BOOK REVIEW : In Land of Changes, One Thing Remains Same : FLAMES OF HEAVEN<i> by Ralph Peters</i> Pocket Books: $22, 405 pages

Ralph Peters grew up a Russophobe. He is just about the right age to have endured grade-school bomb drills during the Cuban missile crisis, to have watched as neighbors stocked larders with emergency rations and listened as they discussed the pros and cons of shooting anyone who attempted to enter their shelters.

Employed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he moonlights as the author of successful novels best described as worst-case scenarios in which the Soviets remain the villains.

Peters has accommodated the current global situation in “Flames of Heaven.” Disintegrated, impoverished and chaotic, the once-powerful Soviet Union is now a collection of warring ethnic groups, no longer even tenuously united by ideology or controlled by an omnipotent leader, but more dangerous than ever.

Bankrupted by the Afghanistan war, demoralized by the defection of once-docile satellites, left purposeless by disarmament and burdened by an army reduced to a collection of sloppy, aimless opportunists, the government has degenerated into anarchy. Hungry, cold and generally miserable, the civilian population has slid into cynical despair.

Using this deplorable situation as his set, the author has assembled a cast of victims and tormentors to illustrate his parable.

Sasha Leskov is a gifted painter, bending his talents to the service of the military by painting gross and sodden officers as clean-cut heroes and flattering their wives as Slavic beauties. When the novel opens, Sasha is living with his mistress, the slavishly adoring Vera, who would be a sympathetic character except for her virulent anti-Semitism. Sasha’s older brother, Pavel, is a colonel in the KGB, once an unquestioning apparatchik, now a confused and rueful man tormented by conflict between official duty and long-repressed family feeling.

Misha Samsonov is a psychological casualty of the Afghanistan War, now assigned to lead a rabble of conscripts. Samsonov is Leskov’s friend; his function in the story is to serve as the conscience of a heartless womanizer who has no compassion. A collection of variously repulsive army officers completes the Slavic component.

Ali Talala is the arch-monster of the piece, a legislative deputy from the Muslim province of Uzbek, a man given to mayhem and murder to advance his own ends, which are, of course, utterly contrary to the office he holds. In a half-hearted attempt to humanize him, the author has made Talala fond of his liberated daughter, Shirin, who repays her father’s confidence by being promiscuous.

Talala is also enamored of his oversexed tubercular concubine Ashi. The sexual proclivities of Shirin and the pathetic Ashi offer numerous opportunities for lurid sex scenes, which serve as a diversion from the egregious violence. Shirin becomes obsessed with Sasha and vice versa; the beautiful Uzbek girl and the insatiable artist disport themselves in florid prose.

Ali Talala’s own people finally rise against him, and in one of the most mind-boggling patches of the novel, he greets the news of his family’s murder by quoting Macduff in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”: “All my pretty ones? Did you say all?” These questions are followed by the rest of Shakespeare’s unforgettable scene, virtually word for word.

If you are mindlessly sex-obsessed, if you cheered for Joe McCarthy at the hearings, if you hate to see the nukes deactivated, “Flames of Heaven” may be just your glass of tea. If, on the other hand, you harbor some faint lingering hope for the future of mankind, read it with a vodka and tonic near at hand. After all, they did give us that.