Russia Aims for Leaner, Prouder Army

Russia’s new defense minister, facing the press Friday for the first time, made it clear that although he plans to cut the military in half, his real goal is to shape his country’s young men into the proud soldiers of Russia’s past.

“Russia should have armed forces commensurate with Russia’s status as a great power,” Gen. Pavel S. Grachev, the defense minister, told reporters.

After briefly outlining the strategy to reform Russia’s armed forces and shrink them to about 1.5 million men by the year 2000, Grachev gave a “Be all that you can be”-style pitch for spring conscription.

“At all times, the Russian man has been a warrior, and now it is even embarrassing that the Russian man is no longer a soldier,” said the 43-year-old veteran of the Afghanistan war. “This is not right.”

President Boris N. Yeltsin favored maintaining joint armed forces for the Commonwealth of Independent States, the loose alliance created on the wreckage of the Soviet Union. But he bowed to the inevitable two weeks ago and announced the creation of separate Russian armed forces.

Grachev, who was an unknown paratroop commander a year ago, was a top candidate for defense minister because he sided with Yeltsin during the attempted conservative coup last August in Moscow and played a key role in putting down the putsch leaders.

In his first news conference, Grachev urged the reporters to help the military with its “considerable problems with recruitment.” Among those claiming exemption from conscription, he said, are students, farmers, joint venture employees, subway workers, deer breeders--and, it sometimes seems, almost everyone else.

The new defense minister suggested that men are conscripted at too young an age and that too many men are allowed exemptions from service.

“I am against 18-year-olds being called up into the army, because a man does not really mature until he is 21 to 23,” Grachev said.

But he went so far as to say that even young men with physical disabilities should be conscripted.

At present, according to a statement from the Russian General Staff, only 17 of each 100 conscripts in Moscow can be called up for duty, the rest being “sick or disabled or something.”

Grachev said that while an all-volunteer army would be preferable, Russia cannot switch to a professional army now because that would “fully destroy the entire economy--in other words, make industry and agriculture work solely for the army.”

The new defense minister was not shy in revealing the sad state of today’s armed forces.

“Planes are colliding, helicopters dropping out of the sky and submarines sinking,” Grachev said. “All these facts speak of a considerable fall in efficiency.”

Grachev said that 600,000 Russian troops are currently serving abroad and that he does not intend to let them become sitting ducks or get caught in the middle of cross-fire between warring ethnic or political groups.

Armenian officials have tried to persuade Russia to keep its troops posted in their tiny republic, but Grachev said he intends to withdraw them because he does not want to see them pulled into the ongoing warfare between Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan.

Those troops still stationed in regions of the former Soviet Union where political or ethnic strife threatens their lives or the lives of their families will be given orders to defend themselves, he added.

Grachev also said that by the end of the decade, Russia’s armed forces will be drastically overhauled. By 1995, the military will be reduced by 700,000 members to 2.1 million. Another 600,000 will be cut in the next five years, making the Russian military about the size of India’s.