Soviet Army All in Pieces: It’s 15 National Forces Now : Military: Breakup engenders new rivalries, chaos, bloodshed, revisionist history and divided loyalties.

One daily drill of soldiers in the new Georgian army is to launch rockets across the Gumista River at a three-story building by the Black Sea. Their aim is lousy, but after months of occasional hits, the windows are gone and the concrete walls look like Swiss cheese.

Still, the strategic value of the site is intact--a deep underground seismic laboratory used by Russia’s army to detect nuclear explosions in Southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It is protected by a company of Russian paratroopers, who dodge incoming fire and shoot back.

Leaning against a tank outside, under a bullet-pocked mural of V. I. Lenin, a Russian lieutenant named Vladislav, 22, nervously lighted a cigarette. He admitted being confused at first by the assignment, his first out of officers school, to join a “peacekeeping mission” here in Georgia’s war-torn Abkhazia province.

Soon he figured it out. “We’re really here to hold the Georgians in check,” he explained; otherwise, the Georgians might cross the river and crush the Abkhazian separatists, who are perfectly willing to let Russia keep the lab and other bases on the province’s strategic Black Sea coast.

To Georgia and the 13 other ex-Soviet republics beyond Russia’s borders, the top-secret lab and its Russian guards represent the lingering forces of empire standing like an 800-pound gorilla in the way of full national independence.

As the Soviet Union unraveled in late 1991, the republics scrambled to divide its military superpower might--officers, bases, rifles, ammunition, tanks, warplanes, even nuclear missiles. Russia took the biggest share, but each of the others inherited, bought or stole enough for an army of its own.

But almost two years later, none of Russia’s neighbors has managed to take complete control of the military forces and bases on its soil. While each nation struggles to mold a stable, affordable army to defend its sovereignty, Russian troops remain scattered about the region, asserting the right to patrol beyond their own borders.

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Untangling these threads of the former Soviet army is one of the biggest difficulties the new republics face. According to officials in the region and specialists outside, the process so far is a mess, creating at least as much conflict, disorder and bloodshed as it prevents.

Russian forces have taken sides in civil wars in Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan in the guise of “peacekeeping troops.” They have balked at leaving the Baltics, saying that Russians living there need protection. And they are waging a bloodless but tense dispute with Ukraine for ownership of Crimea and 384 navy vessels in the Black Sea.

Qualifying a pledge to bring home all his troops by 1995, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin says Moscow now wants “special powers as a guarantor of peace and stability” in the former Soviet republics and long-term leases on military bases there.

Moscow argues that Western leaders should set aside legalities and accept its big-stick role in the neighboring republics--an ethnically fractious geopolitical twilight zone that Russians dub “the near abroad”--just as the United States was left to police Latin America under the imperialist Monroe Doctrine.

“Imagine if Russia does not unite our republics and create a stable, manageable system,” said Lt. Gen. Valery L. Manilov of Yeltsin’s Security Council. “It would be a threat to the world.”

That view is officially rejected in eight of the 14 “near abroad” countries.

“The Russians want the world to believe they are peacekeepers,” said Nodar Natadze of the Georgian Parliament’s Defense and National Security Commission. “But their only role is to occupy our territory and organize inter-ethnic conflicts to further their own interests.”

15 Armies From One

The national forces carved from the old Soviet army are as diverse as their new uniforms and the languages replacing Russian in their military commands.

Ukraine wound up with the world’s third-biggest nuclear arsenal. Latvia, left with armed forces smaller than the Los Angeles Police Department, had to build its own navy from scratch, hoisting a naval pennant over a fishing boat equipped with a machine gun. Central Asian armies send officers to study in Turkey; Baltic armies send theirs to Scandinavia.

Still, each nation inherited common woes that independence hasn’t solved.

Soviet imperialism gave things military a bad name everywhere. Draft resistance plagues the new armies. So does the Soviet tradition of dedovshchina , the brutal abuse of younger conscripts by older ones. Some complain that barracks life got too lax after Communist political commissars were purged from the ranks.

“We have no order, discipline or leadership,” former Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Tofig Gassimov said of his nation’s fledgling army. “There are lots of deserters. They pay money and avoid the draft. The conscripts drop everything and run when they hear artillery fire.”

The Soviet navy bequeathed unwelcome nuclear reactors and waste dumps. The army left more officers than the new nations can feed or shelter, more arms than they can control. In Belarus, one citizen in 43 wears a military uniform; 15,000 of them are officers on a waiting list for public housing.

With the Soviet defense industry shattered into 15 pieces, each new nation faces the enormous task of maintaining an inherited arsenal--and ultimately the question: Can it afford one at all?

Ukraine, the most self-sufficient outside Russia, imports 80% of its military components, including bullets, and has no capacity to produce fighter jets. Moldova has 30 MIG fighter jets but no tanks.

Post-Communist leaders everywhere are trying to create what Vladimir N. Lopatin, a reformist Russian air force colonel, calls “an army that serves the state, rather than a state that serves the army.” Azerbaijan, especially, could use one; its feuding warlords have ousted two presidents and frustrated seven defense ministers in less than two years of independence.

Atop these hardships, Russia’s neighbors are struggling to find secure relationships with the Kremlin. Five Central Asian countries, the poorest and most dependent of the lot, have turned to Moscow and locally based Russian officers for help in setting up their armies. Armenia also has a security treaty with Moscow.

The rest are trying, with mixed results, to keep Russia at arm’s length.

Ukraine’s Woes

Today’s classroom quiz at the headquarters of the Ukrainian army’s Pontoon Bridge Brigade: Who were the Sich Riflemen?

The answer: an irregular regiment that fought a brave but losing campaign against pro-Russian Bolsheviks between 1918 and 1920, the last interlude of Ukrainian independence.

“For 70 years you couldn’t read about the Sich Riflemen in Soviet textbooks,” Sergei V. Griboidov, the brigade’s history teacher, told 10 young recruits sitting attentively around a U-shaped table.

The lesson: “The Ukrainian state of that time wasted its chance to create a real army,” the teacher said. “It was obliterated.”

That history haunts Ukraine’s current leaders. Mindful of Russian claims on Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and imperial dreams of broader reunification, they are building a powerful army as the basis of statehood--more successfully than in any other former Soviet republic.

Ukraine has appropriated a conventional arsenal bigger than that in any West European nation and has declared ownership of the 1,600-plus Soviet nuclear warheads on its soil. President Leonid Kravchuk has achieved an accord with Yeltsin to divide the Black Sea Fleet but faces mutinous resistance by Russian and Russified Ukrainian navy officers.

The greatest threat to Ukraine, however, may lie within. In part by offering relatively easy living conditions, the army secured “loyalty oaths” from Ukraine-based Russians making up half its officer corps. But that created a force of irrational size--half a million people--which cannot be maintained without undermining the economy or trimmed without risking ethnic tensions.

Which country would Col. Nikolai Malkov back in a conflict?

The Pontoon Bridge Brigade’s Russian-born commander has called Ukraine home since 1986, the year he and his troops braved radiation to evacuate people from the exploded Chernobyl nuclear plant. Last year he swore “loyalty” to Ukraine--but only because he could not imagine a war against his native country. Like many Russians, the 40-year-old colonel says he’d rather see the Slavic neighbors voluntarily reunited.

“How can you separate Russia and Ukraine?” he asked, blithely wishing away the frontier Ukraine’s army was created to defend. “Why can’t we follow Europe’s example and tear down borders?”

A Baltic Hangover

Ants Laaneots fought for the Soviet army in Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Somalia, led a tank regiment in Kazakhstan and rose to colonel at age 41. Then his native Estonia declared independence. It was time to stop being an imperial warrior and go home.

There, to his dismay, he found thousands of former Russian comrades-in-arms in no hurry to make the same move.

Laaneots is 45 now and chief of staff of the new, 2,000-strong Estonian Defense Forces. He describes Russia’s lingering occupation with a bitterness shared by many Estonians his age or older. When the Soviet army occupied the Baltics in 1940, his father joined the resistance. Both parents were arrested and died in Siberian camps when he was a child.

