TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/88/88capsov.1

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                                                                                December 19, 1988

SOVIET UNION

When the Earth Shook


A killer quake devastates Armenia, and the West responds with
unprecedented aid


In the central square of Leninakan, the hands on the clock
tower stood frozen at 11:41 a.m., as if to record for posterity
that terrifying moment when the city of 290,000 was, without
warning, shaken violently by a rumble from the earth. Concrete
and stone snapped like brittle twigs, hospitals and schools
crashed down on patients and children, and workers were entombed
in factories. Within minutes the city was split apart like an
accordion. Forty- five miles to the north, the town of Spitak,
population 30,000, was virtually "erased from the face of the
earth," in the words of a Soviet television commentator. Said
a local news-agency editor: "Ninety-nine percent of the
population is gone."

The earthquake that shattered much of the Soviet Republic of
Armenia last week brought a horrified world images, via
unprecedented Soviet TV coverage, of trapped victims in twisted
piles of smoking rubble and of as many as 400,000 bewildered
people left homeless, many of them wandering in shock through
buildings crumpled like paper. As the hours went by, the death
toll climbed:  10,000, then 30,000, then, on Saturday, the first
official estimate of 40,000 to 45,000. But the numbers continued
to rise. The only sign of hope amid this swath of misery was
the outpouring of aid to the Soviet Union that began flooding
in from around the world.

The shock wave, which registered 6.9 on the Richter scale,
spread far beyond the battered towns and villages of Armenia.
When the temblor struck, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was
spending his first night in New York City. During lunch later
that day with Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Gorbachev mentioned
the earthquake briefly, noting that the damage was thought to
be "very serious in some places."  Some time after that, news
of the growing toll reached him. Just after midnight, a visibly
shaken Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze summoned the
press to the Soviet U.N. mission on Manhattan's East 67th Street
and announced that Gorbachev would go home later that day to
direct the recovery effort.

Gorbachev's sudden departure, a day earlier than planned, meant
the canceling of many arrangements:  a sight-seeing tour of
Manhattan for Gorbachev and wife Raisa, and then visits to Cuba
and Britain. "I have to be there," Gorbachev said simply in a
farewell speech at Kennedy International Airport. Arriving in
Moscow on Friday morning, he flew on to Leninakan on Saturday,
which had been declared a day of national mourning.

Gorbachev's mission was more than humanitarian:  it was a major
test of the internal reforms known as perestroika. He knows
that out of the despair of Armenia's disaster he must find a way
to regain the political trust of a people who over the past ten
months have become estranged from Moscow and embittered toward
Gorbachev because of his rejection of their nationalist
aspirations.

The outside world responded almost as quickly as Gorbachev did
to the devastation. Medical supplies, rescue equipment and
trained search teams from France, West Germany, Britain,
Switzerland, Bulgaria and Poland were flown into the Soviet
Union, and more aid was offered by countries from Latin America
to the Far East. Perhaps the most striking symbol of change was
the Kremlin's formal request for American help. Washington
responded immediately with offers of medicine and medical
equipment, doctors and trained rescue teams, the first time that
large-scale U.S. assistance had been given to the Soviet Union
since the end of World War II. Over the weekend the first U.S.
cargo plane arrived in Yerevan, carrying rescue experts and
sniffer dogs. On Sunday tragedy struck again:  a Soviet
military transport plane carrying soldiers to help rescue
victims crashed at the airport in Leninakan, killing 79 people.

At the same time, private U.S. groups, many of them organized
by Armenian Americans, were amassing money, clothing and other
supplies under the auspices of the American Red Cross. In
Glendale, Calif., home to many of the state's 300,000 Armenians,
a relief group quickly collected $7 million in pledges. In
Cambridge, Mass., sister city to Yerevan, a disaster relief fund
was launched to send medical supplies to Armenia. This
outpouring of aid from Americans helped underscore Gorbachev's
words when he told the U.N. General Assembly last week, that
"our common goal" can only be reached through cooperation.

The earthquake was the latest catastrophe for the Armenians, an
ancient people who through the ages have been massacred,
conquered and divided. Their home is a region of mountain
ranges and fertile valleys, roughly the size of Maryland, lying
in what the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov called the "high
Caucasian maze."  Of the republic's 3.5 million people, 90% are
Armenian.

The quake's epicenter was 25 miles northeast of Leninakan, the
republic's second largest city. Rumbling through a fault only
twelve miles below the surface, the quake toppled all buildings
higher than two stories within a radius of 30 miles, an area
with a population of about 700,000. Armenian towns and cities
such as Kirovakan, Stepanavan, and Leninakan were largely
destroyed. Even Yerevan, 65 miles from the epicenter, suffered
damage. The earthquake came in a minute-long tremor, followed
four minutes later by a sharp aftershock, measuring 5.8 on the
Richter scale. The timing could not have been worse:  at
midmorning, public buildings were full of people.

