Troop Call-Up Leaves Ethnic Russians Bitter

“My Son Was Not Born to Die in Azerbaijan!”

The hand-lettered sign, held up by a Russian mother at a weekend rally in Moscow, demanded the withdrawal of the troops sent to Azerbaijan and Armenia to prevent a potential civil war between the two southern Soviet republics.

“If they want to fight, why is it our responsibility to stop them?” Natalya Kuznetsov declared, articulating the surprising and still growing backlash here against the deployment of troops, even in a peacekeeping role. “Today, my son Misha is in Azerbaijan. Who sent him there, and why?

“Enough Russian blood has been spilled by this government in places like Afghanistan. None need be spilled in Azerbaijan or Armenia.”

Even as the Soviet army tightens its control on Azerbaijan after fighting its way into the republic’s capital of Baku a week ago, strong sentiments are developing, particularly among ethnic Russians, for pulling the troops out before they are trapped in a lengthy peacekeeping operation that already is threatened with guerrilla warfare.

“This is a job for police officers, perhaps, not soldiers,” a young army officer from an anti-establishment military group called Shield told the rally. “We will defend the motherland to the death--that is our oath. But why are we fighting our own countrymen? How great was the danger that the army had to be deployed?”

Troops were sent into Baku after a week of anti-Armenian violence, characterized as pogroms by the government, in which 72 people were killed. According to military commanders, 125 more people, including 27 soldiers and police officers, died in the week of fighting that followed. A number of other deaths, including those of two soldiers, were reported over the weekend.

When the government dispatched more than 100,000 troops to Afghanistan a decade ago for what became the Soviet Union’s longest war, only a few dissidents protested, and they were promptly punished.

But the bitterness left from that 10-year war, the 15,000 Soviet lives that it claimed and the billions of dollars that it cost have made it difficult to use the army, even inside the Soviet Union, in an unpopular cause. That development reflects the many fundamental political changes that are taking place here.

“Why should Russian lads die for these (no-goods)?” a speaker from Pamyat, an ultra-nationalistic group, asked at the rally. The speaker employed a vulgar and highly chauvinistic term that many Russians use for people from Armenia and Azerbaijan, the neighboring southern republic of Georgia and Soviet Central Asia.

“These places are not worth Russian lives. Let them fight each other, let them kill, let them die, but get our lads out of it.”

Although Pamyat is regarded by most Soviet observers as extremist in many of its positions, it draws on an upsurge of Russian nationalism. That trend has been stimulated, in part, by the strongly anti-Soviet, anti-Russian movements in many of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics--and by the visceral but growing feeling that Russia might be better off without those rebellious regions.

The government’s assertion that militant Azerbaijani nationalists, led by the Azerbaijani Popular Front, were about to take over Baku and end Soviet rule there is widely dismissed, even in the Soviet news media.

“Sons and parents ask themselves: What kind of mission do the soldiers fulfill, and for whose miscalculations and irresponsibility will they have to pay with their own blood?” the liberal news magazine New Times commented Sunday.

“Who issued the order?” the newspaper Workers’ Tribune asked in a highly critical account, also published Sunday, of how army reservists were mobilized in three military districts in southern Russia two weeks ago. Russia is the largest republic in the Soviet Union.

Noting that the military ordered only Slavs--Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians--to be called up, apparently to ensure reliability in the politically volatile situation in Armenia and Azerbaijan, the paper said this provoked days of protest demonstrations, mostly by mothers and wives, in the cities of Krasnodar and Stavropol.

Why, the women demanded, were their sons and husbands called upon and not those from other nationalities? Why were any reservists needed? Were there not enough regular troops and internal security forces in the country? And why were they rounded up in the dead of the night and put on planes for Azerbaijan without any explanation, not even the disclosure of their destination? The number of those called up is still undisclosed.

Military authorities began the mobilization secretly, “practically taking away people by force,” according to the independent news bulletin Glasnost. But angry mothers and wives ran after the mobilization units, throwing themselves in front of their trucks and then laying siege to local military headquarters.

Women’s committees were quickly established to organize more protests, including mass demonstrations and warning strikes, and this brought cancellation of the call-up, but only after thousands of the reservists were already deployed in Azerbaijan.

Even local Communist Party officials, few of whom were informed of the move, are expressing their opposition to the mobilization of reservists and their deployment in Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Igor K. Polozkov, the party first secretary in Krasnodar, told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda that the local reaction was so negative, a virtual revolt, that it has threatened the traditionally strong support that the party and government have there.

“The reaction could not have been different,” Polozkov said, criticizing the order’s implementation, particularly the selective call-up of only Slavs and the suddenness with which it was carried out. “Times have changed, and people are totally different now.”

In its defense, the military has explained that, to enforce a state of emergency in Baku, a city of nearly 2 million people, at least 40,000 troops would be needed initially and that more would be required to separate the heavily armed Armenian and Azerbaijani militias elsewhere in the region.

Only 22,000 internal security troops were immediately available, however, and officials have contended that regular soldiers could not be quickly deployed without pulling them out of front-line positions.

But officers belonging to Shield, which seeks democratization of the Soviet armed forces and the application of “new political thinking” there, said the real reason appeared to be the desire of top commanders for all-Slavic units to go into Baku. Reserve units, which are constituted on a territorial basis, are often homogenous while regular units are made up of soldiers from dozens of different ethnic backgrounds.