went to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, hoping to convince both leaders and milling crowds to check the nationalist course of development, but his trip was in vain. More successful was the oil blockade, a great reduction in the supply of oil to Lithuania, which began in mid-April 1990 and forced the republic to suspend, although not repeal, its declaration of independence on May 16. More violent coercion consisted of such incidents as army intervention in Vilnius, resulting in the death of fourteen people, and the assault by Black Berets on a Latvian government ministry building in Riga, both in January 1991 - aborted coups d'etat in the opinion of some - as well as repeated attacks on border posts and customs personnel of the nationalist republics, the signs of their new independence. The perpetrators included special army forces, such as the Black Berets, and perhaps some paramilitary groups, as in the case of seven Lithuanian customs and police officers killed on July 31, 1991. Officially, all these violent acts were labeled local incidents or transgressions; Gorbachev, in particular, denied any complicity. In fact, he emphasized that he objected to the manner of procedure of the Baltic republics, not to their goal of independence, which could be legitimately obtained in time, although personally he retained the hope that they would decide to remain in the new Soviet Union.
While nationalisms developed in a parallel and even co-operative way in the Baltic area, they were from the start on a collision course in Transcaucasia. Of the three Soviet republics beyond the great Caucasian mountain range - Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan - the first two represent two of the oldest yet entirely distinct peoples and cultures of the world. With their histories antedating Christianity by far, the Georgians and the Armenians also built Christian states and cultures centuries before the vaunted conversion of the Rus in a.d. 988. The Georgians are Orthodox; the Armenians are Eastern Christians but not Orthodox. Becoming part of the Russian Empire when it finally reached them in the early nineteenth century may have been important, even essential, for their survival in the face of hostile Moslem Turks and Persians, now Iranians. (Armenians who remained in Turkey did not survive.) Yet if the Baltic republics kept referring to 1940 as the crucial year when Soviet power crushed their independence, the Georgians focused on 1918, when, following the Russian revolutions of 1917, they created an independent Menshevik-led state, only to be overcome after three years by the Red Army. Azerbaijan, not a distinct historical entity, represented the Turkic element so prominent in the past and present life of the area; its inhabitants are historically Moslem and are closely related to other Turkic speakers in the U.S.S.R. from the Volga to the Chinese border, especially in four of the five Soviet Central Asian republics, as well as to Turks abroad.
The Georgian revolution had its central event, a Georgian 'Bloody Sunday.' On April 9,1989, the particularly brutal suppression of a nationalist demonstration in Tbilisi led to the death of 20 participants and the injury of more than 200. Although authorities in Moscow blamed local officials and started an investigation, communist control could not in effect be restored. The local Party, which, as in Lithuania, tried to play an independent role, lost the crucial ensuing election, and Georgia emerged with a noncommunist government headed by Zviad Gamsakhurdia. On April 1, 1991, Georgians responded to the question of whether they agreed 'that the state independence of Georgia should be restored on the basis of the independence act of May 26, 1918,' with a turnout, according to official sources, of 90.53 per cent of the 3.4 million Georgian voters and the affirmative reply of 98.93 per cent of them. Whatever their exact political future, Georgians, like the Baltic peoples, definitely wanted to live outside the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1991, there even existed widespread interest in restoring the ancient Georgian monarchy, although in a modern constitutional form, in the person of Georgii II Bagration, presently living in Spain but invited by President Gamsakhurdia and the parliament to visit Georgia. Yet in Georgia, too, nationalism brought no easy solutions. In particular, while asserting their own rights, Georgians did their best to limit and control those of the constituent minority groups in their state - the Adzharians, the Abkhazians, and perhaps especially the Ossetians - sometimes to the point of fighting on a considerable scale.
