COLUMN ONE : An Army Besieged by Turmoil : Russia, once-proud heart of the Soviet military, tries to rebuild its fractured forces. Chaos reigns; discontent poisons the ranks. Frustrated officers wonder who, or what, they will be fighting for.

Their fathers and older brothers, pampered sons of socialism, held entire nations of Europe and Asia in thrall and brought hostile nuclear weapons to within 90 miles of America’s shores.

Today, Russian officers like a major who asks to be called only Leonid worry less about fighting for the motherland than their own economic survival. Leonid, 43, who has two daughters and a granddaughter, moonlights as a Moscow taxi driver to earn an extra $5 a day.

Slicing through the high seas, missile-laden Soviet submarines once put teeth in the Kremlin’s claims to global parity. Today, there is such disarray that a captain who investigated the intentional starvation of sailors at one Pacific base likens Russia’s navy to a vast prison.

Glorifying compulsory service as a “sacred duty,” Soviet rulers mobilized their population and economy to forge the largest standing military force on the globe. Today, draft evasion is so endemic that the Russian army “may soon be left without the most important part of its personnel--soldiers,” fumes Col. Gen. Mikhail Kolesnikov, chief of the General Staff.

Over the last two years, no institution save the Communist Party has suffered more from the demise of the Soviet Union than the armed forces. For almost half a century after the Red Army, in the words of Winston Churchill, “tore the guts” out of the German Wehrmacht, it was the spoiled child and instrument of choice of Moscow’s foreign policy.

In far-flung encampments from Mongolia to Ethiopia, Soviet detachments served as the feared muscle and symbol of a now-dead superpower.

Today, the East Bloc and the Soviet empire have vanished. Soldiers, sailors and aviators once hailed as “defenders of peace” are quartered with their families in crowded hovels or are being discharged by the tens of thousands. Morale is often poor. Sedition is overt.

“The world’s best armed forces have been reduced to such a state that but for the nuclear strategic forces, they could be taken on with bare hands!” says army Lt. Col. Stanislav N. Terekhov, who heads the reactionary Officers Union.

This month, the last members of the Soviet motorized-infantry combat brigade that was sent to Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 1962 boarded a Russian transport ship with dependents--500 people in all--for the long voyage home. Thus ended Moscow’s lavish effort to safeguard “the first socialist state in the Americas,” a commitment that brought the world within a whisker of thermonuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis.

Using such remnants of the Soviet army, and in conditions of tremendous domestic economic and political flux, Russia is struggling to shake off the legacy of the Cold War and build a radically new type of military--smaller, more mobile, more professional--to meet life’s new demands.

With the end of the East-West divide, the threat to the security of the world’s biggest country no longer seems to lie on the other side of Germany’s Fulda Gap, in NATO territory, but closer to home: Central Asia, the Caucasus Mountains, even inside Russia itself.

This complex, costly retooling will determine the political stability across a broad arc of Europe and Asia. What is left of the Soviet military machine no longer poses as serious a threat to the West. But depending on how these men and women and their weapons are handled, they could safeguard Russia’s democratic transition--or undermine it. They could fuel ethnic brush fires around the country’s vast perimeter--or stamp them out.

So far, the signs are often troubling.

Humiliated by the collapse of the “socialist camp” and forced to withdraw in disgrace from many of its outer reaches, Russian officers are disoriented, sometimes outraged. To many, the army’s new mission is unclear.

Political leaders view the army warily as a potential source of poisonous discontent that could turn against Russia’s democratic, free-market-oriented reforms.

The disintegration of the once-mighty Soviet military apparatus has left Russia with somewhere between 1.25 million and 2 million citizens in uniform. It has also spawned 14 new armies, one in each of the other former republics. Two of these armies--in Azerbaijan and Armenia--are fighting each other in Europe’s most extensive ethnic war outside the Balkans.

Civil wars also have erupted in Georgia and Tajikistan. Many of the new armies view Russia as a threat and are seeking defense alliances outside the region, a development that could further destabilize former Soviet lands.

