COLUMN ONE : A Raft of Draft Dodgers : Young Russians are evading military service in ever-increasing numbers. Some dread the hazing and harsh conditions. Others fear having to repress dissent. And many of their parents back them.

Porridge and potatoes. Potatoes and porridge. Mashed potatoes diluted into a watery gruel. Thin porridge cooked with water instead of milk.

The winter of 1993 was long and bitter. On a bleak Russian air force base deep in the Ural Mountains, 20-year-old recruit Vladimir German was slowly starving.

“Hunger haunted me for the first two months in the army, and then I got used to it somehow,” German said. “But still I was not getting enough food.”

One desperately hungry December day, German and his buddies caught and ate a stray dog.

“We thought, what the heck, half the planet eats dog meat. . . . What harm will it do if a Russian eats it once in his life?” German said. “We understood that this was probably our last chance not to starve to death.”

Their fears were not exaggerated. A month later, on Russky Island in the Far East, four sailors died of starvation and at least 86 others were hospitalized with illnesses stemming from severe malnutrition. Recruits who survived were reported to be more than 66 pounds underweight. The incident prompted President Boris N. Yeltsin to sack the commander of the Pacific Fleet.

The military said the Russky Island incident was isolated, but hunger apparently is not. German finished his mandatory military service this spring and came home, his mother says, “looking like a walking corpse.”

His advice to the thousands of young men who are now desperately trying to avoid being drafted into the Russian army: “Do whatever you can to wiggle out of it. You should go serve only on one condition: if your goal in life is to become a dumb invalid.”

Although Russia is at peace, young men are dodging the draft in far greater numbers and with a determination not seen even when young Soviet soldiers began coming home from Afghanistan in coffins.

The Bolsheviks proclaimed the army to be indivisible from the people, and for 70 years the Red Army was one of the most respected institutions in the Soviet Union. A recent poll showed that citizens still trust the army more than they do their president, their Parliament or the Russian Orthodox Church.

But today 70% of draft-age men think military service is unnecessary, and 35% say they are prepared to leave Russia to avoid the draft, according to data cited with dismay by Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev.

Tens of thousands of young men are voting with their feet. And a surprising number of their fathers support them.

Though deeply proud of their own military service, many men feel that the army that defeated Adolf Hitler is no longer an honorable institution that will teach their sons to be men. It is not uncommon to hear the father of a teen-age boy reminisce fondly about his own army stint, yet swear to do whatever it takes to keep his son from serving.

This spring, Yeltsin ordered that 216,000 young men be drafted into an army that will number below 2 million by the end of the year, down from a peak of 5 million in Soviet days.

Military officials say they are having no trouble mustering the required number of recruits, though some experts say draft dodging and desertion have in fact thinned the army’s ranks.

Reports of increasingly harsh tactics to round up conscripts, including cancellation of some student deferments and 5 a.m. raids on draft dodgers’ homes, indicate that fewer young men are willing to perform their 18 months to two years of mandatory military service.

Officially, the army registered 41,500 draft dodgers in 1993, or nearly one for every five men drafted. But the real number is certainly far higher, as men ages 18 to 27 struggle frantically to get student deferments or bribe doctors with up to $5,000 to certify them unfit to serve. Some hide out with friends and relatives.

Their motives are varied. Many have heard horrifying tales of cruelty in the army, ranging from dreadful living conditions to brutal hazing that can lead to crippling injuries, gang rape or murder of young recruits.

According to the Russian military prosecutor’s office, 169 servicemen died in hazing incidents in 1993. The deaths are blamed on a general lack of discipline, ethnic tensions in the army and in particular on the tradition of dedovshchina , or bullying of new recruits by second-year soldiers.

Young men cite fear of dedovshchina as a major reason for dodging the draft.

Other draft evaders, emboldened by the end of Soviet rule, do not want to serve in an army they believe may yet be used as an instrument of political repression, at home or in the neighboring former Soviet republics.

