Colonel’s Cry: ‘It’s My Entire Life’ : Military: Sadness and anger mark a gathering of officers of the old Soviet army.

Standing before khaki-clad multitudes of his fellow officers on Friday, Lt. Col. Melis Bekbasynov abandoned his army-bred stoicism and gave voice to his pain.

“The army is my army,” he said. “For me, it’s the measuring stick of my life. It’s my pride, my soul’s pain, my labor and sweat. It’s my entire life. It’s my father, who defended Leningrad, and my brothers, officers of the armed forces. What is happening to all of it?

“And who decreed,” Bekbasynov asked, his sadness giving way to the anger that played often over the thousands of clean-shaven faces, “that we should sacrifice our fates and the well-being of our families on the altar of the vanity of a few current leaders?”

The Soviet military’s officer corps gathered 5,000-strong Friday in the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses. It was a group of very troubled men, each uncertain of the future that was once assured him as a member of the world’s largest armed forces and the servant of a superpower.

With the massive Soviet military’s breakup among the former Soviet republics now looking more and more inevitable, fathers are worrying about facing their soldier sons across a battlefield, if they end up serving different states. Officers are watching the unity of their troops give way to ethnic enmity. And seasoned veterans are wondering whether anyone will pay them a pension and give them a place to live out their retirement.

Officer after officer expressed indignation and anxiety on Friday, both in strident public speeches from the podium at the nationally televised All-Army Officers Assembly and in private remarks made during the breaks in the fresh, freezing air of Red Square.

For some, the breakup of the 3.7-million-member former Soviet armed forces threatened personal abasement, as the 11 members of the Commonwealth of Independent States potentially take over some troops on their territories and send back home those who refuse to swear allegiance.

Adm. Igor Kasatonov, who commands the Black Sea Fleet that both Ukraine and Russia have laid claim to, complained that, “In the history of all states, in the history of all civilized humanity, there has never been a precedent that, along with an army’s property, arms and supplies, its people were nationalized, as well.”

Consider, Kasatonov said, the case of the Kochezhkov brothers. They are identical twins, sons of a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father, both navy colonels, one based in the port of Baltiysk and serving in the Baltic Fleet, the other serving in the Black Sea Fleet.

“Now, they are foreigners to each other,” he said. “And if the Black Sea Kochezhkov refuses to swear allegiance to Ukraine, first he’ll be an occupier, and then a refugee. And he and his family will have to move to his brother’s two-room apartment in Baltiysk. And I’m sure the six of them will be very happy in that two-room apartment in Baltiysk.”

Other officers warned with surprising candor that the armed forces were already showing frightening signs that their capabilities are being badly hurt by the turmoil of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Senior Lt. Andrei Podgornov, commander of a launch unit in the Strategic Rocket Forces, said his troops’ technical supplies were endangered by the growing economic barriers among former Soviet republics. The unit’s “combat control apparatus” is made in Ukraine, he said. But the chassis for its launchers comes from Belarus and its diesel generators are from Latvia. Further, Podgornov said bluntly, the general “state of uncertainty is hurting the troops’ combat readiness.”

Soldiers from former Soviet republics that are creating their own armies are taking advantage of the current confusion over the military’s status to desert or refuse to serve, he said, adding that ethnic tensions in units are growing.

“It’s already hard to put together compatible soldiers and officers in units,” he said, adding that, “For several months we have failed to put together a full contingent for 24-hour duty. It’s staffed only at 60%. And most of those are young draftees from Central Asia who don’t speak any Russian--and they’re sent to master the most complex, modern missile equipment!

“Military people shouldn’t be toys in the hands of the government,” Podzorov complained. “Officers are prepared to go through anything, if only they have some certainty in the future.”

But these days, they lack even certainty in the present.

Capt. Alexander Gilyarovsky’s family can barely feed themselves on his monthly salary as an air force jet pilot, and 100 of the officers in his squadron lack housing, he said in a Red Square interview.

Their modest salaries and lack of guarantees for housing and pensions put officers in a vulnerable position when the former republics creating armies ask them to “sell out,” Lt. Col. Bekbasynov said. “Those who have control of social goods--apartments and salaries--they offer all this, on one condition: that you swear allegiance.

“But you don’t need to be too smart to guess that all of this will have to be paid for,” he added. “And I shiver at just one thought: That some day, in the future, I will have to face not imitation targets but real soldiers, sergeants and officers that I have served with, that I taught. And now, split up among various states, against our will, we’ll be standing on opposite sides of the political barricades.”

Sergei Loiko, a researcher in The Times’ Moscow bureau, contributed to this report.