Like Russia, America--which has 1,735,000 people in uniform--is engaged in a massive rethinking of its defense doctrine and duties. But the two countries’ problems are without common measure.

The most bitter American debate has been over gays in the armed forces. In Russia, conscripts and their parents are trying to end the savagery and abuse of authority that leads to the deaths of as many as 6,000 young soldiers each year.

In America, an Air Force general was forced to resign after publicly mocking President Clinton. But Terekhov, in uniform, led a May parade down Moscow’s busiest street, denouncing Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, and remained in the army.

“Our leaders are criminals! They must be shot for what they have done to the army,” he says matter-of-factly.

Russia’s armed forces were created by an order from Yeltsin on May 7, 1992, after efforts to create a joint army of the Commonwealth of Independent States failed. The new blueprint represents nothing less than a repudiation of the essence of postwar Soviet military thought.

Throughout the Cold War, Moscow’s marshals prepared to fight, in effect, the last battle of World War II. They built giant, tank-powered armies capable of onslaughts across a continent-size front. The Soviet Union became a virtual garrison state, its borders guarded by the world’s largest permanent military force--4.2 million people in uniform as recently as 1988.

From Ukraine to the Urals, a web of factories kept 205 divisions in blankets, steel helmets and tanks, while the average citizen couldn’t buy a decent vacuum cleaner or a pair of socks.

Today’s military requirements, means and goals are different.

“Russia needs a numerically small but purely professional army, within the limits of 1 million men, armed with up-to-date and standardized weaponry,” says army Gen. Pavel S. Grachev, Russia’s defense minister. “Its core is to be made up of highly mobile troops, capable of being quickly rushed over great distances.”

This all breaks decisively with the doctrine of the Soviet marshals and with the Marxist dogma that suspiciously viewed career soldiers as the lackeys of capitalists.

The new concept is espoused by the rough-and-ready paratrooper, who, as a former division commander, witnessed the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan. Hawk-nosed and with a bluntness (some say limited intelligence) that one American acquaintance likens to “a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne,” Grachev, 45, is the career officer Yeltsin has picked to remake Russia’s military.

Under Grachev’s phased plan, Russia is supposed to cut back the forces it inherited from the Soviet Union to 1.5 million within 1 1/2 years. Almost all of the Red Army’s privates and sergeants were conscripts, but by 1995, Grachev wants 30% to be volunteers serving under contract. By 2000, half of Russia’s enlisted and noncommissioned service personnel are to be willing professionals, the remainder draftees. Meanwhile, old, bulky armies and divisions are to be replaced with smaller, more mobile corps and brigades.

Under the second Strategic Arms Reduction Talks treaty, the Soviet-forged “strategic triad” (land-based ICBMs, nuclear bombers and missile-toting submarines) is to be refashioned to look more like the American posture. That means fewer warheads on land, more on subs.

Such is the plan. Military historians say it is as ambitious as the refashioning of the Red Army that followed Russia’s 1918-1920 civil war, when the revolutionary swarm of 5 million that beat the Whites and their foreign allies was hacked down to a standing corps of 520,000 in five years.

“They have got to do everything, all at once, and with no money,” is how one Moscow military attache sizes up Grachev’s task.

So far, results are mixed. Russia wants mobile units, in part so it can participate in U.N. peacekeeping chores as a good world citizen. But Moscow’s first try--700 paratroopers sent in April, 1992, to patrol a stretch of the Danube River dividing Croatia and Serbia--was embarrassing. The Russians became drinking buddies with the Serbs and gave them access to weapons that were supposed to be secured.

Grachev and his generals also must construct their new force amid government instability, political power plays, rumblings from officers like Terekhov and economic disruption that makes highly questionable the large-scale research and development of weaponry more suited to today’s needs. Amid such chaos, the West also remains extremely wary about who will end up controlling the awesome Soviet thermonuclear arsenal.

“Last year, we managed to save the Russian army, and this year we should implement a full-scale military reform” was the upbeat message from Yeltsin to a Moscow meeting of military commanders this summer.

But given Russia’s catastrophic finances, how much rapid retooling it can afford is still an open question. Trying to slash a huge budget deficit, Yeltsin’s government wants 1993 defense expenditures kept under $6.3 billion. But the legislature boosted the figure Saturday to 8 trillion rubles, or $8 billion, with one lawmaker warning that, otherwise, “defense as such in Russia will disappear.” To keep his economic reforms on track, Yeltsin may have to ignore the vote.

With the exception of elite units and the ICBM-equipped strategic missile force, nominally subordinated to the Commonwealth, Russia’s military appears to many specialists to be in near total disorder. Its very battle-worthiness is dubious, some say.

Stephen Blank, professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., doubts that the country that rotated more than 1 million soldiers through Afghanistan could now field and supply 14,000 troops in the Balkans if asked. “I don’t think they are capable of conducting a division-size operation,” Blank says.

The ethnic strife in republics of the former Soviet Union is also braking the creation of Grachev’s army. Crack Soviet paratroop and helicopter detachments that were based in Germany, Poland or formerly front-line Soviet territory such as the Baltics were supposed to constitute the core of Russia’s air-mobile force after being transferred to the Russian rear. But such units are often thrown into regional hot spots in the Caucasus or Central Asia--with no time to retool and re-form into smaller units.

“That is why the original plans are being put off until more peaceful times,” says Alexander A. Konovalov, an analyst at Moscow’s prestigious U.S.A.-Canada Institute.

In Russia, political turmoil has dealt another blow to the reform plan. The Defense Ministry, which is supposed to safeguard the “national interest,” is waiting for the feuding executive and legislative branches to agree on a security doctrine that will define just where that interest lies--for example, whether it includes Serbia, also a Slavic and Orthodox land, or the 25 million Russians who live outside Russia.

For Grachev, economy and efficiency have become the watchwords. About 5,500 people, including 130 generals, lost their jobs when the inherited Soviet Defense Ministry was downsized. Last year, two armies, eight divisions and scores of ministry agencies were dissolved. The ranks were cut by 220,000--the equivalent of the entire U.S. Marine Corps.

“We cannot afford the creation of strong army groups along the border,” Yeltsin explained to commanders this summer. “We need mobile troops.”

To buy the military’s loyalty, Yeltsin has raised salaries by about 400% since September. Although paltry in dollar terms, the pay is good by Russian standards: A lieutenant colonel earns 80,000 rubles, or $80, per month.

Grachev’s task goes beyond constructing a new army. He must preside over the dismantling of the old as well. By mid-1994, 17 Soviet divisions and 20 aviation and helicopter regiments--a quarter-million officers and soldiers, dependents not included--must be withdrawn from eastern Germany, says Col. Gen. Matvey Burlakov, the Russian commander there.

Last year, 180,000 servicemen and their families came home from eastern Germany, Lithuania, Poland and other shards of the former Soviet empire. The homecoming was often bittersweet. In 1991-92, of 55,000 families repatriated from Germany, 30,000 had no apartments in Russia. “The withdrawal process is taking place three times as fast as the resettlement process,” Burlakov complains. And the conveyor belt is speeding up.

Grachev has vowed that “not a single officer without housing will be discharged from the army.” That means force levels cannot be slashed as quickly as reformers would like.

But Russia’s leaders, keen students of history, are wary. They remember that in Germany after World War I, swarms of demobilized, jobless soldiers from the Kaiser’s vanquished army laid the social base for violent radicalism and the rise of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

Along with widespread change, there is also conservatism, the stuff of all armed forces. Grachev, the overseer of reforms, embodies continuity as well: Along with the new field-green uniform he selected for the army, he proudly wears the Hero of the Soviet Union medal he won for service in Afghanistan.

The old ways, however, are not always benign.

As in Soviet days, brutal treatment of conscripts is widespread and in some cases may have worsened. According to the Moscow-based Soldiers Mothers Union, which monitors treatment of inductees, 6,000 servicemen died last year on duty and 94,000 were injured. The causes of death ranged from accidents caused by blatant disregard for safety to male rape, murder and suicide. (According to the Pentagon, 1,327 U.S. personnel died “non-hostile” deaths in 1992.)

“It’s still the Soviet army” is the verdict of the union’s Valentina D. Melnikova.

One appalling case in point: Russian Island, a training base for the Pacific Fleet near Vladivostok. This year, four sailors died from beatings and starvation, a fifth from dysentery.

Retired navy Capt. Victor I. Cherepkov, who investigated, found 500 sailors in the base hospital with pneumonia, malnutrition and dysentery. A typical lunch for conscripts was a bowl of water with a floating piece of potato and a plate of buckwheat with worms. After such fare, sailors were moved out to shovel coal. Slackers were beaten. The barracks had neither windows nor heat.

One conscript weighed 178 pounds when he arrived on Russian Island. Six weeks later, shrunken to 88, he was admitted to the base hospital. A week and a half later, he died.

The commander of the Pacific Fleet was cashiered in disgrace after the deaths, one sign that things are changing. But Cherepkov, who since his free-lance investigation has been elected mayor of Vladivostok, thinks the problem goes far deeper.

“There is no point in even discussing the combat readiness of the Pacific Fleet when half of its men are busy guarding the other half, who are thinking only of escape,” he says.

In Russia’s new anything-goes climate, officers are exploiting their jobs to steal and resell military property, from machine guns to rocket launchers.

A group of Northern Fleet officers were arrested in June for trying to fence purloined ship components containing more than 600 pounds of silver.

Special investigators appointed by Yeltsin found that two generals took advantage of the chaos of Soviet troop withdrawals from Germany to stash more than $10 million in Swiss, American and other foreign bank accounts.

In search of dollars, the former Red Army chorus has also gone on tour in Western Europe singing, among other numbers, the Turtles’ 1960s pop hit “Happy Together.”

As in the Soviet period, the attitude that “the general is God” lingers. A newspaper expose revealed that with Yeltsin’s blessing, spacious, two-story, state-owned dachas west of Moscow were sold to 44 high-ranking officers for as little as $365. One beneficiary was Grachev himself.

Meanwhile, mid-ranking officers and their families often live in dingy, cramped apartments.

Despite the noble goals voiced by the brass, humanization of military life “is implemented only theoretically,” says Sergei V. Stepashin, chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet’s Committee on Defense and Security.

The limited oversight powers of the lawmaker and his committee are a part of the problem. Approached by The Times for this article, Stepashin said he knows that “several thousand” Russian soldiers died last year on duty. But after weeks of trying, his staff could not squeeze precise figures out of the Defense Ministry.

“In the leadership system of the army, the old principle prevails: Solving military problems is assigned to the military itself,” charges Vladimir N. Lopatin, an air force colonel who was one of the first to call for reform of the Soviet armed forces.

Indeed, there is still just one civilian in the loftiest echelon of Grachev’s ministry: First Deputy Minister Andrei A. Kokoshin.

The danger is that the military could become a closed body, jealous of its narrow professional interests. Ilana Kass, a professor of military strategy at the National War College in Washington, sensed in a recent visit to facilities outside Moscow that Russia’s army “was becoming like the Chilean or Argentine army--a caste.” She also found “frightening politicization.”

“The military is split--by rank, age, region, service. It’s not homogeneous,” Kass says. “Can they fight? That depends on what kind of war, and where.”

And what of the issue that preoccupies the West, namely, whether Russia’s armed forces might stage another putsch? As in August, 1991, when most unit commanders did nothing despite the presence of Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov among the hard-line Communist plotters, internal schisms seem to bar any organized attack on Yeltsin’s reforms.

But such differences also prevent Yeltsin from using the military for his own ends. Army leaders, for example, refused to move against a drive by the anti-reform Parliament to impeach Yeltsin last March, saying they “support the constitution,” a response that satisfied neither side.

Maj. Gen. Nikita A. Chaldymov--who quit the Soviet army but returned at Yeltsin’s request to help turn the former school for Communist military commissars into a “humanitarian” training academy--estimates that only half of Russia’s officers today truly support Yeltsin and military reform. The rest are equally divided between indifference and overt hostility, Chaldymov estimates.

