Soviet Union Heading for a Showdown

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.