Red Army Gets a Day in Sun to Flex Its Muscle : Soviet Union: The military also gets a chance to air its views about security and the upheavals sparked by perestroika.

The Soviet military got its day in the sun Wednesday for an impressive flexing of its military muscle on Red Square and the airing of its views about security matters and the social upheavals sparked by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms.

With Gorbachev, who is also Soviet commander in chief, and the Politburo watching, the military held a spit-and-polish parade outside the Kremlin to mark both the 45th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat and the current role of the armed forces, now under unprecedented attack from radicals, reformers and local separatists.

Public response to simultaneous Victory Day parades in the independence-minded Baltic republics--where the 4-million-strong Soviet armed forces are looked upon as occupiers rather than wartime liberators by many--showed the degree to which opinion is now polarized.

In Riga, Latvia’s capital, as many as 10,000 people, many of whom were Russians or from other non-Latvian ethnic groups, gathered on a river embankment to cheer the parading soldiers and demonstrate against the republic’s declaration last Friday proclaiming restoration of Latvian independence.

In Lithuania, where Soviet troops have seized buildings and manhandled deserters since the republic’s proclamation of independence from Moscow in March, youths in the capital city of Vilnius whistled in contempt at the soldiers and derided them as “occupiers.” A group of protesters reportedly tried to block the parade but were dislodged by paratroopers.

In Estonia, many elected officials shunned their republic’s parade.

On a sunny but cool day in Moscow, more than 12,000 troops from the ground forces, navy, air force, KGB border guards and Interior Ministry high-stepped across Red Square with eyes trained on the nation’s leadership assembled atop Lenin’s mausoleum. That was the same spot where Kremlin leaders were standing last week when thousands of Muscovites jeered them during the May Day parade.

Rows of T-34 tanks, considered by many Western experts to be the best any nation produced in World War II, ground across the cobblestones, belching blue clouds of exhaust fumes, as a tribute to the victors in the Soviets’ “Great Patriotic War.”

But the Soviet Union also revealed its newest battle tank and other items of military hardware never before put on display.

To render further homage to the 27 million Soviets said to have perished in the four-year struggle against the Nazis, a graying group of World War II veterans, partisans and underground fighters strode across the cobbles, their medals gleaming and bouncing off their chests.

To incarnate the Soviet army’s vision of itself as a wartime liberator, and not a subjugator as many Balts or East Europeans would contend, a soldier armed with a sword stood atop a float, cradling a little girl as if to protect her.

The pair, reproducing the image of a Soviet victory monument in East Berlin, waited frozen in their poses for at least at hour before the parade got under way.

Tass, the official Soviet news agency, said veterans it interviewed want the monument brought home from Berlin’s Treptow Park, where it presumably might disappear in the process of German unification, to be erected in western Moscow as the Soviet capital’s victory monument.

The 30-minute march-past and related ceremonies were interpreted by Moscow diplomats as the latest of a series of gestures by the Soviet leadership to the military, which is now seeing its ranks thinned by half a million men. The armed forces also feel multiplying pressures to cut costs and mounting press criticism and public opposition as a result of glasnost.

The Victory Day parade, the first since 1985, “is a shot in the arm for those who want to show their pride,” said U.S. Ambassador Jack F. Matlock, who watched from the VIP gallery.

Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov, in a speech before the start of the parade, voiced the military’s concerns over the current course taken by Soviet domestic and foreign policy, although he explicitly pledged the armed forces’ loyalty to Communist Party policies.

“Under the influence of the deep transformations in the Soviet Union, there have been positive changes in international life,” Yazov said. “Dialogue is taking the place of confrontation.

“However, these positive changes are not yet irreversible,” he said, speaking from the mausoleum with Gorbachev next to him. “The military danger still remains. In these conditions, the Soviet Union maintains its defense capability at the necessary and sufficient level and is carrying out a radical transformation of its defense structure, all of which constitutes military reform.”

Although Gorbachev had no visible reaction, Yazov’s assessment of the international scene was notably more cautious than the phrasing that the country’s civilian rulers are now using as a May 30 superpower summit in Washington draws near.

State-run Soviet television, during its live broadcast of the parade, commented that the world is expecting much from the summit and said the main goal of Soviet foreign policy is to negotiate a halving of the superpower strategic arsenals.

Yazov also spoke of the Soviet people’s “unshakable faith” in communism and the “mighty possibilities of the socialist organization of industry and agriculture.” Gorbachev and his allies, in contrast, are stressing the need for rapid implementation of elements of a capitalist market to rescue the nation’s reeling and shortage-plagued economy.

The defense minister, who is a non-voting member of the Politburo, also voiced concern over the breakdown in inter-ethnic relations that has fueled resistance to compulsory military service in the Baltic and Caucasus republics and, in the case of Armenia and Azerbaijan, led to virtual civil warfare.

“The war convincingly showed the stability of the Soviet state structure, the indestructibility of the fraternal friendship of the peoples of our country,” Yazov said. “It confirmed that not apart, not alone, but only in a tight union, under mutual respect, help and collaboration, can woes and difficulties be overcome.”

According to NATO military attaches, Soviet equipment shown for the first time Wednesday included a variation of the T-80 tank and the BMD-2 airborne combat vehicle, which is armed with a tank-killer missile.