“The Russians still have aggressive intentions here,” Laaneots said. “I know the beast from the inside.”

More than 40,000 Russian troops remain in the Baltics, dwarfing the three nations’ own armies. Those in Lithuania are due to leave by Aug. 31, but promised pullouts from Estonia and Latvia are being delayed to press those nations to halt ethnic discrimination against Russian residents.

Meanwhile, Russian soldiers act as they please, crossing Baltic borders without permit, staging naval target practice offshore, driving tanks on busy highways, selling weapons, encouraging paramilitary groups.

Baltic leaders were alarmed last April when Russian forces in Estonia and Latvia went to combat readiness during a three-day “command and communications” exercise.

“An incident is waiting to happen,” warns Valdis Pavlovskis, Latvia’s deputy defense minister. “First thing you know, the Russian army will take over and say we were not protecting the Russian population.”

Unlike Ukraine, the Baltics are forming small, defensive armies. The best they could do, Pavlovskis says, is block a Russian occupation for a few days and hope the West wouldn’t turn its back, as it did half a century ago.

The Armed South

On Aug. 5 last year, Russia’s 10th Motorized Infantry Division pulled out of Georgia, leaving behind 450 armored vehicles and scores of Grad missile launchers. Ten days later, Georgian commanders drove some of that hardware into Abkhazia province and started a fight.

Today, the Georgians are bogged down against ethnic Abkhazian separatists. The war has slowed Georgian leader Eduard A. Shevardnadze’s effort to mold scattered paramilitary units into a disciplined army under civilian control--and to get the rest of the Russians out.

“We’ve got weapons coming out of our ears, but we don’t know how to use them,” said a 22-year-old Georgian fighter named David on the Abkhazian front, where conscripts are thrown into battle with no training. “It’s the Russians who know how to fight.”

Advanced weapons deployed by the Soviet Union along its southern frontier are now in the hands of inept new armies and guerrilla forces beyond Russia’s borders. Most of these forces are handicapped by past ethnic discrimination that kept dark southerners out of the Soviet army’s upper ranks.

Fighting has killed more than 2,000 people in Georgia, as many as 8,500 in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the latter’s breakaway, largely Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and up to 20,000 in Tajikistan. It has drawn Moscow’s urgent attention to a long arc from the Caucasus Mountains to the steppes of Central Asia--an area rich in petroleum, ethnic strife and geopolitical intrigue bordering on Turkey and Iran, which are competing with Russia for influence.

Moscow’s post-Communist generals look south more than west these days, worried that guns, drugs, refugees and Islamic fundamentalism will spread up into Russia, but they have mounted no coherent defense.

Russia’s 201st Motorized Rifle Division props up Tajikistan’s conservative regime against Islamic-led guerrillas. But Russian tanks, planes and skilled fighters based in the Caucasus line up on both sides of the Armenian-Azerbaijani war in exchange for cash.

And while some Russian units stand deliberately in the way of a Georgian rout of Abkhazians in the breakaway province, refusing to withdraw unless granted a permanent “peacekeeping role,” others have allowed Georgian troops to “raid” their installations and haul off truckloads of weapons.

“The real power is not in the Kremlin but in the hands of local Russian commanders,” says John Colarusso, a specialist on the Caucasus region at Canada’s McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. “Those commanders sometimes act in their own personal interest.”

The Worst Cases

Since the breakup of the Soviet army, two of its commanders have brought nightmare scenarios to life in obscure corners of the former union:

Led by a megalomanic bomber pilot named Dzhokhar Dudayev, tiny Chechnya declared independence from Russia’s Caucasus region in late 1991, raised a green Islamic flag and sent the Russian garrison home, keeping several MIG jets and thousands of firearms for its own war chest.

The oil-rich republic of 800,000 people is now a Mafia-run arms bazaar and a sponsor of the Abkhazian insurgency in Georgia. Flying out of Moscow’s orbit, Dudayev, 49, makes “state visits” to Saudi Arabia and Turkey and confers with Shiite Muslim fundamentalists in Lebanon. He threatens terrorist attacks on nuclear power plants in Russia if its army tries to take him out.

