New-Found Will to Say No Transforms Soviet Military : Shakedown: Armed forces are seen shifting from a centralized mass to republic-based militias.

The Leningrad military commander refused to send his troops into the city, the air force balked at the odious orders from above and one appalled officer in the Pacific fleet even talked his skeleton crew into slipping their crippled submarine out to sea rather than serving the upstart junta.

As reports filter out on the extent of military opposition to last week’s attempted coup, reformers say they are ever more convinced that the Soviet armed forces will never be the same.

Having broken its long, forced servitude to the Communist Party, “the revolutionary romanticism that was locked away in the army has now, finally, come out,” said Vladimir Lopatin, deputy chairman of the Russian Parliament’s Defense Committee.

Furthermore, Lopatin said, the entire structure of the Soviet armed forces can now be expected to change radically, shifting from a centralized mass of 4 million members to republic-based militias, perhaps united under a civilian minister of defense.

Even before newly appointed Defense Minister Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov’s announcement Sunday that he will replace 80% of the military leadership, a colonel on the general staff, Alexander Kondrashev, commented that “the changes have already started, and will reach the highest echelons. We just have to get clear how everyone acted.”

Within military units, no longer will the hated zampolit, the deputy commander in charge of political orthodoxy, interfere with normal functioning, exulted Lt. Alexei Cherevko, who was expelled from his naval unit in Vladivostok for joining the Social Democratic Party.

“It was so unhealthy,” he said, “to have these guys who did nothing and always got the best of everything.”

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin banned all party units in the armed forces in the midst of last week’s coup attempt, and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev issued a similar national decree Saturday.

But the real change came earlier, Lopatin said, “when the army had to make the choice of whom to defend”--the reactionaries backed by the party or the Russian president who renounced his party membership more than a year ago.

“People understood almost right away that this was an anti-constitutional putsch,” said Col. Kondrashev, who helped defend the Russian government building. “We have information that, by the next day, 50% of the personnel of the Moscow military district had come out against it.”

More than 5,000 Soviet officers showed up to defend the building, officials said.

The tank crews who pledged their loyalty to Yeltsin won instant fame, as did former air force chief Shaposhnikov, who earned his current appointment by refusing to throw his airmen behind the coup. But there were thousands of other mutinous heroes whose stories are only now coming out.

“There were such cases!” Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said in delight in a Sunday night television interview. “There were units that refused!”

The tales range from the paratroopers’ lieutenant general who refused to lead his forces into Moscow to Capt. Medvedev, as he is named in the newspaper Izvestia, who persuaded a crew of six to launch his disabled diesel submarine into the Pacific and tried to sail away on the surface flying a Russian flag.

Medvedev was apprehended by a cutter, but he will not face charges, Izvestia reported.

Perhaps the most dramatic, and certainly the most pivotal, of the stories of heroic insubordination that emerged this weekend was that of KGB Maj. Gen. Victor Karpukhin, whose account was distributed in a special issue of the Russian Parliament’s newspaper, Rossiya.

Karpukhin was summoned by KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov at 5 a.m. last Monday, was told that Gorbachev was sick and was ordered to arrest Yeltsin along with the entire leadership of the Russian Parliament and spirit them away to “a specially equipped spot” outside Moscow.

“From the very beginning, I did everything so as not to fulfill the orders of the KGB,” Karpukhin said. And the plotters, he said, had no way around him; his men would obey only him, and his group of special forces was “the only force they could depend on.”

Eventually, “Kryuchkov called me into his office and told me that the fate of the country depended on my actions,” Karpukhin said. “I was given the order to lead the putsch” and put in charge of 15,000 men, special forces from the Interior Ministry and KGB.

Karpukhin devised a plan to storm the Russian government building in the middle of the night by clearing the crowd using tear gas and water cannon, then attacking using helicopters, grenade-throwers and other methods.

But, he said, “thank God, I could not raise my hand. In this situation, everything depended on me. It would have been a slaughterhouse and a bloody meat-grinder. I refused.”

In the moral dilemmas that arose for each such officer, “the army’s eyes were opened, in a psychological way,” Kondrashev said.

The army was blamed for 20 deaths in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi in spring of 1989; for scores of victims in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku the next January, and for 13 deaths in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius last winter.

In all those places, wrote Andrei Krayniy, military commentator for the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, “the army was pulled into political games, then made to take the blame. It seems there was a similar scenario this time. Enough!”

Shaposhnikov, struggling to bring the armed forces back to normalcy, is now clearly concerned that the political upheaval will split the military, even as he assured television viewers Sunday night that the army remains united.

“It has long been clear that the army was divided,” Lopatin said. “The army is polarized, the polarization has gone deep, and now these revolutionary events have shaken up everything.”

The only remedy, Lopatin said, is to get rid of Communist Party cells in the armed forces fast, to insist that all high-ranking officers resign and to cleanse the military of all the commanders who supported the coup. His committee is also demanding a civilian defense minister, he said.

In any case, Lopatin added, given the tremendous backlash from the coup, combined with the Soviet Union’s accelerating disintegration, the army is likely to split along republic lines rather than political ones.

The sudden and mortal threat from Moscow last week, he said, “made republics realize they must have their own armies.”

The Ukraine, second-largest of the country’s 15 republics, passed a law Saturday claiming control over all military units on its soil, including more than 1 million Soviet troops. Armenia, Georgia and the Baltic republics are already building up extensive national guards, and other republics are considering similar plans.

Cherevko said that he and more than a dozen other expelled officers, all members of Shield, a group that agitates for military reform and now claims more than 200,000 members, had already signed up to join a new Russian Federation army.

“I want to put my stripes back on and serve to get back at those scum who kicked me out,” he said.

He said he expects that the army will split completely among all the republics, with the Russian Federation retaining the country’s nuclear weapons but important defense decisions being taken by a council of all the republics modeled along the lines of the Warsaw Pact or North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Shield is proposing that Russia have both a regular army and an extensive national guard, he said.

BACKGROUND

The Soviet armed forces have had what is called one-man control. The commanding officer of a unit or ship was personally responsible for his unit’s political activities. Within each command there was a zampolit , or political officer, who served as assistant commander but also had his own chain of command. The zampolit was responsible for the ideological indoctrination of the enlisted men, ensuring that party directives were carried out and enforcing discipline. The zampolit also acted as “chaplain” and social worker for the crew and was responsible for the morale of the unit.