Young General to Head Soviet Armed Forces

A 49-year-old Soviet general was promoted over scores of more senior officers and appointed the armed forces’ chief of staff Thursday amid increasing indications here that the officer corps has serious doubts about the unilateral military cutbacks announced by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Col. Gen. Mikhail A. Moiseyev, commander of the Far East Military District and a protege of Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov, replaces Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, 65, as chief of staff and first deputy defense minister, according to a brief front-page announcement in Red Star, the armed forces newspaper.

Moiseyev’s appointment, one of the most important Gorbachev has made, appears to reflect his determination to carry his reform program deep into the armed forces, reorganizing them to conform with his new strategic outlook and recent foreign policy initiatives, modernizing their command structure and rejuvenating their leadership.

Moiseyev, a graduate of the Soviet Union’s top military schools, comes from an entirely new generation of Soviet officers, who were too young to have fought in World War II and whose careers have been entirely in the era of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Akhromeyev, who had held the dual post of chief of staff and first deputy defense minister since 1984, was at first reported to be retiring for health reasons amid widespread speculation that he had opposed the announced unilateral Soviet troop cuts in Central Europe and the 10% reduction in the overall Soviet armed forces.

One of the country’s most respected soldiers and a key participant in recent Soviet-American negotiations on arms control, Akhromeyev had repeatedly spoken out against unilateral reductions, arguing instead that the level of conventional armed forces in Central Europe should be the subject of East-West talks, just as nuclear weapons are.

“Why should we do it unilaterally?” Akhromeyev replied bluntly when asked about such a unilateral move during a visit to the United States last summer. He had earlier declared that the new Soviet policy of “reasonable sufficiency” in arms should not become “a unilateral lessening of our defense efforts.”

And the day before Gorbachev announced the measures in an address to the U.N. General Assembly last week, Akhromeyev had warned in a Bulgarian military newspaper that the West was trying to persuade the Soviet Union to take “one-sided actions” that inevitably would weaken it.

But government officials, who have denied that Akhromeyev resigned in protest, said Thursday that he would become one of Gorbachev’s principal military advisers, continuing to play a key role in the modernization of the Soviet armed forces and in arms reduction negotiations.

“Marshal Akhromeyev’s transfer has nothing whatsoever to do with the reduction of the armed forces,” Viktor P. Karpov, a deputy foreign minister and arms control specialist, told reporters. “The reason is purely his health. The experience of Marshal Akhromeyev is very great, moreover, and it will be used in the future by the supreme organs of the government.”

However, the same issue of Red Star that reported Akhromeyev’s replacement published a selection of letters from career officers apprehensive about the country’s military security--and their own future--after the troop cuts.

Recalling a similar move by the late Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev to reduce the armed forces 30 years ago, the officers urge that, if carried out, the reductions be made carefully, even cautiously, so that the officer corps--which will be more affected than the conscripts who make up the bulk of the army--is not decimated and that the country’s security is not undermined.

“Last time, when Khrushchev did it, the act proved a disaster for many people and influenced negatively the combat readiness of our armed forces,” a retired major general, a military lawyer, wrote. “Let’s guard against repeating the old mistakes.”

But Col. Gen. Vladimir N. Lobov, first deputy chief of the Soviet general staff, writes in this week’s edition of the influential, avant-garde newspaper Moscow News that the 10% cut in the armed forces over the next two years will be “an extremely important step,” shifting resources from the military to the civilian economy.

Lobov said that he, along with other Soviet officers, had been trained to assume that increases in the size of the Soviet armed forces, currently estimated by the International Institute of Strategic Studies to number 5.6 million people, automatically increased the country’s security.

Lobov said that the armed forces are now putting into practice Gorbachev’s concept of “reasonable defense sufficiency” and concentrating on quality rather than quantity.

Lobov was the first senior member of the general staff to endorse the troop cuts, although other officers have recently debated the pros and cons of such a move.

Moiseyev, the new chief of staff, has had a reputation as “one of the rising stars” of the Soviet army, according to Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov. A specialist in military training, he has written frequently in military journals of the need to improve the technical training of the Soviet officer corps.

He served as district chief of staff when Yazov, now defense minister, was the commander of the Far East Military District, which stretches along the Pacific Coast from the Sea of Japan to the Bering Strait.

And he was appointed Far East commander when Yazov was brought to Moscow in the shake-up of the whole Soviet military leadership after a West German youth landed a small plane in Red Square.