Yeltsin Foes Join Unhappy Army Officers at Rally

More than 20,000 Muscovites massed near the Kremlin on Tuesday for an armed forces day rally that turned into an ominous political assault on Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin by a budding alliance of hard-liners and disgruntled officers.

“Today we are saying: The time of those in the Kremlin is over!” shouted nationalist lawmaker Ilya Konstantinov. “You traitors behind the Kremlin Wall--get out of there and let popularly elected people take their legitimate places there!”

With the red stars on the brick Kremlin towers glowing ruby in the frigid indigo dusk, a boisterous crowd below cried “Shame!” at Yeltsin’s policies and demanded the ouster of Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev.

The big turnout, more than double past opposition rallies, indicated that Yeltsin’s political enemies are gaining support with a dangerous tactic: currying favor among Russian officers by reminding them of their army’s lost greatness and quietly encouraging them to revolt.

Yeltsin has complained openly about attempts to turn the army against him, its commander in chief. In his message to service personnel on armed forces day--known here as Day of the Defenders of the Motherland--he warned: “There are some people who would like to play the army card.”

He and Grachev struggled in the lead-up to the holiday to provide Russians with a clearer concept of the fledgling Russian military, trying to wean former Soviet citizens away from their 75-year attachment to the Communist glory of the Red Army of old.

Grachev assured Russian television viewers Monday night that, despite attempts to pull the army into the political fray, it remains the nation’s best guarantor of stability, “the only stable organism in society.”

Despite Grachev’s assurances, there are growing signs of unrest in the officer corps. Last weekend, more than 300 officers--many retired--met at an unsanctioned conference aimed at restoring a union known as the Officers’ Assembly to push their interests. For two days, egged on by prominent opposition members, they savaged the current military leadership and bemoaned the state of the great Red Army, once 5 million strong and now down to 2.5 million in its shrunken Russian version.

One officer claimed that none of Russia’s aircraft carriers are in working order; another complained that his men simply do not know why they are serving anymore.

Grachev dismissed the conference as “a political show,” saying it brought together mainly malcontents who had been kicked out of the army and retired officers who could not get used to the new regime. But he did not deny that these are agonizing times for Russian service personnel, and he acknowledged that the brisk pace of withdrawal from the former Soviet empire has made it impossible for Russia to absorb all its returning officers.

Yeltsin, in a holiday interview in the army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, or Red Star, admitted that the Russian armed forces are also still grappling with an array of temporary substitutes for a real military doctrine. But at least, he said, it is clear that, although Russia must gear its army toward fighting in local conflicts, it has no real enemies in the world.

“Our foreign policy principle is to create a belt of good-neighborly and friendly states,” he said. “This is what a new Russian military doctrine and defense ideology should be based on.”

Russia’s friendly new approach to the world had little appeal, however, for the marching rows of largely elderly veterans, officers and workers sunk in nostalgia for the old Soviet Union, the old Communist Party, the old order.

“I was a colonel, and everything I achieved, I achieved thanks to the Soviet regime,” said Alexander Dolotov, 77. “My life is tied to the Soviet regime and the Soviet army, and to the end of my days I’ll be a Soviet person, loyal to the Red banner. I don’t accept the capitalist system.

“I feel grief,” Dolotov added, “that at the end of my life I feel spat on and humiliated, especially as a veteran.”

Among the marchers were several of the former Soviet leaders who face treason charges for their role in the attempted coup of August, 1991. Former Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, built like a linebacker gone to fat before his arrest, looked as if he had lost dozens of pounds in prison; former Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov made an appearance as well.

In a frightening expression of Muscovites’ wrath, several protesters beat up Arkady Murashev, the former police chief of Moscow and a well-known Yeltsin supporter. He managed to escape without serious injuries, the Interfax news agency reported.