At Elementary School No. 9 on Leninakan's Gorky Street, "the
earthquake killed children on the spot during their classes,"
said a correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Communist
youth newspaper. Police Sergeant Valeri Gumenyok and his men
pulled 50 children's bodies from the wreckage of the building.
The paper described an end-of-the-world scene of people huddled
around bonfires, and roads out of the city clogged with fleeing
residents. As workers tried to clear away fallen masonry, "you
could hear the terrible cries of people waiting for help," wrote
a reporter for Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper. In
devastated Spitak, a correspondent for Sotsialisticheskaya
Industriya said, rescue workers heard a small girl trapped under
a pile of rubble cry for her mother and ask for water. They
lowered a pipe for her to drink through, but were unable to free
her.

Rescue workers put out a frantic call for heavy equipment to
help in the search for people who might be trapped. But Soviet
Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, in charge of the rescue effort,
admitted, "There is a shortage of equipment."  The need was
critical. "Every hour of delay means another 20 dead out of
every thousand buried," said Soviet Health Minister Yevgeni
Chazov. Doctors from several sister republics were rushed into
the region to minister to 19,000 injured people, nearly a third
of them crowding hospitals in Yerevan and neighboring towns.
Their efforts were hindered by a desperate lack of antibiotics,
disposable syringes and blood supplies. About 6,500 Soviet
soldiers were dispatched to aid in the rescue. By Saturday,
1,500 survivors had been pulled from the ruins, but untold
thousands remained buried beneath the rubble.

Among the victims of the earthquake, it is believed, were some
of the more than 100,000 Armenian refugees, who in the past
three weeks fled across the border from neighboring Azerbaijan.
For ten months the two republics have been locked in a bloody
dispute over Armenia's territorial claim to Nagorno-Karabakh,
a predominantly Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. The turmoil has
revived the historic blood feud between Armenians, who are
largely Christian, and Azerbaijanis, who are mainly Muslim.
Violence between the two sides has claimed at least 60 lives and
forced Gorbachev to sent thousands of troops into the area to
restore order. The Soviet leader has firmly rebuffed the
territorial claim, and his hurried departure for home prompted
speculation that he feared that the effects of the quake, if
not dealt with promptly and sensitively, could inflame the
situation and lead to further upheaval. In fact, shortly after
Soviet troops left the Azerbaijan capital of Baku for the
earthquake zone, an Armenian spokesman reported that rioters in
the city had set fire to Armenian houses. The government
newspaper Izvestia urged people to "first be human beings, and
then Russians, Armenians or Azerbaijanis."

This ethnic clash has become Gorbachev's most explosive
domestic issue because other restive Soviet republics, from
Estonia on the Baltic to Georgia in the Caucasus, are watching
how he deals with the fiercely nationalistic Armenians. The
Armenians are likely to have taken note of the emotion in his
voice at Kennedy Airport when he spoke of the urgency of helping
victims of the earthquake. This tragedy thus gives Gorbachev
an opportunity to present himself as a caring leader who seeks
to heal rather than divide.

Gorbachev's other major domestic problem will be coping with the
cost of the earthquake, likely to rise to the tens of billions
of rubles. The long restoration of the quake-stricken region
will drain money from an economy already reeling from a series
of setbacks. The cleanup costs for the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear
disaster swallowed 8 billion rubles, about $12.8 billion. This
year the Soviet budget is already expected to run a 36
billion-ruble deficit. The government has also suffered falling
revenues from declining international oil prices and from its
campaign to crack down on vodka consumption. Now the country
faces a sizable loss of income from Armenia, important for its
manufacture of technical and electronic equipment.

In terms of the death toll, the temblor was among the century's
worst. In terms of the magnitude of the shock, though, it was
a good deal less severe:  the quake that his Mexico City in
1985, for example, was a considerably more destructive 8.1
seismic shock, yet fewer than 10,000 people died. Experts laid
much o the blame for last week's shocking toll on the shoddy
construction of the buildings in Armenia's cities and towns.
According to Brian Tucker, acting state geologist of California
who has visited Armenia, many buildings in the region are made
of 8-in-thick concrete slabs held together by metal hooks and
mortar. Poorer Armenians, he says, tend to live in "very
fragile, very deadly houses" made of un-reinforced mud and rock.
Yet geologists have long known that the region affected by the
quake is interlaced with small faults in the earth's crust and
has been shaken by dozens of serious tremors this century.
"Where were the seismologists, the architects and the
construction workers that drafted and built the houses that fell
apart like matchboxes? Komsomolskaya Pravda asked. Many new
nine-story prefabricated panel buildings, Pravda noted, simply
collapsed into heaps of rubble that became "common graves for
many."

But this was not the time for recriminations, as the Soviets,
aided by an outpouring of worldwide concern, sought to shoulder
the burden of their great tragedy. It was bitter irony that a
leader who had just traveled half a world to talk of peace
should return to a land that was, in the words of a
Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent, "like coming into a war, a
cruel and modern one."

--By David Brand.  Reported by Ann Blackman/Moscow