HUMILIATION IN CHECHNYA : From Hero to Heel, Russian Army Stuck in Trenches of Incompetence

During the mid-19th Century, the Caucasus became known as the “graveyard of the Russian Army.” The Russian conquest of this wild, mountainous region and its fierce tribes required decades to accomplish and cost the czar’s legions thousands of lives. Several of Russia’s great authors, notably Mikhail Y. Lermontov and Leo Tolstoy, fought as soldiers in these brutal and protracted campaigns of conquest and cut their teeth on tales of the exotic Southern mountains. Sadly, Russia’s current entanglement in this same region has already replicated the brutality of these historic wars, so far without any literary compensation. The fighting in Chechnya has exposed deep rifts between Boris N. Yeltsin’s government and the military. These rifts did not emerge overnight; they have deep roots in Soviet history. Civil-military relations were always a problem in the Soviet Union. Since the communist state relied more on force than on the consent of the governed, ensuring the loyalty, or control, of the armed forces was always a major concern. Bolshevik leaders were students of revolutionary history, and so they feared “Bonapartism”--they worried that some officer would, like Napoleon, emerge from the army to become the “gravedigger of the revolution.”

Immediately after the Bolshevik revolution, therefore, the communist government struggled to find methods to control the military. During the Russian Civil War of 1918-21, the Bolsheviks, lacking a proper military, were forced to employ czarist officers to man the new Red Army. To ensure the loyalty of this obviously reluctant group, Leon Trotsky, the communist war commissar, resorted to two effective expedients: He held the officers’ families hostage and, of longer-lasting importance, he salted the army with political commissars loyal to the new regime. Later, the Soviets further ensured that the army would not act against the state as a unified body by creating armed forces under the secret police and Interior Ministry whose command structure was entirely separate from the regular army.

Such expedients did not solve the problem entirely. In 1937-38, Josef Stalin moved violently against the military leadership, purging some 40,000 army officers. Most were shot outright; others perished in concentration camps. The lucky ones survived until 1941, when the Nazi invasion once again put their talents at a premium.

The reasons for this extraordinary self-inflicted wound, during which more Soviet officers perished than the dead of both sides in the battle of Gettysburg, remain unclear even in this time of archival revelations. Vyacheslav M. Molotov, Stalin’s closest comrade at that time, would later claim, unconvincingly, that the condemned soldiers were “rightists . . . having ties with (Adolf) Hitler.”

The Soviet victory in the World War II, and Stalin’s death in 1953, transformed the position of army officers. The triumph over Hitler, achieved at the cost of more than 25 million lives, was the single event of Soviet history about which most Soviet citizens could be justly proud. So, the Soviet authorities created a cult of victory in which the great marshals and generals of the Red Army were celebrated as heroes. Stalin’s purge of the military was denounced publicly, and Red Army officers, instead of being terrorized, became part of the pampered Soviet elite. They received good pay, country dachas , the best food and drink, as well as scarce Western consumer goods.

Stalin’s heirs learned that co-optation worked better than terror in ensuring the army’s loyalty. The Soviet military-industrial complex received anything it wanted, even as Soviet consumers languished in squalor. Whatever worked best in Soviet industry--as much as one-quarter of gross national product--was channeled into the military sector, and the prestige of the army rivaled that of the Communist Party. Overstuffed Soviet marshals stood complaisantly beside Politburo members during those half-forgotten May Day displays of Soviet Army might.

This cozy situation began to crumble, 1989 being the pivotal year. Already reeling from defeat in Afghanistan, the empire collapsed when communism evaporated in Eastern Europe. The 500,000 Soviet troops stationed in what had been East Germany suddenly found themselves cut off, an island of the dreary communist past in a newly reunified capitalist Germany--a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Military morale collapsed. Central Berlin became one huge yard sale of Soviet uniforms and weaponry; desertion and alcoholism ran rampant.

Nor was the situation better at home. Beginning in the Baltic republics, then spreading to the non-Russian areas of the Soviet internal empire, draft resistance became endemic. Even before the Baltics regained their independence, 80% of draft-age males in parts of Lithuania refused to appear for military service.

Even for ethnic Russians, service in the conscript military had never been popular, but it had been a duty enforced by tradition, the power of the Soviet state and the perceived need to defend the Soviet Union from foreign enemies. As the Soviet regime disintegrated, however, any lingering sense of mission disappeared. Corruption reached astronomical proportions, with officers selling fuel, rations and weapons on the black market.

Some elements of the newly free Russian press became openly contemptuous of the military, a situation unthinkable during its postwar glory years. Finally, the prestige of the military plummeted to its nadir in August, 1991, when many of its leaders cooperated in the failed coup against Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Fortunately, many officers sided with Russia’s infant democracy rather than with the imperial Soviet past. Yeltsin was able to purge the military--bloodlessly--and put his own men in charge, such as Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev.

As is evident in Chechnya, however, Russia’s transition to a quasi-democracy has not solved the military’s problems. Many officers who sided with Yeltsin in 1991 have been appalled with the continuing slide of the armed forces’ power and status. Upon returning from Eastern Europe, they were housed in tents. As the Russian economy has been retooled for peace, the share of national income devoted to the army has dramatically shrunk. No longer does the army receive everything it desires; in fact, without years of rebuilding, the Russian economy could not sustain a ‘80s-sized force.

Many army officers are now in thinly concealed revolt. During Yeltsin’s October, 1993, confrontation with the reactionary Parliament, much of the military was notably cool to their president’s fortunes. Indeed, his memoirs reveal that the army almost did not come to this defense at all. Some generals, such as the frightening Lt. Gen. Alexander I. Lebed in Moldova, act almost as warlords, disobeying Yeltsin’s orders and openly calling him a traitor to Russia with impunity. According to recent polls, 40% of officers favor radical nationalist--even fascist--parties. The disarray among officers in Chechnya is further evidence of this growing cancer.

Many observers watch the lackluster performance of the Russian army in Grozny and wonder how the West could ever have been worried by such a bumbling, incompetent force. This ignores the events of the last six years. Any conscript army largely remakes itself every few years. Most of the young soldiers now being killed in Chechnya were too young to have served in the fearsome Soviet army; their military experience has been limited to a period of shortages, poor training, corruption and demoralization. It is small wonder they have little stomach for street fighting against a tough, determined opponent, armed to the teeth with black-market arms.

If there is any light in this otherwise bleak story, it might be found in irony. The incompetence and rifts exposed within the Russian army by the sad events in Grozny may indicate that the military lacks the coherence needed for a coup against the civilian state. The Caucasus is once again a graveyard, this time of whatever reputation the Red Army once enjoyed. That is cold comfort to Moscow’s tottering democracy as it stumbles through another dreary Russian winter.