Azerbaijan Ussr

With his ambitious reforms endangered by the prolonged conflict over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the remote mountains of the southern Soviet Union, Mikhail S. Gorbachev has personally taken over management of the crisis in a demonstration of the new, more open political system he envisions for the country and the vigorous leadership he believes it must have.

Two senior officials have been removed in Soviet Azerbaijan, where violent ethnic unrest has broken out this year over Armenian demands to recover the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. The latest edition of the Azerbaijani party daily newspaper Bakinsky Rabochy to reach Moscow said the republic's deputy interior minister, T. Aslanov, has been retired while the head of the ministry's staff department has been given other work. The Interior Ministry deals largely with police matters.

The republic of Azerbaijan annulled a vote by its Nagorno-Karabakh enclave to secede and join Armenia, Tass reported Wednesday, creating another stalemate in a territorial dispute that has caused months of ethnic turmoil. The official news agency said the Presidium, or executive committee, of Azerbaijan's Parliament met Tuesday night and declared "null and void" the motion of secession that the legislature of Nagorno-Karabakh had voted earlier that day.

Soviet officials have opened criminal investigations and taken disciplinary action against instigators of strikes in the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Soviet news agency Tass said on Friday. The announcement of tough measures to end a 2-month-old general strike followed a call by Azerbaijan's Communist Party leader for talks with officials of the neighboring republics of Armenia and Georgia.

A huge rally in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius has urged Soviet authorities to hold a referendum on self-determination in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh in the Azerbaijan republic more than 1,000 miles away, Lithuanian sources said Sunday. The Tass news agency said 100,000 people gathered in Vilnius on Saturday evening for a rally called by the Initiative Group in Support of Perestroika, a non-official group formed recently to promote Kremlin reform.

An eyewitness who traveled to Sumgait in Soviet Azerbaijan, where violence flared late last month between Muslim Azerbaijanis and Christian Armenians, said peace is being kept in the tense city by heavy concentrations of Soviet troops. "It is a colossal military presence," Andrei Shilkov, a member of the Glasnost independent publishing group, told Western reporters in Moscow. "The troops are wearing bullet-proof vests and steel helmets and patrolling the streets in groups of four."

The Soviet Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that several people were killed in ethnic rioting in the industrial city of Sumgait before army troops could be mobilized and a curfew imposed. Gennady I. Gerasimov, the ministry's chief spokesman, told reporters that life in Sumgait, a city of more than 160,000 people in the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, is returning to normal after Sunday's clashes between Azerbaijanis and Armenians.

Soviet officials confirmed Tuesday that demonstrations have been renewed in Armenia, apparently in protest over an article in the Communist Party newspaper Pravda indicating there will be no change in disputed borders in the region. Officials contacted in Yerevan, capital of the Soviet republic of Armenia, said the demonstrations Monday and Tuesday were small compared with those last month.