worried that last week’s violence would spread to Uzbekistan; they declared a state of emergency along the border. “The police are unable to handle ethnic conflicts,” Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin told the Soviet Parliament, “particularly when caveman, medieval nationalism is being stirred up.”
Battle scenes: Even if Moscow can find manpower, there’s the problem of willpower. Nearly 3,000 troops from the Interior Ministry, the regular Army and the KGB eventually flew in from neighboring Turkmenia to put down the riots in Kirgizia last week. But that was only after local officials had worried publicly about the “Tbilisi syndrome”–hesitancy to use outside troops against civilians. (In April 1989 more than 20 peaceful demonstrators were killed by troops flown into the Georgian city of Tbilisi.) The Army now makes no secret of its distaste for the role of interethnic referee. And any military involvement will surely invite comparison with the Kremlin’s senseless Afghan war.
The battle scenes even look a little like Afghanistan. Reports from Kirgizia described local militants armed with Kalashnikovs as well as Molotov cocktails. They blockaded garrisons so effectively that helicopters hovered over the city of Osh day and night, dropping ammunition to government troops. Throughout the Caucasus, too, militants are well armed. Private armies have sprung up everywhere; one volunteer guard, the Armenian National Army, claims a membership of 140,000. Gen. Yuri Shatalin, commander of the Soviet troops in the Caucasus, estimates that their garrisons are being attacked once a day on average. As civil strife spreads along the Soviet Union’s southern rim, one attacka day soon may seem like calm.
