Trouble Among Soviet Troops : Army on the ‘Brink of a Caldron’

The Soviet government has suspended for at least a month its regular spring call-up of 18-year-olds for two years of military service. This unprecedented action was forced by mounting resistance to conscription, especially in a number of non-Russian republics where new laws allow alternatives to military service. Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Communist youth newspaper, reports that draft dodging rose sixfold last year over 1988. The army, it writes, is “on the brink of a caldron.” As senior defense analyst John G. Hines of the Rand Corp. recently told Congress, “the Soviet military establishment is an institution under siege.”

Fresh evidence of that could be seen this week, both in the effort to boost military morale with a hastily arranged World War II Victory Day parade in Moscow’s Red Square and in some of the remarks made as part of the observance of Germany’s surrender in 1945. A little-known Soviet admiral drew prolonged applause from a crowd of veterans when he called on President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to invoke strict law and order to punish draft evasion, desertions and insults directed against the military, particularly in the Baltic states. Gorbachev’s answer was not what hard-liners wanted to hear. The country, he said, would not go back “to the atmosphere of the past.” Democratization would come, and it would affect the military along with everything else.

A military whose discontents have deepened as its authority has declined under perestroika isn’t going to be mollified by such comments. The grievances are formidable, and by no means due only to the dampening of the military’s voice in foreign and security policies.

Military morale has plummeted along with military prestige. The shrinkage of the Soviet armed forces following pullbacks from Afghanistan, the Chinese border and Eastern Europe has taken hundreds of thousands of men from the minimal comforts of military life and thrust them and their families into a civilian economy unable to provide them with housing or jobs. Meanwhile, rising ethnic tensions have forced a reluctant army to play policeman in rebellious republics, even as it has had to contend with its own internal ethnic splits, not least between its mainly Slavic officers and enlisted ranks filled increasingly by non-Russian-speaking Muslims.

A Soviet military riven by internal discord and wounded by a loss in status is probably less to be feared by the outside world. But a military under assault, one whose dispirited and even desperate officers could increasingly be drawn to the country’s most ultra-nationalist and anti-democratic elements, might also prove to be a greater domestic danger than ever before. Perestroika has downgraded the military’s role in Soviet life. In the process, it has given rise to a simmering anger that could yet have dramatic political consequences.