New Note of Optimism Sounds in Russia’s Dispirited Military

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia —  The marines of the Russian Far East are among the most pampered members of the Russian military. Their pay comes only two months late. They usually get fed. And many of their officers get free housing, even if the accommodations are one room to a family in a spartan barracks.

Not for them the miserable fate of fellow conscripts in nearby Nakhodka. In July, firms in Nakhodka appealed to Russia’s new security chief, Alexander I. Lebed, to send food to the local border guards. At least 100 were seriously underweight, the appeal said. They were subsisting on half-rations.

“We’ve been paid for June. I suppose we’re lucky. Some people are only getting their money from four months ago. But still, I have two kids--one’s 5, and one’s a month old--and it’s hard to get by,” marine junior officer Ivan L. Gromyshev said recently, loitering in a barracks containing iron bunk beds, memorials to dead sailors and little else.

Even the elite marines are sick to death of the cuts and confusion in the post-Soviet military. The Defense Ministry has clung to a nostalgic dream of past glories, when the vast Soviet army was paid and equipped to conquer a host of ideological enemies. Refusing to accept reality, the ministry has balked at reshaping the armed forces to protect a smaller country with limited military needs.

Post-Soviet conscription has been kept up to former levels, although widespread draft-dodging means most units are understaffed. But soldiers and sailors are for the most part penned in their barracks with no enemies to fight and, in any case, little equipment to fight with. The only result of stretching dwindling resources thinner has been to reduce the 1.5-million-strong armed forces to beggary.

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Conventional wisdom has it that the armed forces, angry about their new poverty, are dangerously close to countenancing coups and military dictatorships to restore their prestige and power.

But officers in the Pacific Fleet say they do not want the Soviet past back. They just want a sensible modern army, scaled down from its Soviet size but properly trained to perform new, more limited functions. They want an end to the financial embarrassment that has become their daily lot. They say they are ready and willing to embrace reform if it allows them to perform their patriotic duty properly.

“The situation now is far from simple,” said Capt. Viktor I. Ryzhkov. “We haven’t broken down completely, but we have realized it’s time to start creating new structures.”

A new note of hope can be heard in conversations around the shabby barracks of Vladivostok. The nation’s unpopular defense minister, Pavel S. Grachev, was fired in June. Lebed has installed Col. Gen. Igor N. Rodionov in his place, with plans for “profound” reform.

With Grachev gone, many in the military feel that a better future might be on the way. Rodionov was appointed only weeks after Lebed, his ally and patron, became security chief. Both men are heroes to members of the military, who believe for the first time since 1991 that they are being commanded by men with their best interests at heart.

Rodionov, who ran Russia’s top military academy for five years before his appointment as defense minister, is particularly dear to the hearts of marines because his son was the popular commander of a Pacific Fleet battalion.

“The fleet thinks of him as a saint, so it’s great for us that his father is in charge now. I’ve met the father, and he was very pleasant--accessible, upright, honest,” said Col. Sergei N. Aleshin.

“I wish him [Lebed] huge success. I really want to see very soon the fruits of his work, especially military reform,” Adm. Vladimir I. Kuroyedov, the commander of the Pacific Fleet, said enthusiastically.

Kuroyedov’s vision of the new friendships opening up for Vladivostok with its Pacific neighbors--Japan, South Korea, China, the United States--has made him a keen advocate of reform.

“We are becoming a purely defensive force. Our doctrine is defensive, and for the military that’s a completely new departure. . . . We have no probable enemies anymore, and we need a different kind of force.”

No clear picture of the shape of military reform ever emerged during five years under Grachev, whose friendship with President Boris N. Yeltsin kept him in his job although his inefficiency and legendary corruption made him almost comically unpopular among soldiers and civilians.

Grachev’s reforms consisted only of grudging cuts in equipment and, to a lesser extent, manpower, Kuroyedov said. By about the year 2000, Kuroyedov said, he expects a second stage of reform--reequipping depleted forces with modern weaponry--to be well underway.

What reform will actually be carried out is still being debated. Yeltsin’s promise during his reelection campaign earlier this year to abolish conscription by 2000, creating an entirely professional army, was a vote-catcher. But it was so ambitious that Rodionov and Lebed have expressed strong reservations about whether it is possible.

