Officers Demand Unity for Ex-Soviet Military : Armed forces: Yeltsin vows to try to prevent a breakup, wins applause with promises of housing.

Bemoaning the dissolution of the Soviet Union, more than 5,000 military officers demanded Friday that the former Soviet armed forces remain unified and battle-ready under a single command.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin tried his best to woo the officers, one of the country’s most conservative and well-organized forces. He committed himself in strong terms to try to prevent the military’s breakup and promised to improve officers’ housing.

But he repeated a position that other leaders in the former Soviet Union have found threatening: If other republics force the military breakup and form their own armies, giant Russia is in the best position to create its own powerful armed force and it will do so, he said.

Indeed, even as Yeltsin spoke of a unified military under the joint command of leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States, he announced that Russia is taking under its jurisdiction all troops located outside the Commonwealth. Russia, he said, will begin negotiations on the fate of these troops, including those in former Soviet republics that did not join the Commonwealth--Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Georgia--as well as those in other countries.

To the officers assembled for the daylong Kremlin meeting, though, Yeltsin pledged that “Russia . . . will fight to the death for unified armed forces.”

But it was with his offer of 120,000 apartments and 70,000 quarter-acre plots that Yeltsin started to win over the disgruntled officers. When the crowd remained silent after hearing his housing proposal, Yeltsin smiled slyly and asked the stony-faced officers from around the country: “Why aren’t you reacting? Don’t you like it?”

Anticipating their concern about money to build on these plots, Yeltsin rubbed his thumb and forefingers together and promised to give them cash from the sale of surplus military equipment. The officers then finally started to smile back at him and applaud.

Throughout the day, one officer after another had trooped to the podium to voice support for keeping together the 3.7-million-member former Soviet military.

At the end of the first-ever session of the All-Army Officers Assembly, the officers declared their intention to resist the breakup of the old Soviet force into separate armies and navies for each of the former Soviet republics. “We do not want political aims, personal interests and the ambitions of some shortsighted leaders to split us,” the resolution said, in part.

The Officers Assembly was convened because of widespread discontent among military personnel with political leaders’ attempts to carve up the former Soviet armed forces. The officers decided to try to seize control of their fate by calling the meeting and formally organizing themselves into a political force.

Although the leaders of the 11 republics in the Commonwealth have agreed on joint control of strategic forces, there is a fierce debate over whether the Commonwealth will have one or many armies. Four of the republics--Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan and Moldova--want their own armies.

“The course of events has reached the limit beyond which there will be chaos, a national and perhaps even a global tragedy,” said Air Force Marshal Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov, the interim commander in chief of the Commonwealth’s armed forces. He cautioned the officers that they cannot prevent the military from splitting up, now that each former Soviet republic is an independent country.

But he stressed that, in practical terms, there must be a transition period of at least two or three years when there should be some joint command.

He thus indirectly criticized the governments of Ukraine and the other republics for moving too fast to create their own armies.

So far, 68,000 former Soviet troops have taken loyalty oaths to Ukraine, including 15,000 officers, Ukraine Defense Minister Konstantin Morozov said on a talk show Friday on Ukrainian television. Only 1,230 officers have refused to take the oath.

Morozov criticized the Officers Assembly, saying the Ukraine’s position was not being considered. “The meeting in Moscow is taking place under the leitmotif: A single state and a single armed forces,” he said. “My attitude toward this is: If there is no unitary state, there cannot be a unitary army.”

Ukraine’s President Leonid M. Kravchuk was invited to the officers’ meeting but did not show up, angering many. Yeltsin and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev were the only leaders to attend.

Maj. Yevgeny Suprun, a Ukrainian artillery officer who attended the meeting in Moscow, said during a break that the assembly was fighting against a done deal: “It is quite clear that Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan and Moldova will never concede to any model of unified armed forces, and no one will make them change their minds. Although feelings run high in the assembly hall, this meeting will not change a thing.”

In his speech, Yeltsin said that he considers the joint command of strategic forces, agreed to by the Commonwealth leaders, to include the navy, the air force, the strategic nuclear weapons, the tactical nuclear weapons and the intelligence forces. But he noted that the future of the fleets in the Black Sea and Caspian Sea is being decided by committees.

While stressing his desire to keep the Soviet military together, Yeltsin acknowledged that other republics may force the division of Soviet conventional troops. If most Commonwealth members opt for national armies, Russia too will be forced to create one, he said.

Speaking to the officers, Yeltsin concentrated on the problem first in the minds of most military commanders: the housing shortage. As many as 300,000 military families need housing, and at least 200,000 families, 120,000 of them stationed on Russian territory, have no apartments at all, he said.

Yeltsin pledged that within the first half of this year, 120,000 apartments will be made ready in Russia for the military families in need. “Those heads of administration who fail to fulfill this decision and the president’s decree will be dismissed,” he added.

He pledged to supply quarter-acre plots in the popular Moscow and St. Petersburg regions to 70,000 families of demobilized officers. To help the former officers build homes in these cash-strapped times, Yeltsin said he was making plans to sell surplus arms abroad and give the profits to them.

“We will direct the hard currency yields from this to housing construction for officers,” he said. “We will pay from $1,000 to $3,000 to each officer to build a house on his plot of land.” (Because the Russian currency is so weak compared to the dollar, $3,000 can build a roomy, two-story house.)

Special correspondent Mary Mycio in Kiev and Times researcher Sergei Loiko in Moscow contributed to this report.

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