But the most extensive fighting in Transcaucasia, and indeed in the entire Soviet Union, took place between the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis and their respective republics. The historical hostility of the two peoples came to center on Nagorny Karabakh, an Armenian-populated area within the republic of Azerbaijan. The Armenians claimed it for themselves on grounds of nationality and of alleged mistreatment of its inhabitants. The Azerbaijanis responded by attacking Armenians wherever they could be found. During the last four months of 1989, they also blockaded railroads leading into Armenia and carrying supplies vital to that republic. Especially traumatic were assaults in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on Armenians and some Russians in January 1990 which resulted in at least twenty-five deaths. On January 20, the Soviet army intervened against the Azerbaijani rioters, in effect recapturing Baku from them. The central government was blamed both for intervening and for intervening late and was even accused by both sides of inflaming hostility among nationalities for its own nefarious purposes. More likely, it was trying to make the best of a very bad situation, breaking the railroad blockade, and attempting to prevent massacres, while rejecting Armenian claims to Nagorny Karabakh. The Armenian-Azerbaijani border was transformed into front lines, with the opponents remarkably well provided with weapons and materiel stolen or otherwise obtained from the Soviet army. Although there is a lull at the front at present, the situation is anything but peaceful. Masses of people migrated between the two republics and even to Moscow and other distant points. Some Armenians have been brutally moved by the Soviet army into the Armenian republic from their native villages in Azerbaijan. Armenia has declared its independence and broken with the Soviet Union, although because of its especially difficult predicament and the volatile nature of events, its decision appears perhaps less definitive than that of the Baltic republics.
More co-operative, it would appear, are the five 'Moslem' republics of the U.S.S.R. located in Central Asia: the Turkic Kazakh, Kirghiz, Turkmen, and Uzbek republics and the Iranian Tajik republic. Deeply affected by the present political and nationalist turmoil, affirming in the train of other republics their 'rights' and their 'sovereignty,' and in constant conflict with central authorities, their minorities, and at times one another, they have proved nevertheless to be so far among the less self-assertive major components of the former Soviet Union. The Party and the administration have been relatively successful in maintaining their positions in Soviet Central Asia. The explanation for that success may well lie in the comparative underdevelopment of the area, with its extreme reliance on a single crop (cotton), its poverty, its population explosion, and especially its dependence on huge government subsidies vital to the economy and even to the existence of its peoples. Kazakhstan, by far the largest republic of the five, represents a special case: it is little more than half Kazakh, the southern half, while the north is predominantly Russian and therefore claimed even by such Rus-
sian nationalists as Solzhenitsyn who are eager to separate Russians from alien peoples.
Whereas all the republics discussed thus far can be considered peripheral from the standpoint of Russian geography as well as Russian history and, typically, entered that history relatively recently, this judgment in no sense applies to Ukraine, as readers of this book or of any other book treating Russian history in the large must know. Correspondingly, the historic future of Ukraine will be of immense importance to that of Russia proper. The nationalist tide brought to power in Kiev, after elections, a coalition government led by rather nationalistically minded Ukrainian communists and joined by a noncommunist nationalist movement known as Rukh. In contrast to more exclusive Baltic nationalists, Ukrainian politicians appealed to all the inhabitants of the republic. As to its relation to Soviet and, later, Russian governments, Ukraine gave some indication of willingness to participate in certain kinds of associations but always with reservations and conflicting problems. The problems included Ukrainian sovereignty over the Crimea, the management and disposal of atomic weapons, and the division and control of the armed forces, in particular of the Black Sea fleet. The eastern and the smaller western parts of Ukraine are sharply different from each other. It is especially in the latter, Soviet only since 1939 or 1945, that the many-sided religious revival included the restoration, at times a militant restoration, of the formerly prohibited Uniate Church, a Catholic jurisdiction, while anticommunism and anti-Russian nationalism rode high.
Adjacent and closely related to Ukrainians, as well as involved in the general course of Russian history from its very inception, Belorussians have been slow in developing a nationalism of their own, perhaps a generation or two behind the Ukrainians. Also, the Party proved to be stronger in the Belorussian republic than in some others. Still, the new nationalist wave had its effect. Thus in late July 1990, Belorussia issued a resounding declaration of its 'sovereignty.' And while it apparently constitutes one of the more cooperative members of the commonwealth, the future is difficult to predict.
The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, bordering Ukraine on the southwest, exemplifies well some of the conundrums and miseries of contemporary nationalisms in the Soviet Union. In a sense a fake nationalism to begin with - for the Moldavian language is really Rumanian and Moldavians are part of the Rumanian people, the
