A New Discontent Surfaces in Red Army Ranks : Soviet Union: The grumbling even spawns rumors of a military coup, but officers say the mood merely reflects the air of change in the country.

They grumble in public as never before and challenge Communist authority in unsoldierly fashion, but to a man, Soviet officers say civilian fears of a military takeover are wildly exaggerated.

“It’s not even worth talking about such questions because they don’t correspond to reality,” said Col. Gen. Boris Gromov, the ruddy-faced commander who led Soviet troops out of Afghanistan in February, 1989, his words punctuated by the thunder of firing from a nearby artillery range.

Such questions arise, however, in Kremlin corridors and in the media, because the Soviet army can no longer hide the deep discontent in its ranks as it grapples with cutbacks, shortages and its vastly reduced role in the new Soviet Union.

Domestic critics and Western experts agree that the Soviet armed forces are an institution in crisis.

A rare official tour of army bases laid on for foreign reporters this month turned up signs that political change is indeed beginning to percolate, slowly but visibly, into the barracks and mess halls. The defenders of the motherland are as patriotic as ever, but many now say politics, especially Communist Party dictates, should have no place in the army.

At a paratrooper training camp near the village of Malorita, deep in the birch and pine woods near the Polish border, unsupervised interviews brought very plain words from junior officers recently returned from Hungary.

“They should get rid of all the zampolits, “ Lt. Kirill Paltsev said, referring to the political officers charged with enforcing Communist orthodoxy among the troops.

“We think the army should be depoliticized,” said Victor Znamensky, a tall senior lieutenant in camouflage fatigues and the blue-and-white striped shirt that is a paratrooper trademark.

With the Communist Party’s constitutional monopoly on power now abolished and its prestige plummeting, a dispute is growing over whether party control over the armed forces, a basic principle dating back to the civil war that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, should be ended.

According to Maj. Vladimir Lopatin, a Soviet lawmaker and outspoken advocate of military reform, almost 90% of officers favor the idea. But the higher command, especially the zampolits, view the prospect of a non-Communist army with dismay.

“There are elements of instability in the economy, in the social sphere and in ethnic relations,” said Pavel Ilarionov, deputy political chief of the Leningrad Military District. “The most stable organism in the state is the armed forces. We can’t let opponents of the socialist course into the army.”

Still, Ilarionov acknowledged that the Communist grip on the army will have to loosen in accordance with the political tenor of the times. The party leadership agrees. The Communist Party, at its national congress last month, endorsed transforming the zampolit into something akin to a civics teacher, inculcating patriotism in the ranks. But the congress insisted that party cells in the armed forces remain.

Officers in the paratrooper camp near Malorita, ignoring current defense ministry policy, also called for transforming the army from the world’s largest standing force, 4 million men, into a whittled-down professional corps of volunteers.

For the brass, political changes have meant that the nation’s defenders now must seek protection themselves in the fight for a share of resources that grows ever sharper as the economy crumbles.

“Give us housing so that I know my family will have a place to live--that’s the only problem,” said Maj. Gen. Vladislav Lisovsky, deputy commander of the Leningrad Military District.

“Our social protection is very weak,” he told reporters in the immaculate barracks of an artillery base outside the Leningrad suburb of Pushkin. “Even now, I don’t have an apartment in Leningrad.”

Lisovsky and his family moved to the city of 5 million a year ago, and are still living in a dormitory.

With an estimated 75,000 officers’ families already lacking private apartments and tens of thousands more soldiers streaming back from Eastern Europe under troop withdrawal agreements, the housing crunch is growing more extreme.

An additional 123,000 Soviets, mainly officers, are expected to arrive from Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the near future.

Officers at Malorita said that although shopping and salaries were better in Hungary, they have no complaints about their new posting. But members of the Soviet legislature’s defense committee warned last month that discontent among officers over living conditions had reached the point where it could hurt the army.

“The lack of housing, lack of normal medical care, unsatisfactory supplies of food products and unemployment among wives has negative effects on the morale of officers and non-comissioned officers,” the official Tass news agency reported from the committee session.

In the meantime, the army does what it can, on its own. It has stopped constructing anything but officers’ housing, according to Col. Andrei Mironov, head of an artillery base near Pushkin. And the stroybats, the construction battalions that formerly were lent out to various ministries, now work only for the army, he said.

The housing shortage brings the army into mounting conflict with civilian authorities who are supposed to provide apartments for officers. But local governments, facing in some cities a waiting list of 10 years for civilian housing, are using their increased powers to say no to the military.

The lack of decent living conditions are causing a “catastrophic” decline in the interest and respect young people show for the army, according to Lopatin.

Members of Shchit, or Shield, a group founded last year to defend servicemen’s interests, warn that anti-army sentiment is growing and say authorities are not moving to counter it.

Top-ranking officers have begun airing their complaints from the podiums of the national legislature and Communist Party meetings, less to lobby for help than to complain about shady campaigns to discredit the armed forces and damage morale.

“Anti-army propaganda is taking abnormal forms,” Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov complained earlier this year.

But paratrooper Victor Znamensky said he could see some good in the army’s changing image. “The romanticism is over,” he said. “That can only make the army cleaner.”

The old image, however, still makes some people nervous. The army command’s belligerent public statements have frightened many, who see them as warning shots preceding a possible takeover attempt by officers fed up with painful reforms and insults to their honor.

Warnings of a military coup surfaced earlier this summer when a group of 47 politicians, scientists and officers published a letter suggesting that conservative officers united with other anti-reform forces could seek to take power.

With the crime rate spiraling, ethnic conflicts verging on civil war in some areas and the economy in increasing disarray, it would seem natural to many for the military to step in and impose order.

The warning letter caused a small storm at the Communist Party congress, which was under way when it was published. Judging by Gen. Gromov’s preemptive strike at the coup question, made at an improvised news conference near the firing range in the Kiev Military District that he now commands, the army knows the storm has not yet dispersed.

“It’s impossible, and it couldn’t happen,” Maj. Gen. Lisovsky of the Leningrad District said emphatically. “For the sake of what? There’s no reason to do it. None.”