Armenia

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Almost every day for five weeks, a group of Armenians had huddled in the winter chill in front of Moscow's six-story Supreme Court building, slapping their arms against the sides of their brown fur coats to keep warm. Their breath burst forth in clouds of pale steam as they talked quietly to one another, discussing the fate of those on trial.

Inside, in a crowded courtroom, three young Azerbaijani defendants sat motionless as they listened to witnesses describe a violent clash between ethnic Armenians and ethnic Azerbaijanis that left 32 dead and 400 wounded in the Azerbaijani port city of Sumgait last February. Struggling to hold back tears, an aging Armenian woman described how she had watched an Azerbaijani mob burn a man to death in his automobile. A Russian doctor described the head < wounds he had found on the corpse of a man beaten to death with lead pipes.

Last week the ordeal came to an end as a three-member panel of justices sentenced Akhmet Akhmetov, 24, to death for his part in what has been described as the worst ethnic clash in Soviet history. Akhmetov, the oldest of the three men on trial, was charged with "organizing and participating in pogroms, murder and arson." The cases of his co-defendants were sent back for further investigation. "I suppose I'm pleased," said an Armenian who had come to the courtroom every day since the proceedings began on Oct. 18. "But we really wanted to get at his leaders. He didn't act alone, after all."

Some 1,200 miles to the southeast, in the Armenian Republic, the upheaval set in motion by the Sumgait riots was still under way, though in muffled fashion. Since February, Armenians have been in near open revolt over Moscow's refusal to transfer to Armenian control the mountain enclave of Nagorno- Karabakh (pop. about 160,000), where an Armenian majority has lived under Azerbaijani rule for nearly 70 years. Demonstrations first erupted when news began trickling back into Yerevan, the Armenian capital, that Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh were being beaten, raped and killed by Azerbaijanis, people who are ethnically related to Turks.

Since then the Armenian Republic has been paralyzed three times by widespread work stoppages protesting the Kremlin's refusal to countenance a border change despite the violence committed against Armenians next door. Twice the Soviet government has had to dispatch troops to Yerevan to quell disturbances. Last July a boy was killed by a plastic bullet and 36 people were wounded during a confrontation with soldiers at Yerevan's Zvartnots Airport.

Despite the crackdown, thousands of Armenians still gather nearly every Friday in Theater Square, a small plaza tucked behind Yerevan's neoclassical opera house. Around 7 p.m., old women, their heads wrapped in shawls, begin to perch on the steps leading to the theater. Bands of youths, sometimes unruly, wave the orange-red-and-blue Armenian flag, which last flew over the region when it was a free republic in 1920. Later, at about 7:30, a lone bugler approaches a microphone and plays a melancholy tune. When the last note dies, the crowd breaks into a chant: "Artsakh! Artsakh!" -- the historic Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh.