Once Mighty Warriors Now Feel Unneeded, Betrayed : Russia: The world’s largest army is now its unhappiest. Housing is short as troops are called home.

If you want to know how bad morale is in the Russian army, ask Vladimir Mysenko, the mustachioed, barrel-chested commandant of the shrinking garrison of paratroopers here.

Does he feel betrayed by his government?

“It’s not a feeling, it’s a fact,” he blusters, openly convinced that his 26 years of service to the Soviet army have all gone for naught.

Or ask Yuri Korotkov, a balding, blond Russian navy captain crammed for years into a single Moscow dormitory room with his wife and two children--amid 16 other miserable families all sharing one kitchen and bathroom--how he feels about the service these days.

“Dissatisfied,” he snaps. But at 35, “I have nowhere else to go. It’s all I have.”

When Mysenko and Korotkov enlisted, they joined the world’s biggest standing armed forces, a proud caste of Soviet “warriors,” as they were known, backed by burning patriotism among their compatriots.

These days they feel, at best, uneasy; at worst, simply unneeded. What once was the biggest army in the world has turned into its unhappiest army. And many of the officers who were once the heroes of Soviet society now feel distinctly second-class.

In their view, everything has fallen apart. The country they served has collapsed. Their fellow Russian officers are being withdrawn by the hundreds of thousands from the former Soviet Bloc. They have a harder time doing their jobs because draftees are suddenly in short supply and money is tight. Housing is scarcer than ever. They have lost their place.

“What is it that we military want?” asked Red Star, the Defense Ministry daily newspaper, in exasperation. “Well, it’s just certainty, social guarantees, stability and order in society and in the army.”

Which is exactly what they do not have. For all President Boris N. Yeltsin’s attempts to appease them, Russia’s hundreds of thousands of military officers remain deeply, openly discontented--turning the institution that is supposed to guarantee the country’s stability into a giant source of potential instability.

Could all this anger translate into a Latin American-style military coup? No, say the officers. No, says Red Star, hastening to add to its plea for order that officers do not want to impose “order at the point of a bayonet.”

Yet the disgruntled officers hold the potential to coalesce into a powerful force resisting Yeltsin and his democratic, free-market reforms.

In the 1991 presidential elections, the military largely backed Yeltsin’s conservative rival, Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, and it remains heavily represented in anti-Yeltsin groups. Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi, a former bomber pilot who has openly turned against Yeltsin, is likely to carry many officers’ votes in the next presidential election. He has already announced that he is running.

Most officers insist they are not anti-reform. But they have good cause to disbelieve their president and commander in chief. He has made them extravagant promises, including that many would be given dollars to build their own houses.

Although salaries and privileges for officers have improved in the last year under a fairly open government policy of keeping the army happy, many of the pledges have not been kept.

“It’s like we’re playing a game with only one goal post,” navy Capt. Vladimir Blinov said. “You’re supposed to solve all the government problems and all your own problems as well.”

Still, to average Russians, the officers’ lot does not look so bad. Take, for example, an engineering corps major who asks to be identified only as Leonid. He earns about 80,000 rubles--$80--a month, about triple the average wage. Even better, he gets a ration of cheap food each month that includes about 15 pounds of meat, two pounds of sugar, fish, butter and oil.

But officers were used to being some of the more prosperous people in their neighborhoods, perhaps among the very few with a car; now, suddenly, they see business people earning 10 times as much as they do--and 15 pounds of sausage is cold comfort.

Then there is the eternal housing problem. Because of Russia’s drastic apartment shortage, officers have always had problems with housing their families--and even more problems when they leave the service and want to settle down.

Officers in Moscow, where space is tightest, have sometimes found it nearly impossible to return to their hometowns. Moscow magazines sometimes carry advertisements by officers’ families offering to take care of ill elderly people in exchange for the right to inherit their apartments when they die.

Now, with officers pouring back into Russia under withdrawal agreements, the housing crunch is so frightening that it has become one of the main targets of Western aid. More than 200,000 officers lack apartments, according to the Russian government, and 100,000 more are expected to flood in from Eastern Europe and Mongolia by the end of next year.

On the navy-dominated island of Kronstadt near St. Petersburg, amid the usual maze of hallway laundry, a converted military barracks houses officers’ families who share one kitchen and two toilets for every seven families.

Lt. Capt. Yuri Prokopov, his wife, Svetlana, 8-month-old Marina and 6-year-old Nastya consider themselves lucky to share a nine-square-yard room with two cots, rented sheets, a rented fridge, a table, a five-inch TV and a crib. The dorm has no phone.

“He’s served almost eight years and gotten next to nothing for it. Not an apartment, not anything,” Svetlana said. “All of our money goes to feeding our children. Last week, I bought an apple for my daughter, and how she celebrated!”

The Prokopovs left a fully furnished apartment behind in Latvia, where Yuri served last. A similar fate awaits many of the paratroopers now leaving Kaunas commandant Mysenko’s garrison under an agreement withdrawing all Russian troops from Lithuania by the end of next month.

This summer, after 26 years in the military, Mysenko himself will be demobilized. His garrison will be turned over to the Lithuanians and the army will kiss him off. Unlike most of his men, Mysenko will stay behind--with his Lithuanian wife. He already feels like a second-class citizen, unable to own property under Lithuanian law and risking his Russian pension if he takes Lithuanian citizenship. “It’s as if the army has been defeated,” he says. “Do a revolution if you have to, but you shouldn’t demoralize the army.”

In the Baltics, where local leaders citing 50 years of Soviet occupation insisted on prompt withdrawal of the remaining Russian forces, discontent among officers reached the point that some simply refused to leave.

According to members of the Officers’ Assembly, a renegade group banned by the Defense Ministry that unites the most outspoken of those bemoaning the current state of the army, Yeltsin slowed the withdrawal from the Baltics last fall because of the officers’ own mutinous refusal to move to “unprepared fields.”

“I was supposed to go to Kaliningrad,” said Vladimir Kandalovsky, who led the refusal. “But there was no housing there, no barracks, nothing. The Defense Ministry admitted they had nowhere to put us.”

Kandalovsky, who was fired for his role in the refusal, knows very precisely what worries officers most: housing and retraining.

“Hundreds of thousands of officers are being let go and they have no other specialty,” he said. “This is a unique case, when troops are withdrawn without any social programs for them. No government ever withdrew troops without backing it up with decisions and agreements.

“Excuse me, I’ll tell you straight: We’re being led by idiots.”

In fact, the government is launching a variety of programs to help service personnel, from plans to funnel them into newly created tax-police units to American-run courses on business management. But with tens of thousands of former Soviet officers already laid off and tens of thousands more to go by 1995, the programs seem piddling compared with the problem. The government retrained only 2,500 officers last year.

Korotkov and some of his colleagues went through business training courses. But they sound iffy when asked if the lessons helped prepare them for a new life. Korotkov said that although he’ll be eligible for a pension in six months, he has signed on for another five years.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of officers have solved their retraining dilemma by staying in the military--but moving to another army. Russian mercenaries have become common in conflict zones around the region, from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Nagorno-Karabakh. Those who stay in the Russian army must continue to grapple not only with personal problems but with the unease they feel in the part of their hearts conditioned over their young years to love the Soviet motherland and oppose its Western enemies.

Once, the infamous zampolit political officer attached to every Soviet commander and responsible for morale and ideological purity, could have handled these questions. But the zampolit went the way of other Communist Party fixtures and is only now being replaced by a new position known as the “staff officer.”

Because of the prolonged shake-up of officers charged with bolstering morale, “dangerous emptiness has begun to develop in the spiritual sphere,” warned Lt. Gen. Konstantin Bogdanov, chief of the new morale service.

Valery, a veteran of the strategic missile forces who was recently pensioned off, observed: “When you have no grand idea, when it’s not clear whom to fight and why, that’s tough. There’s a lot of demoralization.”

Combined with their lack of mission is the painful awareness that all of society knows about it. Officers repeatedly said they feel they are being “spat upon,” that politicians think that the army is not needed at all.

When Nikolai, a captain who asks that his full name not be given, joined up 17 years ago from a small village in present-day Belarus, he was the town star for a time. When Korotkov was accepted into an elite military school about the same time, there were 15 applicants for every place. These days, there are not as many applicants as places, he said.

Amid general feelings of impoverishment, army goods have been disappearing at twice the rate of previous years, according to testimony given at a recent legislative hearing. Theft runs particularly wild in units located outside Russia and now being disbanded.

“When it was decided that our unit was to be disbanded, a black sabbath of greed, corruption and stealing began,” one air force officer formerly stationed in Azerbaijan said. “The senior officers were shamelessly selling to the Azerbaijanis everything they could lay their hands on: gas, kerosene, all sorts of equipment, spare parts, wires, trucks, everything except the planes that were to be left to the Azerbaijanis anyway. No one gave a damn about flying missions and doing duty anymore. They all turned into frenetic wholesale traders in uniforms.”

Further complaints abound from officers who, because of the sparse draft call-up, lack the low-ranking staff they need to do their basic support chores. Red Star is full of stories of mid-level officers forced to stand guard duty and deeply unhappy about it.

But all of the current difficulties would be acceptable somehow, officer after officer said, if only they had the sense that they knew where they were going, that they could see the shape of the future army once this tumultuous period was over. “There’s no program for what’s coming ahead,” said the officer named Nikolai with grim assurance. “Not even for the next two steps ahead.”

For all their complaints, Russian officers in interviews and public statements are unanimous in their denial that their discontent could boil over into a putsch. Despite romantic tales of the democratic Decembrist officers’ uprising against the Czar in 1825, it is simply not in their nature, they say.

“Look at history, look at what happened during the (1917) Revolution,” said Leonid, the engineering corps officer. “Look how long the army didn’t come onto anyone’s side. The real Russian officers were all destroyed. No one planned to support any revolt. They maintained neutrality.”

In more recent history, during the 1991 hard-line Communist coup attempt, some officers were among the crowds defending Yeltsin’s stronghold, but the army as a whole hovered in indecision, unwilling to take sides.

But this tradition of neutrality is a double-edged sword. Since the Soviet Union dissolved and the army came under Yeltsin’s command, the president has been unable to count on its full support in his bruising power struggles with the Soviet-era Parliament.

Last March, for example, when Yeltsin was threatened with impeachment, Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev was reduced to publicly begging Yeltsin and Russian lawmakers to stop trying to pull the army into their squabbles.

Most officers say they want to stay out of Russia’s political tangles, not only because of the danger of civil war but also because they just don’t care enough these days to take the risk.

“If I were on the streets during the coup,” Korotkov said, “I wouldn’t fulfill the orders of the putsch committee and I wouldn’t go to defend (Yeltsin’s) White House. I don’t believe in our president and that he’ll bring order in Russia.”

Times special correspondent Matt Bivens, in St. Petersburg, contributed to this report.

Legions of Gloom

SUNDAY: The 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.

TODAY: 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.