Troops put an end to the Armenian massacre in Baku, Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and last president of the USSR, told the Novaya Nedelya newspaper.

The Yerkramas newspaper reports that Gorbachev justified his orders on introduction of troops to a number of regions with the tragedies in Fergana in 1989 and Baku in 1990.

Interestingly, Gorbachev named Nagorno-Karabakh along with two of the South Caucacus states when he said: "The entire Caucasus - Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan - was ablaze. Mechanism of seceding from the state were on there."

Gorbachev said that the causes of conflict lie in the policy pursued by Lenin and Stalin. "Their policy of national-territorial division of the country was utterly wrong, which finally caused the USSR`s collapse," Gorbachev said.