Soviet Union Occupational Disease

Sometimes the invasion is the easy part. It is what comes after that truly tests the resolve of the conqueror and slowly drains away victory.

Once the decision to intervene in Azerbaijan was made, Soviet army tanks, so often the Kremlin's tool for political repression, thundered through makeshift barricades and swept easily into the center of riotous Baku. Since then, however, nothing has been easy for the occupying force of some 40,000 from the army, Interior Ministry and KGB. They have found it almost impossible to pacify the people of Azerbaijan, who for two years have been inflamed by a bitter blood feud with neighboring Armenia over control of the mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Last week black flags waved from housetops, sirens wailed and ships' horns echoed over Baku harbor as some 800,000 Azerbaijanis thronged the streets, in defiance of emergency regulations, to mourn their hundred or more "martyrs" killed in street clashes with Soviet troops. Among the marchers' signs: a photograph of Mikhail Gorbachev over the word WANTED.

After almost 70 years as a republic of the U.S.S.R., Azerbaijan seemed to peel off its Soviet trappings almost overnight, turning into a foreign country under occupation by invaders. Enraged Azerbaijanis called for guerrilla warfare and swore to "fight to the last drop of blood" to drive the Soviets out. Almost a third of the republic's 380,000 Communist Party members burned their membership cards. Local government offices and police units ignored Moscow and looked to the ten-month-old Azerbaijani Popular Front for leadership. "If Gorbachev wants a second Afghanistan," shouted Ekhtibar Mamedov, the Front's representative in the Soviet capital, "he will get it in Azerbaijan." Mamedov was later detained by police.

Western correspondents were still barred from the region, but the news that emerged last week did in fact sound like reports from a war zone:

-- Captains of more than 50 merchant ships from Caspian Sea oil refineries blockaded Baku harbor, threatening to blow up tankers and drilling platforms unless they were allowed to inspect ships leaving port. Rumor had it that Soviet troops had killed thousands and were dumping the corpses at sea. Army artillery barrages broke up the blockade, and troops boarded several of the ships. Lieut. General Mikhail Kolesnikov reported that one soldier was killed and two were wounded in the operation.

-- Snipers fired from windows and rooftops, killing at least two soldiers. Troops on the ground, unable to spot their attackers, responded with streams of bullets.

-- Shooting between soldiers and nationalist guerrillas continued around the Salyan military barracks in Baku, with civilians sometimes hit in the cross fire.

-- Gunmen on motorcycles, some of them in police or military uniforms, dashed through the city at night taking potshots at soldiers on patrol. Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov claimed that 40,000 armed "extremists" still roamed the republic.