Russians Are Coming, but to Do What? : Baltic crackdown risks chilling relations with Washington

The Soviet Defense Ministry has ordered thousands of paratroopers to the three Baltic republics, bolstering the occupying army that for more than 50 years has kept the once-independent states bound firmly to the Soviet Union.

The primary mission of the elite troops is to round up draft dodgers and army deserters. No doubt that effort will be pursued ruthlessly, even bloodily. But no one in Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania expects that the crackdown will be confined to this single objective. The powerful separatist impulses in the three republics are a growing danger and embarrassment to a regime desperately seeking to preserve the Soviet empire’s territorial unity. In the spring of 1990, the Baltic states declared themselves independent of Moscow’s rule. In the winter of 1991, Moscow is forcefully acting to reassert its control, if need be with full military force, and even at the risk of chilling its relations with Washington.

President Mikhail Gorbachev’s easing of restraints has had many consequences, some unanticipated. To Soviet military leaders, none has been more grievous than the collapse of discipline that has seen a rising number of 18-year-olds, mainly in the restive non-Slavic republics, refusing to report for military duty. The numbers are staggering. The defense ministry says only one in eight Lithuanian youths drafted last year actually reported for service. In Latvia and Estonia, only about one in four answered the call. Armenia’s response rate was only slightly better. Georgia, with a compliance rate of only 10%, was far worse. Overall, draft dodging last year rose six-fold over 1988.

For a frustrated and conservative military leadership--one that has already seen the loss of its eastern European outposts, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the elimination of many of its prized weapons systems--this mass and spreading refusal to serve is perceived as an intolerable threat. It is also one that the military, with Gorbachev’s approval, feels it can do something about.

It’s impossible not to sympathize with those young men who evade the draft or who have deserted from the armed forces. For recruits, Soviet military life even in the best of times is nasty, brutish and sometimes short. Official mistreatment is routine, unofficial and sometimes even fatal hazing is sanctioned. In recent years especially, ethnic minorities have been singled out for particular abuse. Those unfortunate enough to be caught in the Baltic dragnet now being spread will almost certainly face particularly severe treatment. They, and their families and friends who are sheltering them, know that. That could lead to widespread resistance, triggering--maybe calculatedly--a harsh response. That’s why the White House, in powerful language, denounces the new troop movements as “provocative and counterproductive.”

Will the roundup become the occasion for sweeping new repression in the Baltic states, while the attention of the United States and European nations is on events in the Persian Gulf? Soviet tanks moved to crush the Hungarian independence movement in 1956 at the very moment the West was preoccupied with the Suez crisis. The Baltic states remember that. So, certainly, does Moscow.