New York Times

28 July 1997

[for personal use only]

PLANNED MILITARY CUTS TOUCH A NERVE IN RUSSIA

By MICHAEL SPECTER

MOSCOW -- One bright day last week, Col. Alexander Terekhov walked out of his office in the Moscow Military District headquarters to the nearest subway station. There, he sat down in front of the marble entrance and doused himself in alcohol. Then he dropped a match on his lap.

Terekhov, the chief financial officer at the prestigious Moscow base, died two days later. Friends released a statement saying his suicide had been prompted "by the grave financial position of Officer Terekhov's family."

On the other side of the country, Pvt. Sergei Polyansky apparently grappled with the same problem. While standing guard at a checkpoint in the remote Far East, Polyansky -- who earned the standard conscript's pay of $3 a month -- turned his gun on himself.

He left behind a note saying he could no longer bear the extreme poverty of life as a soldier.

In any other week, two such deaths in Russia's giant, beleaguered army might hardly be noticed. After all, 500 Russian soldiers committed suicide last year, and so far this year's figures are worse.

But last week, after a decade of watching his country's military forces crumble before him, and along with them the intense pride that Russia has always reserved for its soldiers, President Boris Yeltsin signed a series of decrees that will introduce the most fundamental military reforms in the country's modern history.

Within three years the military is to shrink by a third -- from 1.8 million to 1.2 million members. Entire branches of service will disappear, and so will the careers of tens of thousands of officers.

The plan also means the end of hundreds of gigantic, useless factories and scores of towns that for nearly a century have existed only to serve the military.

"This is a monumental decision," said Pavel Bayev, a defense specialist and senior researcher at the Institute of Europe in Moscow. "It will be painful, and it will affect the entire nation. But it is just physically not possible to put this off any longer."

Russia's army is starving in every possible way.

Most military analysts say the Russian army could fully supply only one of its 78 divisions for battle. Giant ships from Murmansk to Vladivostok lie rotting in their berths; rusted hulls have become the central symbol of any former Soviet port.

Army privates are allotted 5,000 rubles (about 70 cents) a day for food. By contrast, prisoners, in conditions that are habitually called appalling, receive 7,750 rubles worth of food each day.

There is never a good time for a president to announce that he is being forced to drastically reduce the size of his country's military. But for nearly a century, the power of Russia's army was immense. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the army's humbling defeat last year at the hands of separatist guerrillas in Chechnya, its diminished status became obvious.

Still, the psychological pain for a nation whose once invincible soldiers now routinely beg for food is hard to overstate.

Coming immediately after Russia endured the humiliation of watching the NATO military alliance advance nearly to its borders, the political freight was especially heavy for Yeltsin. His decision was denounced instantly and widely -- not only by generals desperate to retain their privileges, but by a society that too easily sees its own anguish and loss reflected in its pitiful army.

"I am certain that reform should not be implemented," said Mayor Yuri Luzhkov of Moscow, normally an ally of Yeltsin, but one with strong nationalist leanings. "What does it mean for the country? The situation is too shaky and dangerous and controversial now."

But with a military too poor even to train its soldiers for combat, with 100,000 families of officers homeless and with only 10 percent of servicemen issued boots, topcoats or full uniforms, Russia can no longer afford to pretend that its military is not withered or weak.

"My heart aches for our hungry soldiers, for our officers who do not receive their pay on time, for their families roaming about for years with nowhere to live," Yeltsin said Friday in a radio address. "My heart aches deeply over the constant fall in the prestige of the military profession."

Yeltsin has said he envisions a smaller, more mobile and technologically adept fighting force emerging from the reorganization. With its immense distances, Russia needs a more mobile force.

Probably the longest distance that U.S. forces would have to cover quickly would be from, say, Fort Bragg, N.C., to the Middle East. But that is not as far as from Moscow to Kamchatka, in the Russian Far East. Such distances require mobility, but they also demand bodies.

Yeltsin has promised to build 100,000 new apartments for the servicemen who will lose their jobs. But he has insisted that no more than 3.5 percent of the gross domestic product can be spent on the military, and even many who support the military overhaul do not see how that would provide enough money to accomplish its goals.

Currently Russia spends less than $20 billion on defense each year -- about 10 percent of the U.S. figure, and a third of what Britain spends.

Even cutting personnel is not without costs. Each general who is retired -- there are 3,000 on the roster now, half of whom will have to go -- will receive a large pension and two years' severance pay. In the short term, when savings are needed most, the price for that will be enormous.

"The government has said that it will spend money on defense when the economy improves enough to do that," said Pavel Felgengauer, a leading military analyst. "I don't disagree. But they should tell the country the truth. There is going to be no army. Russia does not have the money to have a real army anymore, particularly if it intends to remain a nuclear power. Russia can afford its nuclear forces and an honor guard to put around the Kremlin. And not much more."

It is the issue of nuclear weapons that causes much of the controversy. Russian leaders have repeatedly asserted that Russia's large nuclear forces must be maintained -- and they could hardly say otherwise.

The country's last claim to might in the modern world is its stockpile of nuclear weapons. Without them the humiliation that so many people feel about the collapse of the Soviet Union would be complete.

Yet the immediate military threats facing Russia today are not from NATO forces, but from along its own borders and from warring regions within the nation. Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Ossetia -- those are the places where battles that threaten the security of Russia have become common. In none of them would the use of nuclear weapons solve any problem Russia could have.

Still, nuclear weapons are not just weapons. They are symbols and they stand for a place in the world, and it is a place that many in Russia are simply unwilling to relinquish.

"There was once, as they say in the West, a monster," said Lev Rokhlin, a retired senior general and former head of the parliamentary defense committee. "It was called the Soviet Union, with its vast military 'machine,' the Warsaw Pact. But for all the West's hostility to the Union, no question anywhere in the world was resolved without its being consulted first."

Rokhlin has unnerved the Kremlin by forming a large organization to tap the vast disaffection over the planned dismemberment of the military. He says the way to save the military -- and the economy -- is to spend money building it up.

"All the reforms that we have seen or heard about," he said, "really lead to one conclusion: the disintegration of the army and its potential. Is that what we want?"

The better question is what can Russia afford, politically and economically. Even government leaders are not optimistic about that.

"We must finally look at the real needs of defense and the country's objective possibilities," Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev told Parliament last week. Sergeyev is Russia's third defense minister in less than a year.

"And of course," he said, "the situation in the country is critical. So we must reform our army against the backdrop of sharply deteriorating social conditions and the demographic situation in society, the falling prestige of military service and Russia's weakening geopolitical positions in general. It won't be easy. But all the other choices would be worse."

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Johnson's Russia List

#1092

28 July 1997

djohnson@cdi.org