Word: azerbaijanis
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hour at the center in Coolidge Hall, about 60 Soviet scholars and local chess enthusiasts shot. questions at Kasparov, who in 1985 became the youngest chess Grand master in history at age 22. Kasparov, a full member of the Soviet Communist Party since 1984 and a Azerbaijani Central Committee member, will play an exhibition chess match in Cambridge today...
...Armenian born in largely Muslim Azerbaijan, Kasparov touched on disparate topics ranging from Gorbachev to the Azerbaijani crisis to the Communist Party yesterday, displaying the iconoclasm that has made him a symbol for Soviets backing social change...
Panah Huseynov, 32, a member of the directorate of the Azerbaijani Popular Front, is seated at a desk in the former schoolhouse that serves as the group's new headquarters. He is listening to an Azerbaijani refugee from Armenia describe how he and his family were expelled from their home last November. "I was thrown from my house, beaten," the man says. "I lived off weeds, anything I could find." As Huseynov shakes his head in anger, the refugee continued, "They want to cut us up like sheep. But we'll burn them first...
Added to ethnic grievances in Armenia is the railway blockade, which began + two months ago when Azerbaijanis stopped allowing freight cars through railyards in Nakhichevan. The facility handles 85% of goods bound for Armenia from other Soviet republics, giving the Azerbaijanis a virtual stranglehold. The cutoff has not affected food supplies, many of which are home grown, and markets in Yerevan last week were stocked with fruits and vegetables. But fuel supplies were virtually nonexistent. Car owners waited in lines at the city's gas stations for days at a time. There were also acute shortages of many building supplies...
Extremists in both republics have called for formation of republican armies. That is unlikely to happen, but such is the depth of bitterness that civil war would be hard to prevent if it did. Azerbaijani nationalists also speak seriously of carrying out their self-proclaimed secession if Moscow continues to govern Nagorno-Karabakh. "There would be a war ((with the Soviet Union))," says Huseynov with a shrug. "But we think Iran and Turkey would help us." Moscow would presumably have something of its own to say about any attempt by Baku to exercise such an option. But so far, Moscow...