Draft Dodgers Give Red Army ‘Special Alarm’

With draft-dodging up eightfold in the last two years and anti-conscription campaigns spreading rapidly across the Soviet Union, the Red Army is worried about its ability to defend the country, the chief of the Soviet general staff said Monday.

The official, Gen. Mikhail A. Moiseyev, said the refusal by young men to serve in the armed forces is not so much a lowering of combat readiness as a threat to military morale, an open questioning of authority and a sharp break with accepted loyalties of the past.

With nearly 4 million men still under arms--more than in any other nation--and almost two-thirds of them conscripts, the 6,647 youths who refused last year to “serve the motherland” represented no real loss in personnel, he said. But he said that the growth of the number--up from 837 in 1987 and 1,107 in 1988--is very worrisome.

“Special alarm is being caused in the army by the frequency of attempts to refuse military service,” Moiseyev told the Communist Party newspaper Pravda. “The statistics are very alarming.”

In Washington, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said Soviet officials have good reason to be concerned about draft-dodging, as well as by the potential threat of large numbers of soldiers deserting.

Cheney said that Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov, in the course of a visit to Washington last year, privately expressed concern about the problem. Yazov, Cheney said, “reacted negatively, very strongly” to suggestions that the Soviet Union could help defuse the problem of nationalism in the military by allowing soldiers to serve the Soviet army in the republics where they live.

Pointing out that the Soviet military has always been considered a unifying force that cuts across national and ethnic lines, Cheney said he and Yazov discussed “a litany of problems” but that the defense minister kept returning to his concern about the possibility of large numbers of desertions.

The refusals to serve have expanded a debate in Moscow about the future of the Soviet military--whether it should become a wholly professional force or remain based on conscription--and on its role in society and the political system.

“That there is a need for changes should be clear to everyone,” Lt. Gen. Alexander F. Katusev, the chief military prosecutor, told the youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda last month. “Above all we must decide the function of the army--whether it is a means of defense, a school for reeducation or a labor army, a gigantic reservoir of free manpower.”

Moiseyev, assessing the impact of both the draft-dodging and the broader debate over the military’s role in changing society, made it clear that he thinks greater loyalty and sterner discipline are what are needed. The draft, established in 1918 and incorporated in the Soviet constitution as “an honorable obligation,” should be preserved as a national institution, he indicated.

Key factors, Moiseyev said, are the growing number of refusals to register for the draft in many of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics, particularly Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and the development of an anti-conscription movement in many other areas of the country.

Military authorities complained earlier that in Lithuania, for example, local governments refused to establish conscription commissions, as draft boards are called here, and that youths were being encouraged to join a new militia and border force that the republic was establishing as part of its drive for independence from the Soviet Union.

“Local authorities in a number of republics have adopted anti-constitutional laws that effectively provoke young people to refuse to serve and even to desert,” Moiseyev said.

The armed forces have also been hit by desertions over the past year, as servicemen left their units to return home--to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Moldavia, the Ukraine--in times of crisis, especially ethnic strife.

At least 800 and perhaps more than 1,000 Lithuanians returned to the Baltic republic when it declared its independence and undertook to secede from the Soviet Union last month. Military police have arrested more than 20 of the youths, and a similar number have surrendered under promises of amnesty.

A movement called Geneva-49, which has been active in the Baltic republics, Georgia and other regions in recent months, tries to persuade young men not to serve in the Soviet army, which it denounces as an “army of occupation.” The group justifies its position on the basis of a 1949 Geneva Convention releasing people from the obligation to serve in occupying armed forces.

The Soviet Interior Ministry sharply criticized the group over the weekend, accusing it of playing on people’s ignorance of the convention.

“One must not allow any interference with the spring draft, not even in one settlement or town,” the ministry said. “Each person must fulfill his duty to the motherland.”

The Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have all adopted laws providing for “alternative service” for youths in their own republics. Similar legislation is under consideration in the southern republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, and anti-conscription movements are said to be active and winning support in Moldavia and the Ukraine.

Of 259 youths prosecuted for refusing military service in the Baltic republics last year, only two were sentenced to prison. In the Transcaucasian republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, 1,146 draft dodgers were prosecuted but only one was imprisoned.

The growth of religious beliefs among Soviet youth has brought a growing number of appeals, largely from ethnic Russians, for exemption from military service as conscientious objectors. Most have been placed in construction battalions and not required to undergo military training or take the country’s military oath of allegiance.

The army has faced equally serious problems in Russia itself. In one Moscow district during the autumn call-up last year, only 1 draftee in 10 reported as ordered, according to Komsomolskaya Pravda; in another only 5% showed up on the first day.

When the central government ordered Russian reservists into Armenia and Azerbaijan to halt ethnic violence in January, strong protests by mothers and wives forced it to cancel the call-up.

In addition to the Red Army’s combat units and construction battalions, conscripts also serve with the 340,000-man internal security force and in detachments of the KGB, the security agency.

To ease the controversy over military service, the Supreme Soviet, the legislature, took away the power of the defense minister to conscript the forces he thought necessary for the coming 6 months or a year and gave it instead to the Council of Ministers, the principal government executive body.

Earlier, lawmakers forced the Defense Ministry to release 176,000 university students from active duty ahead of time and ordered deferments for students so that they could complete their courses.

Times Washington Bureau Chief Jack Nelson contributed to this story.