After flirting with the idea of a NATO-like alliance of former republics, subordinated to the Commonwealth and its commander, Russia has chosen to go it alone. Yeltsin has broached the possibility of contracting for U.S.-style foreign military bases in other republics and served notice that Russia, like America, believes it has vital interests outside its borders.

With all its problems, is the army today capable of defending Mother Russia?

“Even what we have today is capable of solving the problems before us,” contends Lt. Gen. Gennady D. Ivanov, simultaneously justifying Russia’s go-it-alone policy and rebutting critics who say Grachev’s creation cannot fight.

But Ivanov, 48, said to be the mastermind behind the reform blueprint, acknowledges that Russia must learn from others, the former “chief adversary” included.

Ivanov wants to adopt from the U.S. military the awesome logistics capacity used for Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf; the careful fostering of military careers that became the rule after the Vietnam War, and the space-age communication and command facilities encapsulated in the AWACS (airborne warning and control system) aircraft. It is another matter entirely whether Russia’s shellshocked, struggling economy will be able to afford the dreams of its generals.

“Our chief task is to make the new Russian army unlike any that exists today,” Ivanov says forcefully. “We must take all the best from existing armies and combine it in a new one.”

Sergei L. Loiko and Andrei V. Ostroukh of the Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.

TOMORROW: With the military in disarray, Russian officers voice bitter complaints emblematic of their plummeting morale.

Comparing Russian, U.S. Forces

One Russian military official says his nation’s armed forces have 50% to 80% of the personnel they require. Here’s how the five branches of the Russian military measure up against U.S. forces:

SU-27 Flanker: A front-line long-range, twin-engine air-superiority fighter, in service with Russian Air Force and Air Defense Forces.

F-15E Eagle: A front-line long-range twin-engine air-superiority fighter, with all-weather ground attack capability.

Russia: Ground forces*: 1.4 million Air Force: 300,000 Navy: 320,000 Air Defense Forces: 350,000 Strategic Rocket Forces: 180,000 (stationed at nuclear installations in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan) Total Forces: 2.5 million* Strategic Weapons ICBMs: 934 (Includes those in the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Baltics and Germany) Missile submarines: 54 Bombers: 89 Conventional Weapons Battle tanks: 30,000 Fighter aircraft: 3,700 Helicopters: 1,400 Monthly Pay Lt. Colonel: $80 Sergeant: $55 Recruit: $2 +

United States: Army: 600,000 Air Force: 455,000 Navy: 525,000 Marines: 183,000 Total Forces: 1.7 million Strategic Weapons ICBMs: 555 Missile submarines: 25 Bombers: 270 Conventional Weapons Battle tanks: 8,815 Fighter aircraft: 3,138 Helicopters: 3,866 Monthly Pay Lt. Colonel: $4,113.30 Sergeant: $1,175.50 Recruit: $753.60 * Note: Size of Russia’s total force is according to Air Marshall Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov, secretary of Russia’s Security Council. Figures are for September, 1992. Western military attaches believe Russian force levels may have sunk as low as 1.2 million, with some units at only 10% of their rated strength. Besides the five branches of the Russian Armed Forces, there are 220,000 border guards and 120,000 interior Ministry troops.

Sources: The Pentagon, International Institute for Strategic Studies, USA-Canada Institute

Compiled by Beth Knobel and Andrei V. Ostroukh in the Times Moscow Bureau and D’Jamila Salem in Los Angeles.

Legions of Gloom

TODAY: Soviet Union’s collapse has created a crisis in what once was the world’s largest armed force. The fate of Russia and more than a dozen other nations--even the prospects for global peace--could hinge on reshaping it.

MONDAY: They once were proud warriors, even heroes. Now Russian officers are unhappy in a way unmatched in almost any sector of their society. Will their morale problem undermine democracy?

TUESDAY: From one sprawling Soviet army has sprung 15 new national forces--along with chaos, bloodshed and conflict.