RUSSIA : Waiting for Napoleon, As Corruption Runs Amok

Communism, wrote the young Marx and Engels in their famous manifesto, is the specter haunting the chancelleries of Europe.

Not anymore. The new specter keeping both U.S. and European diplomats up late at night is named for Napoleon. When diplomats worry about the future of Europe today, they worry about “Bonapartism”--about the possibility that a Russian military leader will take power and unite the country behind an aggressively hard-line foreign policy.

It’s not hard to see why people worry. True, the Russian military’s misadventures in Grozny don’t inspire much fear, but then France’s army wasn’t doing particularly well before Napoleon came on the scene. Meanwhile, Russia’s civilian politicians seem both weak and divided, and its generals are muttering in the background.

Clearly, the Russian military isn’t happy. Many officers still resent the loss of Eastern Europe, much less the collapse of the Soviet Union. Others remain bitter and proud in their hatred of the West--a West that, they believe, first brought down the Soviet Union and now seeks to keep Russia weak, poor and friendless in a hostile world.

Shocks to their pride are only part of the problem. The Russian military is currently undergoing a huge downsizing that dwarfs anything planned for the Pentagon. The collapse of Russian military spending has been astounding by any standard. Reliably estimated at around 16% of gross domestic product during the Soviet period, military spending in Russia’s fledgling democracy is headed toward about 4% of GDP. Worse still, Russia’s GDP has fallen more than 50% since 1989. The Russian military is getting an ever smaller slice out of an ever shrinking pie, and you don’t have to be an Einstein to know that a hungry bear is a cranky bear.

Soldiers who might try to take power would have plenty of support in much of the country. The Russian military-industrial complex was, after agriculture, the biggest employer in the country. Whole cities, even regions, are utterly dependent on military factories and orders for their incomes and jobs. Presumably, these employees and managers would tolerate a takeover, even if they didn’t exactly welcome it. Meanwhile, Russia’s civilian politicians are divided, corrupt, incompetent and unpopular.

Already, the Russian leadership has had to call on military support in several crises. During the attempted coup of 1991, it was the failure of the armed forces to crush popular protests in Moscow that catapulted Boris N. Yeltsin into national power and foiled the Communists. In October, 1993, when Yeltsin confronted Parliament and Russia teetered on the brink of civil war, it was the support of Russia’s generals that allowed Yeltsin to crush his enemies.

Why not cut out the middlemen, Russia’s generals must wonder. Many blame Yeltsin for sacrificing the unity of the Soviet Union to fulfill his personal ambitions to rule an independent Russia. Many others attack the government for its insensitivity to the military’s financial requirements. There is open talk in Moscow about the need for a Russian Pinochet--a tough, purposeful military leader who will protect the interests of the military-industrial complex while forcing the necessary economic reforms on the country.

So where’s the coup? Why hasn’t some military leader summoned his fellow officers to save the country from the crooks now running it into the ground?

Don’t hold your breath. While anything is possible in Russia, Russia’s military is as mixed up as the rest of Russian society. It will be years before Russia’s military sorts out its own problems. It may even take a strong new civilian government to create the strong, united armed forces that Russia needs.

Nothing is simple in Russia today. The military budget problems, for example, don’t just bring Russia’s soldiers together to grumble about tightfisted civilian politicians. They also divide the armed forces and make it impossible for the generals--and admirals and air-force marshals--to agree on a government program.

The military is as divided as Russian society about what should be done. Rank-and-file officers have one kind of program. They don’t want to lose their jobs, they don’t want promotion opportunities to disappear, they want improved housing and they want their pay to keep pace with inflation.

Reasonable enough, you might say, but you can’t pay for personnel unless you skimp on equipment. That won’t be easy for Russia. On the one hand, the country must retain enough of a nuclear deterrent to ensure against an attack from the United States or China. Gone are the days when the Soviet Union ran a nuclear-arms race against the United States, but even a modest strategic nuclear force is monstrously expensive and eats up a sizable share of the military resources available.

Conventional forces are also a problem. Russia can no longer afford--and no longer needs--the massive, clunky armies of the Warsaw Pact era. Russian strategic students agree that the new country needs smaller, but higher-quality and more mobile forces. Furthermore, the Gulf War showed that Russia’s basic armor and communications technology is obsolete. Perhaps more than anything else, the Russian military needs to invest in expensive research and development and purchase new generations of complex, expensive weapons systems.

But more money on R&D;, and more investment in smart weapons inevitably means less money for Russia’s hungry officers’ families and fewer orders for its hungry tank factories. Moreover, from a purely military point of view, much of the current Russian military Establishment is deadwood that needs to be pruned. Soviet officers spent a lifetime preparing to fight tank battles with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Germany; this isn’t much use for fighting Chechen guerrillas in the hills around Grozny.

Russia’s military is caught in a trap. If the leadership does what its supporters want and keeps its Soviet-era officers and factories happy with more of the same, then the military, as a whole, will continue to fall behind the West. But if the military leadership undertakes the necessary reforms, it loses support within its own ranks and in the public at large. Russia’s generals face the same problems as its politicians: Reform is both completely unavoidable and monstrously unpopular.

Besides these practical problems, the Russian military also faces a profound ideological crisis. Officers raised to serve and defend the Soviet socialist motherland must get used to the new, non-Communist Russian motherland. In the end, the Russian armed forces will probably find their psychological and spiritual roots in such traditional sources of Russian nationalism as the Orthodox religion--but that kind of change can’t come overnight.

With this combination of practical difficulties and spiritual uncertainty, it cannot be surprising that Russia’s armed forces are as corrupt as its civil society. Chechen fighters openly boast that they have been able to purchase weapons from the Russian armed forces. Military participation in the black market is an open secret and corruption flourishes at every level of the chain of command.

The chancelleries of Europe should go back to sleep. Bonapartism is not--yet--a danger in Russia. Look at Grozny. The Russian armed forces could be the strongest power in the country some day. For now, however, they are just another institution overwhelmed by the adjustment to a post-Soviet world.