Military May Be Tempted, Experts Say : Unrest: Growing frustration and despair are reported among officers, who show disdain for civilian leaders.

American experts on the Soviet military said that senior Soviet officers are watching events in the crumbling empire with growing frustration and despair, as civilian leaders appear unable to create a viable authority from the remnants of the Soviet Union.

Military leaders are uncertain to whom they owe loyalty and may be tempted to take matters in their own hands if the disintegration continues, experts said. Neither Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin nor Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has won the trust of the bulk of the 3 million-member Soviet armed forces.

“There is tremendous disdain for the civilian leadership,” said Ilana Kass, a specialist on the Soviet military at the National Defense University. She said numerous senior Soviet officers have told her: “ ‘We handed them the state on a silver platter in August and look what they’ve done.’ There is tremendous disappointment in Yeltsin and Gorbachev, and in events since August.”

But other experts said the military is encouraged by the formation of a Slavic commonwealth because it provides at least a skeleton of central authority to replace the dissolved Soviet state. The new confederation could answer the question that military commanders have been asking themselves since the failed August coup: To whom do I report?

“Every time there’s a new float in the parade, they ask themselves that question,” said Gabriel Schoenfeld, senior fellow in Soviet studies at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Now the Slavic float is going by. Perhaps that will be more durable than any other structures proposed up to now.”

Schoenfeld, who edits the think tank’s magazine “Post-Soviet Prospects,” said the Slavic commonwealth--made up for now of the republics of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (formerly Byelorussia)--is more likely to survive than other possible combinations because the three republics are “tightly integrated economically and demographically interwoven.”

Thomas E. Robinson, of the American Enterprise Institute, said he does not believe the military will intervene directly to preserve the Soviet Union. If military officials intended to do that, Robinson said, “they should have done it long ago. It’s too late now.”

One U.S. official, who declined to be identified by name, said Soviet military leaders would face even greater problems in launching a coup today than the putsch’s leaders did last August.

“I’m not sure the (Soviet) military has it within its power to reverse things,” the official said. “Part of the problem with the coup the first time (in August) was the inability of the troops to take on other Russians. . . . And I would think that there has been even more devolution of central control over forces to the republics, which have already got a large number of forces at least semi-officially under their control.”

Speaking of Soviet military leaders, this official added: “At this point, I don’t see what other choices they have. Yeltsin seems to have outmaneuvered Gorbachev at every turn since the coup.”

Kass, who just returned from a visit to the Soviet Union where she met with a number of senior and mid-level military officers, said that Yeltsin and Gorbachev had squandered much of the military’s loyalty by their inability to address the country’s pressing problems since the military thwarted the August coup. Kass said the military has drawn inward in a process she called “cocooning.”

They have sequestered themselves from the larger society and are concerned chiefly with hoarding food and supplies to survive the winter, Kass said.

Officers and enlisted men show loyalty only to their immediate superiors, she added. “They respond to their own chain of command. The guy immediately above you is the guy you trust and the guy to whom you report.”

She said that she finds this attitude “exceedingly dangerous” and takes quite seriously the rumblings of a new, military-led coup if Yeltsin and other republic leaders do not move quickly to stem the growing sense of chaos.

“I heard over and over again: ‘It cannot stay this way. It’s anarchy, it’s not democracy. We have to take matters into our own hands to save the nation.’ I took it seriously because it came from serious people,” Kass said. “The next coup will be by the majors and the captains. And it is going to have wide-ranging popular support because it is going to come from the bottom, from the grass roots.”

But other specialists dismissed the likelihood of a new coup. Very few senior military leaders believe that they can solve the nation’s social and economic problems, analysts said. The majority fear that any effort to impose order on the country through martial law would be more likely to touch off what the world fears--large-scale civil war in a nation with 27,000 nuclear weapons.

“But at the same time, there are people who are so terrified of the loss of their power, privileges, perquisites and the collapse of everything they believed in and dedicated their lives to, that an effort to seize power can’t be precluded,” said Jeremy R. Azreal, a senior analyst of international affairs at the Rand Corp., in Santa Monica. “I think the most likely scenario is not (a coup) this week but when, and if, there actually are mass unrest, food riots, protests, bigger ethnic clashes and so on” the military could step in to try to restore order, Azreal said.

Azreal said that the Bush Administration is in much the same position as the Soviet military--watching events with concern but unable or unwilling to try to directly influence the fast-unfolding drama.

“We have signaled not only that we’re prepared to recognize those realities but that we would prefer that some centralized military institution remain, particularly to control nuclear weapons,” the RAND expert said. “I don’t think we’ve emboldened Yeltsin and the others, but we made it clear belatedly and reluctantly that we’re prepared to deal with the unstoppable changes that are taking place on the ground.”