Word: azerbaijan
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...shaking up the leadership of the southern republic in the Caucasus Mountains, Georgian party officials were following a pattern set last year in the neighboring republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. After four months of nationalist protests there, the Armenian and Azerbaijani party chiefs were fired, apparently for their inability to halt the unrest...
...explosion of ethnic violence in Azerbaijan a year ago caught Gorbachev without a workable nationalities policy. The Armenians are enraged by what they claim are flagrant cases of ethnic abuse against their compatriots living in Azerbaijan. Gorbachev's prestige plummeted in Armenia when he gave a finger-wagging lecture to Armenian intellectuals who had come to present their case in Moscow last summer and when he ended his snap tour of the Armenian earthquake zone last December with another outburst against nationalists...
Some of Gorbachev's most hostile critics are among those whose help he needs to make perestroika work: the 18 million members of the nomenklatura, or ruling class. Says Eldar Shakhbazov, deputy minister of finance in Azerbaijan: "The first layer of opponents of perestroika are people who would lose their economic privileges." Not only might they be shifted to less desirable jobs, but the nomenklatura fears that reform may also eliminate the perks -- special stores, food sources, even schools -- that make them the Soviet Union's pampered elite. Those privileges are a touchy matter. When Pravda published a letter from...
...leader Mikhail Gorbachev two years ago informing Andrei Sakharov that he could return to Moscow, the Nobel laureate and human-rights activist has assumed an increasingly public role in Soviet life. Two weeks ago, Sakharov, 67, led a fact-finding mission to the strife-torn republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan -- reportedly with Gorbachev's personal blessing...
Sakharov's delegation visited Baku, Yerevan and Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan that has been at the heart of the ethnic clashes that have been rocking the Soviet Union since February. He also stopped in Spitak, the town virtually destroyed in the Dec. 7 earthquake that the Kremlin now estimates took 25,000 lives...