Soviet Soldier Sparks SigAlert in Berlin : Germany: In a sign of crumbling morale and discipline, the lovesick trooper takes an armored vehicle and eludes police on streets and autobahns.

Monday-morning commuters everywhere should spare a minute for the long-suffering rush-hour veterans in Berlin.

Drivers accustomed to fighting the jammed streets and autobahns that have become part of the city’s rush-hour rhythm since the fall of the Berlin Wall a year ago heard a cryptic radio traffic advisory early Monday warning them of another obstacle that made them wonder briefly if the Cold War had ended after all.

“Attention, drivers in Berlin,” the advisory began, going on to say that somewhere out there in the Monday gloom, a Soviet armored fighting vehicle was on the loose.

It was moving fast, erratically, often on the wrong side of the street, with police trying to corral it.

The announcement was the first most Berliners knew of a wild, five-hour joy ride by a Soviet soldier, who later said he was upset after a fight with his girlfriend.

Before it was over, the Soviet trooper had taken the tracked, BMP armored tank-like vehicle, replete with its turret-mounted 30-millimeter cannon, rumbling along the city’s Avus autobahn, onto the main Kurfuerstendamm and across the Wittenburgplatz, the site of one of Europe’s premier department stores, the Ka De We, before eventually heading southeast into the eastern section of the city.

Exasperated police admitted they had their hands full trying to keep track of the armored vehicle, let alone stop it.

“Before you could turn around, he was gone again,” said Berlin police spokesman Hilmar Wozniewski, describing fruitless attempts to hem in the 14.6-ton vehicle with hastily erected barricades.

The armored vehicle smashed into several autos, including a police radio van, during its foray but miraculously injured no one.

The odyssey eventually ended almost where it began--in the southern suburb of Potsdam--when a Soviet officer, working with police, managed to climb onto the armored vehicle and block the small windows.

Police said a 20-year-old Ukrainian soldier was taken into custody.

Although the incident provided a rare sense of adventure to the benumbed Berlin commuters, it marked only the latest and most bizarre sign of crumbling discipline and morale among the estimated 380,000 Soviet troops in eastern Germany--soldiers stranded and disoriented by the end of the Cold War and left struggling to adjust their meager income to life in a hard-currency economy.

It was a sign of the times that within a few hours, a senior Soviet military legal officer, Oleg Filippenko, formally apologized for the incident on behalf of the Soviet military command.

Filippenko also admitted that no one at the Soviet tank park in the village of Saarmund, near Potsdam, realized that the armored vehicle was missing until they learned from German police that it was moving toward central Berlin.

He said what he termed “bad organization” will be investigated.

Under terms of a German-Soviet treaty signed last month, Germany has agreed to pay $9.2 billion over the next four years to offset the cost of Soviet troops until their withdrawal is completed at the end of 1994. But the plight of Soviet soldiers, existing on as little as $20 a month, is believed to have become increasingly desperate.

German television and illustrated news weeklies publish photos of Soviet soldiers scavenging in municipal dumps and relate stories of desertions, rising petty crime and a brisk market in Soviet weapons.

The Berlin magazine Tempo said recently that for the equivalent of $4,000, it had purchased an array of weaponry, including Kalashnikov rifles, anti-tank mines and grenades from Soviet officers trying to make extra money.

Other press reports said that more than 200 Soviet troops have deserted in recent weeks, with about 50 seeking asylum in Germany. Neither Soviet nor German military officials were able to confirm these figures.