Soviet Union Red Army Blues

By Bruce W. Nelan

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.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Moscow and Bruce van Voorst/Washington