TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/080690/0806006.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 36

SOVIET UNION

Heading for a Showdown


As illegal nationalist forces roam the countryside, Gorbachev
issues a decree demanding that they disband

By PAUL HOFHEINZ/MOSCOW


    At 6 a.m. a young man stands outside an olive-green military
tent in the mountains along the bank of Lake Sevan in Armenia.
"Votki!" he bellows. "Get up!" In minutes, 30 young men, all
of them under 18, file out of the tent to begin their morning
exercises. By noon they have jogged six miles, practiced
hand-to-hand combat and had a lesson in Armenian history. "We
need our own army," says Razmik Vasilyan, commander of the
Armenian National Army, a semi-underground military force that
has grown to 10,000 men since it was founded nearly a year ago.
"The Soviet army simply cannot guarantee the security of
Armenia."

    For months, illegal military units like Vasilyan's have been
forming all across the restive Soviet republics, from Central
Asia to Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. In Armenia, nationalist
forces clashed with Soviet troops deployed to prevent ethnic
fights with neighboring Azerbaijanis, resulting in the deaths
of two officers in the Soviet army, 30 soldiers from the
Armenian side and three civilians. Several weeks ago, violent
battles erupted between local militias and the army in the
Central Asian republic of Kirghizia, where Soviet soldiers are
trying to end fighting between ethnic Uzbeks and Kirghiz.

    Last week President Mikhail Gorbachev finally ordered these
local vigilante groups to disband, charging that they
"encouraged irresponsibility" and "threatened human lives." He
gave them 15 days to demobilize and hand over their weapons,
and threatened to use force if they resisted.

    Even if the decree is heeded, however -- and that is a big
if -- Gorbachev will still face a major problem: the rot that
has infected the 4.5 million-strong Soviet armed forces. It has
spread beyond nationalist resentment into the very nature and
role of the army itself. Estonia and Lithuania have passed
legislation allowing draft-age boys to opt out of military
service, and Georgia and Russia may soon follow suit. In this
year's spring call-up, the number of outright draft dodgers has
grown to an estimated 20,000. In Armenia a mere 7% of draftable
boys bothered to answer their induction notices.

    In the wake of Gorbachev's liberalizing reforms, the once
proud armed forces have grown increasingly demoralized, and
their popular prestige has plummeted. Young recruits complain
of rampant hazing, even homosexual rape. Ethnic violence has
racked many units; some military men claim that more Soviet
soldiers have died in perestroika-era ethnic clashes than in
Afghanistan. "How can an army that can't defend its own soldiers
defend an entire country?" asks Valentina Zhukova, 42, whose
son Edward was killed under mysterious circumstances while he
was on active duty in Siberia. "They have no prestige at all."

    In response, reform-minded young officers have begun to push
for change. Unlike the top brass, this new generation of
military men takes a more independent approach to the army's
troubles than the one dictated by orthodox communism. They have
proposed a radical agenda that includes abolishing the draft,
turning the conscript force into an all-volunteer army,
expelling party cells from military units and permitting the
formation of territorial reserve units as a way to check the
flow of soldiers into unofficial regional corps.

    In the Supreme Soviet, Vladimir Lopatin, a young Deputy and
major in the naval forces, has taken up the cause. He has
drafted a challenging 15-page reform plan calling for a phased
transition to a professional army while permitting the
republics to set up their own corps in the interim. Defense
Minister Dimitri Yazov has categorically rejected these
proposals, arguing that a smaller all-volunteer army would be
too expensive and too risky in a country with more then 37,000
miles of borders to defend. But Lopatin has already begun to
attract followers. The young officer's feisty attacks in
parliament on the generals have become so popular that a joke
is going around Moscow about him. Question: "What's the highest
rank in the army?" Answer: "People's Deputy."

    Another group of officers has banded together in an
organization called Shchit (Shield), dedicated to democratizing
the notoriously conservative military. Shchit's members have
demanded that Communist Party committees be removed from
military units so that all political parties can compete
equally for support among the troops. "Our goal is to make sure
that the army is never again used against its own people," says
Vitali Urazhtsev, 46, Shchit's founder. The group claims to
have 3,000 members in military installations around the country.

    Not surprisingly, the senior military brass is not fond of
Shchit. Most of the movement's leaders, including Urazhtsev,
have been taken off active duty and expelled from the party.
Now many officers keep their allegiance to the new organization
secret. Says Nikolai Moskovchenko, 35, a major removed from
active duty earlier this year for supporting the reformers:
"The majority of soldiers and officers are with us."

    As one of the most conservative groups in Soviet society,
the armed forces would seem to be an obvious target for
Gorbachev's reforming zeal. But with so much pressure building
inside the military for change, sheer momentum may bring about
the kind of changes Gorbachev wants, without the President's
having to lift a finger.