Lt. Gen. Alexander I. Lebed, a paratroop veteran of the Afghanistan war, is a hero to Russian officers everywhere who would stand up to the likes of Dudayev. As commander of Russia’s 14th Army in newly independent Moldova, Lebed intervened last summer, at a cost of more than 500 lives on both sides, to help Russian secessionists defeat the Moldovan army and set up a de facto Trans-Dniester Republic on a fertile, industrial riverbank near the border with Ukraine.

Lebed, 43, argues that Russia, Ukraine and other Slavic lands of the former Soviet state should “wake up from the present nightmare and reunite.” Meanwhile, he insists that the 14th Army will stay in Trans-Dniester, even if Moscow orders it home.

To many Russians, Chechnya offers a glimpse of the chaos in store for the rest of their country if its army doesn’t rein in the “near abroad.” To many in the “near abroad,” Trans-Dniester signifies the blood you spill for trying to be too independent. To the surprise of almost everyone, Moscow has done little to restrain either military leader.

No outsider recognizes Chechnya or Trans-Dniester as independent. But many do recognize that the militant separatism and Russian imperialism they represent are perilous forces that could ignite the former Soviet empire like a giant Yugoslavia with nukes.

Those forces are loose in a dangerous power vacuum. Fearful of destabilizing Russia itself, the West is reluctant to interfere. But the disarray of the Russian army and the poor morale of its officers leave Moscow unable for now to pacify the “near abroad” on its own terms, however hard any local commander may try.

“If the Russian army leadership had its way, it would reunite the former Soviet Union,” concludes John Lough, a senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, England. “But the army is too weak.”

So the arena is left to strong-willed warlords--the Dudayevs and the Lebeds of a fractured empire.

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.

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?

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

The Forces, Far and Wide

Installations from the sprawling Soviet army remain in at least half a dozen republics. Here’s a look at the key strategic Russian military facilities in non-Russian republics.

AZERBAIJAN--Early warning radar station at Mingechaur.

BELARUS--Early warning radar station at Baranovichi. ICBM complex.

GEORGIA--Seismic laboratory at Eshera.

LATVIA--Radar station at Skrunda. Space communications and intercept station at Ventspils. Naval port at Liepaya.

KAZAKHSTAN--Baikonur Cosmodrome space facility. Two ICBM complexes, at Derzhavinsk and Semipalatensk. One ABM test range and early warning radar station at Saryshagan. Nuclear research facility at Semipalatensk.

UKRAINE--Black Sea Fleet naval base (joint control with Russia) at Sevastopol. Two ICBM complexes, in Pervomaisk and Khmelnitsky, and two strategic bomber airfields at Priluki and Uzin (all controlled by Russian army’s Strategic Rocket Forces but claimed by Ukraine).

Sources: The International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, the Supreme Command of the Joint Commonwealth Armed Forces in Moscow, Times staff

A Volatile Mix of Troops

From the sprawling Soviet army 15 new forces have sprung--along with chaos, conflict and combat. Here’s a look at the deployments in former Soviet republics:

Troops of Remaining their own Russian troops Armenia 25,000* 5,000 Azerbaijan 20,000 0 Belarus 125,000 25,000 Estonia 2,000 7,000 Georgia 10,000 10,000 Latvia 4,500 23,000 Lithuania 11,000 12,000 Kazakhstan 120,000 63,000 Kyrgyzstan 15,000 8,000 Moldova 10,000 8,000 Tajikistan 14,000 6,000 Turkmenistan 34,000 34,000 (under joint Russian-Turkmen command) Ukraine 500,000 60,000 Uzbekistan 40,000 20,000

* Plus 10,000 Armenian Self-Defense Forces in Nagorno-Karabakh

Note: Figures do not count reserves

Sources: The International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, the Supreme Command of the Joint Commonwealth Armed Forces in Moscow, Times staff