Kremlin Plans to Ease Armed Forces Secrecy : General Sees Move Promoting Public Discussion of Defense Issues, Mutual Confidence With U.S.

The Soviet general staff on Sunday announced plans to declassify broad information about the composition, strength and equipment of the country’s armed forces in an effort to promote public discussion of defense issues, long a taboo subject.

Col. Gen. Makhmut A. Gareyev, deputy chief of the general staff, said that the partial lifting of the country’s tight military censorship stems from the policy of glasnost, or openness, that is a key element of current reforms under Mikhail S. Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party.

Gareyev, speaking to the weekly Soviet newspaper Arguments and Facts, said the move was also intended to promote mutual confidence with the United States. Washington has been pushing Moscow hard to discuss its strategic doctrine, seen by U.S. officials as offensive in character rather than defensive, and to disclose its military spending.

Dialogue With West

“Broader glasnost makes it possible to better acquaint the public with the activities of the armed forces and to establish a constructive dialogue between the Soviet Union and the United States and between the Warsaw Treaty Organization and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) at various levels, including at top military level,” Gareyev said.

In the future, considerable information on “the combat composition, strength and technical equipment” of the armed forces will no longer be classified, Gareyev said, and “many censorship restrictions” will be lifted on tactics and combat equipment.

Information is now being routinely released, he said, that was regarded as too sensitive even for use in restricted Soviet military and specialist publications.

Soviet military leaders have begun to participate in open discussions, often in the press but increasingly at public forums as well, on security issues, Gareyev noted.

The armed forces have also started discussing some of their problems, notably morale problems in units abroad, the maltreatment of young conscripts and the adjustment difficulties of many veterans of the war in Afghanistan.

The Soviet Union took a major step toward public debate of national security issues earlier this year when the treaty with the United States on the elimination of land-based intermediate-range nuclear missiles was discussed--and some aspects of it questioned--by the foreign affairs committee of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s Parliament.

While Washington had learned about the deployment of most of the Soviet missiles, as well as about the sites of their manufacture and storage, from U.S. reconnaissance satellites, the Soviet public discovered the real extent of this element in the country’s arsenal only when the treaty was published here.

‘It Was Rather a Shock’

“For us, it was rather a shock to find that we had a key munitions factory in Volgograd,” a prominent member of the Soviet Peace Committee there remarked recently, noting that SS-20 missile launchers were manufactured there. “We had always told visitors who came that this was a city of peace with no nuclear weapons and no weapons-making capability. We were quite proud of this.”

Genrikh Borovik, chairman of the Soviet Peace Committee, has been pressing the country’s leadership to permit far broader discussion of foreign policy and national security issues and campaigning for sufficient information to allow for informed debate on crucial issues.

Borovik contends that such public participation would probably have prevented the Soviet Union from making and compounding a number of foreign policy blunders over the past 20 years, including the prolonged military intervention in Afghanistan that is now ending.

“One of the big mistakes in our foreign policy during the time of stagnation (under the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev) was in ignoring public opinion,” Borovik said recently when asked about Soviet foreign policy errors, “or at least in not taking public opinion in account when decisions were adopted. . . . The new way of thinking, if I can express it in shorthand, is a change from monologue to dialogue.”

At Gorbachev’s insistence, a broad effort is being made to make much more previously secret information available to the Soviet public to stimulate participation in decision-making at all levels.

KGB Aiding Declassification

Viktor M. Chebrikov, the head of the KGB, the Soviet security service, said earlier this month that even his organization, which is responsible for protecting state, military and economic secrets, is now helping government departments declassify material and examining its own records to see what it can publish.

Legislation now being drafted will make clearer what is secret and what is not, Chebrikov said, and the emphasis will be on disclosing much more than before and expanding glasnost and giving it legal status.

Use of NATO Designation

Until now, strict military censorship has forced Soviet officials to cite NATO or Pentagon information when discussing their own country’s armed forces and defense strategy.

NATO terminology for Soviet aircraft, missiles, submarines and radar is still more widely used here than Moscow’s own terminology. As a result, the Soviet Union’s newest bomber is more often called by the NATO designation Blackjack rather than the TU-160 when it is mentioned at all.

If NATO accepted a recent Warsaw Pact proposal for exchanges of information on the forces deployed in Europe as part of arms control negotiations, more information could be declassified, Gareyev told Arguments and Facts, which appears to have close links with the KGB.

“As confidence-building measures (with NATO) grow wider in scope, further declassification of the activities of various military departments will be considered, and more information on the Soviet armed forces will be provided,” Gareyev said.

“Information on the quantitative and qualitative composition of the Soviet strategic nuclear forces has been made public, all nuclear tests are promptly reported; more and more often we exchange military delegations and invite foreign military observers to exercises and Western and Soviet newsmen to garrisons and special facilities of the Soviet armed forces.”