And some young men are avoiding military service now simply because they can get away with it amid the general chaos in Russian society that has accompanied the dismantling of totalitarianism.

According to the Defense Ministry, of the 41,500 dodgers on file in 1993, only 470 were convicted of draft evasion, a crime punishable by up to five years in prison.

As young Russians search for spiritual meaning in the vacuum left by the demise of the Communist Party, some have turned to religion. A growing number of draft dodgers are pacifists or have religious beliefs they say prevent them from bearing arms.

And, in a dramatic shift in attitude from Soviet times, a striking number of people here in the Russian heartland believe Russia should abandon the draft and shift to an all-volunteer, professional army.

The stories told by the young soldiers who have recently returned to Chelyabinsk help explain why.

For Dmitri Medvedyev, the problem with the army was not the food or the guns, but the beatings.

Night after night, a group of second-year soldiers would pounce on a sleeping new recruit, curse and humiliate their victim and then beat him, sometimes savagely, while the duty officer in the next room pretended not to hear.

Skinny, handsome and bookish, Dmitri showed up nearly every morning with bruises.

After four months, he deserted and went home. Officers came and brought him back and promised that the culprits would be punished. But the beatings only got worse.

“Those who could put up with it did, and the rest just broke,” he said. “I guess I broke.”

He deserted twice more, hiding out at his grandfather’s home. His mother, Zinaida Medvedyev, 45, said police often telephoned or pounded on the door in the middle of the night, demanding to know Dmitri’s whereabouts.

Dmitri was finally discharged only after his mother brought military authorities a medical certificate showing that he had undergone surgery to repair a kidney that was damaged as a result of the beatings.

Dmitri, now 21, described his military training with contempt: “I held a gun once, and that was all.” Mostly, he said, he did janitorial work and unloaded trucks.

“The army is nothing but a system for free labor,” he said.

Defense Ministry officials in Moscow said they are trying by all means possible to eliminate hazing. If so, the message has not penetrated even through the top army brass. The military commander of the Chelyabinsk region, Maj. Gen. Alexander A. Fedik, said he thinks hazing “is maybe not even a problem. It’s talked about more than it really happens.”

Asked about the Medvedyev beatings, Fedik said: “Maybe there was such a case. I don’t know. But this could happen on the street, in a disco, in a restaurant. . . . It also happens in the American army.”

Hazing does exist in the U.S. military, but it is rarely lethal. Pentagon spokesman Col. Doug Hart said he was not aware of any deaths due to hazing last year, although 85 service personnel were victims of homicide.

Last year, 2,572 Russian servicemen of all branches died in noncombat situations, according to the military prosecutor’s office, out of a force of roughly 2.2 million. That rate is about 64% higher than in the U.S. military, where 1,244 Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps personnel died out of a force of about 1.75 million.

The Committee of Russian Soldiers’ Mothers, a group formed in 1989 to expose and combat brutality in the military, says the official Russian death statistics are probably understated.

After five years of struggle, the families of slain and injured soldiers have finally managed to publicize what they say is an unacceptably high rate of peacetime deaths and injuries. Last month, the Russian Parliament took the unprecedented step of summoning a top general to testify on the problem.

The officer, Deputy Chief of the General Staff Lt. Gen. Anatoly Bogdanov, told lawmakers that most of the 518 deaths in the first half of 1994 were due to safety violations, but 8% were murders, 27% suicides and 5% were caused by barracks violence, or dedovshchina .

In an interview at Defense Ministry headquarters in Moscow, Maj. Gen. Vasily V. Smirnov said the army’s problems are grossly exaggerated by the Committee of Russian Soldiers’ Mothers.

He said the army only reflects the increase in violence and crime plaguing Russian society in general. Smirnov said other top officials say they feel the honor of the Russian army is being undermined by an incessant barrage of bad press.

In a nation that still prides itself on having won World War II, plenty of people agree. Some are saddened by the army’s loss of glory and prestige, while others think draft dodgers are scum.