TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040990/0409008.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.6 KB | 218 lines

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                                                          WORLD, Page 46

SOVIET UNION

Red Army Blues


The secession crisis in Lithuania adds to the military's
unhappiness over cuts in manpower, money and hardware

By BRUCE W. NELAN -- Reported by Ann Blackman/Moscow and Bruce
van Voorst/Washington


    In the frigid darkness between midnight and dawn, two troop
carriers pulled up in front of a psychiatric hospital outside
Vilnius and a phalanx of Soviet paratroopers in battle dress
leaped out. The soldiers dashed up the stairs to the third
floor, smashed doors and windows and dragged out about two
dozen Lithuanian deserters who had been hiding in the ward.
Some of the youths resisted, and were clubbed with rifle butts,
leaving splashes of blood on the steps. The commander in chief
of Soviet ground forces, General Valentin Varennikov, vowed
that the army would round up all of the 1,500 Lithuanians who
have fled its ranks over the past few months.

    After 18 days of growing tensions between Moscow and
Lithuania, the two sides seemed at first to be inching toward
de-escalation last week. Lithuanian President Vytautas
Landsbergis conceded that he was willing to hold a popular
referendum on independence, and Soviet army officials offered
amnesty to Lithuanian deserters who turned themselves in.

    But then Moscow's fist clenched again. Soviet troops, which
had occupied Communist Party buildings earlier, seized
government offices in Vilnius and installed a new chief
prosecutor charged with enforcing Soviet, not Lithuanian, laws.
Meanwhile, a senior military officer in Moscow said no offer
of amnesty had been authorized and criminal cases had been
opened against all deserters. While Mikhail Gorbachev had not
cracked down on the nationalist movement, Sajudis, or the
separatist parliament, his power play had rendered Lithuania's
declaration of independence null and void.

    Nonetheless, the crisis continued to underscore the
difficult role that the army must play in Gorbachev's Soviet
Union. As ethnic conflicts and secessionist movements boil over
in at least half a dozen republics, the military is
increasingly being called upon to quell violence and to police
disputes between citizens and their leaders. Faced with troop
withdrawals in Eastern Europe, budget cuts at home and
increasing criticism in the press, the 4 million-man armed
forces have been plunging rapidly in both public esteem and
institutional authority. Meeting with TIME's editors in New
York City last week, Vitali Korotich, editor of the weekly
magazine Ogonyok and a member of parliament, observed, "After
the party bureaucrats, the military is the most unhappy part
of our society."

    A hint of the army's coming demotion should have been
visible in February 1986, when the 27th Communist Party
Congress adopted the doctrine of "sufficient defense," a clear
departure from the long-held Soviet view that the best defense
was an overwhelming offense. The military budget, which had
regularly been increased as national income grew, was frozen
in 1987. Gorbachev's intentions became clearer in December
1988, when he told the United Nations he would unilaterally cut
his military by 500,000 men and his arsenal of tanks by 10,000.

    Gorbachev coupled his strategic changes with a purge of his
top commanders. He replaced the Defense Minister, the Chief of
Staff and his deputy, the Warsaw Pact commander and his deputy,
and the commanders of all the Soviet military districts, and
he retired all the Marshals of the Soviet Union. He announced
a 14.2% reduction in the defense budget by the end of 1991.
Production of military hardware will drop by 19.5%. His plan
is to save some 30 billion rubles ($49 billion) over the coming
five years. He is also determined to convert defense plants to
civilian use. Some 400 of them are now being retooled. An
article in the daily Trud argued last week that the threat of
fiscal collapse is far more real than any potential attack from
abroad and "makes a huge conscript armed force not only
obsolete but an economic burden we can no longer afford."

    Despite misgivings among more tradition-bound senior
officers, the military leadership generally accepted the logic
of Gorbachev's argument for restructuring. If the economy was
to be repaired, the defense budget would have to be trimmed.
In the process, the high command hoped, the armed forces could
be streamlined and modernized. As it turns out, the process is
far rougher and more disruptive than anticipated. The top brass
now claims that Gorbachev's reforms are damaging the military
and undermining discipline and order in Soviet society as a
whole.

    Defense Minister Dimitri Yazov charged last month that
"nationalist, extremist" groups in the Baltics, the
Transcaucasian republics, Moldavia and some parts of the
Ukraine "are trying to obstruct and wreck the draft." In many
of those areas, the army is denounced as an "occupation force,"
induction notices have been burned and war memorials dismantled.
Last year, Yazov said, 6,500 of the roughly 1 million young
men drafted failed to appear for induction.

