For a Russian Deserter, Georgia’s Fight for Independence Is Personal : Rebellion: Rejecting orders to destroy local militias as ‘not just,’ he now trains teen-agers for battle. “I want to be free,” the 20-year-old says.

In the middle of the night, a 20-year-old Russian soldier quietly crept out of his barracks in strife-torn Tskhinvali, deep in the Caucasus Mountains, where he had been sent to fight Georgian militias, and joined the “enemy.”

Now, about two months after he deserted, the blond, blue-eyed Russian is in Tbilisi, the capital of the Georgian republic, as an officer of the three-month-old Georgian National Guard, training its teen-age recruits.

“I left Tskhinvali because our orders were not just,” Dima, who asked that his last name not be printed, said in an interview. “I saw the order with my own eyes. It said we should destroy Georgians in Tskhinvali, and it was signed by Interior Minister (Boris) Pugo himself.”

Dima, who fled just four days after he was posted to the region, was the eighth soldier from his unit to desert. But unlike most of the others, he did not return home.

“I’ve been here since, and I will stay,” the slight young man said. “Georgia is fighting for freedom, and I want to be free.”

This unusual turncoat asserts that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is primarily responsible for the violence in Tskhinvali, wanting a pretext for declaring martial law in all of Georgia, which is moving swiftly toward independence from Moscow. “As long as Gorbachev is still in power and the empire is still intact,” Dima said, “I will stay here.”

Conflict over the Georgian territory known as Southern Ossetia, whose main town is Tskhinvali, erupted into a fierce battle late last year. For more than three months, Georgians wanting to break with Moscow and Ossetians, who support continued Soviet rule, have been fighting for land they both claim.

More than 50 Ossetians and about 30 Georgians have been killed in the conflict, Soviet and Georgian officials say. Hundreds more have been wounded by machine-gun fire, grenades and beatings. Thousands on both sides have fled their homes in Southern Ossetia, which is in northern Georgia. Ossetians, a small ethnic minority, are in the majority in the region.

Soviet state television and most central newspapers have favored the Ossetian side; Georgian officials are convinced that Ossetian extremist bands are armed by the Soviet Interior Ministry’s troops, deployed in the area when the fighting began.

“I saw soldiers renting out armored personnel carriers for 1,000 rubles for 24 hours and Kalashnikov automatic rifles for 400 rubles for 24 hours,” Dima said.

This means that, at the artificially inflated official exchange rate, an armored personnel carrier would cost $1,850 a day and a Kalashnikov would cost $740. An average Soviet worker earns about 250 rubles a month; most soldiers earn less than 10 rubles a month.

“Sure, the soldiers were doing it to earn money, but the important thing is that their chiefs closed their eyes to it,” Dima said. “I know that the soldiers gave their officers a cut.”

To Dima, it is clear who is right.

“There are no Georgian militias,” he said, recalling his unit’s orders to fight Georgian armed bands. “They are fighting with hunting rifles to defend their land and their homes. They do it poorly, but they do something. It’s not an even fight. Ossetians have automatic weapons, and they do not have pity for anyone.”

The young soldier said the Interior troops are systematically carrying out orders to disarm Georgian peasants living in villages around Tskhinvali so they will not even have hunting guns to protect themselves.

Dima is not shy in saying he is willing to return to the battle in Southern Ossetia--this time on the Georgian side. Meantime, he plans to continue teaching 17- and 18-year-old recruits “how to shoot and how to fight like soldiers.” In his free time, he is tutored in the Georgian language. He lives in a Tbilisi hotel.

When he called his parents, who live in the industrial city of Pavlodar, in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan, to inform them of his plans, they did not try to urge him to return home or to his unit, he said.

“I don’t want to go home,” Dima added. “By Soviet law, they can shoot me if they find me.”

But Dima feels safe in Georgia and says he wants to join its fight for freedom from the empire built by Russians, his people: “I think Georgia will win in the end and secede from this empire. Once the empire has dissolved, there will be no more Soviet soldiers to find me and charge me for desertion.”