Big Parade May Be Balm for Restive Soviet Military

When World War II-vintage tanks trundle across Red Square this morning, the roar of their engines will be a hymn to an institution once virtually sacrosanct but now subject to increasingly harsh criticism: the Soviet armed forces.

On this Victory Day, when the Soviet Union marks the 45th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender and the end of the Red Army’s long trek to Berlin, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the commander in chief, has ordered a military parade. But his decision and other recent Kremlin actions are motivated as much by the need to placate present-day soldiers as the desire to honor veterans of what is known here as the Great Patriotic War.

For five years into perestroika, Gorbachev’s national restructuring drive, many of the leaders of the 4-million-strong Soviet armed forces, the world’s largest standing military force, are increasingly leery about where their nation is headed, viewing ethnic strife, secession movements and looming economic collapse as natural out-growths of Kremlin policy.

Of special concern to the brass are the rise in draft-dodging and resistance to compulsory military service, the subordination of top generals and admirals in the crafting of national security policy to what one general derided as civilian “new thinkers,” unprecedented public criticism of the military as a “parasite” feeding on society and a palpable decline in its prestige.

“Political loudmouths are cropping up in our country,” an irate Marshal Viktor G. Kulikov, the former Warsaw Pact commander, said this week. “Denigrating the military feat by the Soviet people, they never think of the fact that they can live today because fallen soldiers paid for this right on the battlefields of the last war.

“We are not icons, we do not demand prayers,” Kulikov said. “But we definitely do not deserve insults and we will not tolerate them.”

In what must be a nightmare for older commanders like the 68-year-old Kulikov, who commanded a tank brigade against the Nazis, the specter of a strong, united Germany has also reappeared, with the blessing of Soviet political leaders to boot.

For many in this nation, which by current official count lost a staggering 27 million soldiers and civilians during its four-year struggle with the Nazis, no number of diplomatic guarantees of Germany’s peaceful future could suppress all qualms.

In recent months, Gorbachev has been using the tactic of the “knout and the cookie”--the Russian version of “carrot and stick”--to get the military more solidly behind his domestic agenda and foreign policy initiatives that include a unilateral 500,000-man cut in the armed forces. He did it again Tuesday, waxing both reassuring and critical as he addressed a group of officers and World War II veterans at the Bolshoi Theater.

“We are far from being satisfied with the current situation in the army. And of course it cannot be beyond the pale of criticism,” Gorbachev told his audience, who listened in stony silence. “Our perestroika forces us to have a new look at the army.”

He also rejected calls from some quarters of the military that he crack down on “anti-socialists” in Soviet society. Earlier this week, in a meeting with veterans, he shook off suggestions that he become a strong-arm ruler, saying: “When people say I should use my power, I understand it to mean that law should guide our society.”

However, Gorbachev also vowed that the armed forces will be given adequate means to defend the country. In recent months, the leadership has also plied top commanders with favors, and U.S. officials even report that the Soviets revamped their stance at the superpower arms talks to assuage the military’s worries that the Kremlin is neglecting national security for the sake of meager foreign policy gains. (One of Gorbachev’s top advisers, Alexander N. Yakovlev, denied that charge last week.)

In pronouncements by career soldiers, there is often the clear feeling that they have become virtual social outcasts, with the Soviet people and Communist Party they have been defending now deaf to their concerns.

“Political nihilism, draft dodging, egoism and nationalism are growing among youth, together with the crime rate and selfishness,” a retired army colonel from Vitebsk said recently. “We fail to understand the positions of many publications and the placidity on the part of the ideological departments of the (Communist Party) Central Committee.”

Of particular concern is how soldiers now being withdrawn from Eastern Europe and brought home will be housed in this apartment-short society and what the government will do to retrain the half a million people it is cutting from the military rolls to help find work in civilian life.

Today’s parade continues the Soviet leadership’s overtures to World War II veterans and the men and women who have succeeded them. Military attaches from Atlantic Alliance countries say the affair has all the trappings of a hastily laid-on event. At the most recent parade, in 1985 on the 40th anniversary of Victory Day, Soviet officers had indicated that the next would be in 2005, the 60th anniversary.

At the foot of the Kremlin’s brick walls, a regiment of veterans, home-front workers, partisans and underground resistance fighters will march across Red Square, preceded by the red banner hoisted atop the Reichstag when Berlin fell to the Soviets.

Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov and other dignitaries will look on from Lenin’s mausoleum, where Gorbachev and the ruling Politburo stood when tens of thousands of demonstrators jeered them at May Day celebrations last week.

World War II-era equipment such as T-34 tanks and “Stalin organ” rocket launchers have been taken out of mothballs and will appear in the parade. But the Soviets have also promised a lavish showing of state-of-the-art weaponry, including the first public display of the new BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicle, the BM-22 multiple rocket launcher, the SA-10 surface-to-air missile, a combat vehicle for airborne troops and a new medium tank.

“Saying this parade is just about World War II is a lot of horse-hockey,” one Western military attache said when asked to comment on the array of modern hardware.

A recent promotion for the burly, bushy-browed Yazov is also a sign of the political leadership’s new attention to military sensitivities. The defense minister was elevated to the rank of marshal from general of the army last week, despite previous indications that Gorbachev had ruled that marshal’s rank would no longer be conferred in peacetime.

HELP FOR MOSCOW--Bonn hinted of a joint effort to aid the Soviet economy. D1