    Military leaders were offended when the Supreme Soviet, with
Gorbachev's blessing, exempted 176,000 university students from
the draft in July. "Instead of some university-qualified
recruits," says Dale Herspring, an author and former analyst
at the State Department, "the military had to settle for still
more peasants from Azerbaijan." Since more than half of
draftees are non-Russian, ethnic and social tensions have been
replicated inside the army. Conscripts from the Baltics have
reported beatings and sexual abuse. The crime rate in the armed
forces went up 14.5% last year; 59 officers were murdered, in
contrast to two in 1988 and one in 1987. Colonel General
Vladislav Achalov, the commander of the elite airborne troops,
complained that last year more than 1,500 of his recruits had
criminal records and 500 were known drug users.

    Defense chiefs are also irked by Gorbachev's reliance on
civilian think tanks for advice on sophisticated strategic and
operational issues. "There's deep resentment among the military
leadership over what is considered amateur hour by these
civilians," says Edward Warner, a senior analyst at the Rand
Corporation.

    The end of the cold war adds new pressures. In spite of
Gorbachev's insistence that there are no military solutions to
East-West relations, his high command still tends to believe
it is a zero-sum contest, a question of who prevails over whom.
When Moscow loses the West wins, and vice versa. These days the
Soviet Union is losing Eastern Europe and digging in hard to
keep from losing one of its own republics. The U.S. is not only
winning, many senior Soviet commanders feel, but gloating about
the Soviet decline. "The American invasion of Panama was a gift
for the generals in Moscow," Ogonyok's Korotich said last week,
because they can use it as evidence that the Soviet Union must
not lower its guard.

    General Mikhail Moiseyev, the Chief of the General Staff,
puts the number of troops pulling out of Hungary and
Czechoslovakia this year at 35,000, plus 30,000 family members.
About the same number will leave East Germany and Poland in
1990. Eventually, all the approximately half a million Soviet
soldiers stationed in the Warsaw Pact countries may be
withdrawn. "We will bring the troops home," said Moiseyev, "but
no one has clearly thought what it will cost. Families will
find themselves without apartments or work, children without
schools."

    "Soviet officers who have lived relatively well abroad are
coming back to nothing," confirms a senior Western military
attache in Moscow. Some soldiers are faring even worse; several
thousand are reportedly living in tents in the Odessa area. A
poll of army personnel taken last fall, even before the influx
from Eastern Europe began, found that 91% considered their
quality of life "almost unbearable." Such a mood, said
Izvestia, was "creating a crisis in the army."

    In an implicit criticism of Gorbachev, Defense Minister
Yazov has counter-attacked on the issue of budget cuts. "It is
economically groundless and politically shortsighted," he said
recently, "to try to make the reduction of defense expenditures
the sole method of liquidating the budget deficit and the
resolution of all of today's social problems." He went further,
arguing that a modernization that would shift the emphasis from
mass-conscript armies to smaller forces with high-tech weaponry
would cost more, not less. The idea of eventually dropping the
draft and adopting a volunteer professional army is still
opposed by most of the senior commanders, but if it were ever
tried, it would require more money.

    Western Sovietologists warn against assuming that discontent
within the military means that a coup is in the offing. There
is no example of Bonapartism in Russian history, and the Soviet
army has always been firmly under civilian control. "A lot of
military people are distressed," says retired U.S. General
William Odom, former chief of the National Security Agency who
is now at the Hudson Institute, "but it would be a mistake to
see the friction as evidence of coup thinking." In any case,
he says, the brass is snapping back at its civilian critics
with Gorbachev's permission, in order to release some of the
tensions.

    Stephen Meyer, a Soviet expert at M.I.T., says flatly that
the Soviet armed forces are "not capable of a coup." What is
possible, he and other analysts suggest, is that the military
might one day support a power shift in the Kremlin organized
by civilians. It might then step in to support either a new,
tougher defense policy forced from Gorbachev or a promising
candidate to replace him. But first, says Meyer, the generals
would have to "find a patron," because no such alternative is
in sight.

    Faced with low morale in the uniformed ranks, Gorbachev
seems to have developed a keener appreciation of the military's
worth. Last summer Gorbachev defended his proposed reductions
by saying that the 101 divisions cut had become "feeding
troughs" for officers. Then, after Soviet soldiers restored
order in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku in January, Gorbachev
warned the press against "antiarmy propaganda" and put through
an increase in officers' salaries and allowances that will cost
about $2 billion. Unlike some of his predecessors, Gorbachev
never served in the military. But if his problems persist,
Gorbachev may find himself treating his generals like old army
buddies.