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Professionals--men who have completed two years of compulsory military service--are already being asked back into the armed forces. Unlike conscripts, they have to be properly paid, but Ryzhkov and Kuroyedov say the benefits of their experience more than offset the extra cost.

Asked whether he thought the navy could go completely professional in four years, Ryzhkov paused. “Yes, but . . ,” he said finally.

“It took the United States more than 10 years to perfect a professional army. It takes time and money to get it right. In our situation, one could expect it to take longer still. But Russia now is in the grip of revolutionary hastiness, even if there has been no revolution to justify that haste.”

Although up to 10% of the members of the Pacific Fleet are already professionals, or kontraktniki, a fierce argument is going on in Moscow about the cost of a complete changeover.

Government budgeting for defense spending in 1996 is 3.8% of GDP, or about $15 billion. The Defense Ministry believes that the cost of building and running a smaller professional army, with new equipment, will be about 6% of GDP. Where the money is to come from has not yet been made clear.

But there is general agreement that a professional army is a desirable goal.

“It would be reassuring to know there was a pool of men whom we could count on to be able to fight at the moment the order came,” said Sergei V. Tonakov, a 25-year-old marine officer.

There is no such pool now. A severe shortage of acceptable conscript soldiers is one of the armed forces’ biggest problems. The slow-witted, naive or friendless are among the few who fail to dodge the draft. If they do obey the call-up, they risk brutal hazing by older troops. Suicide figures are high; 423 soldiers committed suicide in 1995, according to the Interfax news agency.

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In Vladivostok--where Pacific breezes blow and the shabbily elegant seafront buildings are decorated with mermaids--youths on the street are unanimous in saying they will do all they can to wriggle out of naval service.

Young men here are haunted by television pictures of a local navy catastrophe, in 1992, when food supplies at a base on nearby Russky Island ran low and four cadets starved to death.

The images of starvation--boys with bruised eyes and skeletal bodies--were shown to the nation after Vladimir Cherepkov, later the mayor of Vladivostok, filmed them and smuggled the pictures off the island.

So young men stay on at college, pretend sickness or just vanish to avoid the draft. Mothers’ committees all over Russia compare notes on how their boys should dodge their call-up orders, and even the most patriotic of officers is prepared to look sympathetically at the weakest of excuses.

“How do I get my son out of the draft?” Valentina, a middle-aged housewife, whispered to one Vladivostok officer with a wheedling note in her voice. “I so want him to keep out of the armed forces.”

The officer smiled understandingly back.

“Don’t you worry,” he said. “When his call-up papers come, bring him to see me. I’ll introduce you to a doctor who will write him a disability certificate for a bottle of whiskey.”

The strongest argument against military service in the last 21 months has been the risk of being packed off, untrained, as cannon fodder for a war inside Russia’s own borders that has dragged on since December 1994.

The unpopular war in secessionist Chechnya, viewed in Russia at least partly as the brainchild of the hated Grachev--who is popularly suspected of pursuing it because he had private financial interests in it--has created a powerful anti-military backlash that has driven forward plans for reform.

Lebed--who began intense shuttle diplomacy in Chechnya in August, reaching a tentative peace agreement by the end of the month--was as appalled as any of the soldiers by his first sight of the demoralized, penniless Russian troops there. The shock made him pledge to speed up military reform.

“Today there is an acute need to concern ourselves with the development of the armed forces and other force structures because these weaklings manning those checkpoints--hungry, lice-ridden and underclothed, or rather clothed in blouses, coats, vests and sweaters and shawls, some boots of unknown shape or purpose--can by no means represent the Interior Ministry or the Defense Ministry,” the retired general said.

The Pacific Fleet marines were among the motley crew of Russian forces sent to inland Chechnya for the first six months of fighting. A total of 63 were killed.

“You didn’t think whether it was wrong to kill or not, because you knew if you didn’t kill first, they would get you,” said a deadpan Tonakov, whose unit killed 15 Chechen snipers. “But it was ugly to be fighting on Russian territory, and I was happy to leave.”

As he watched a group of skinny conscripts, bare-chested, sweating and crop-headed, jog around a track, Aleshin railed against the many humiliations suffered by the military under Grachev and expressed his own hopes that reform will restore order and logic to the armed forces.

“The secret of professionalism is to let a soldier be a soldier. Let him shoot, let him drive, let him keep busy doing his job. Don’t deflect him onto the problems of day-to-day survival,” he said.

“Don’t ask him to organize his own water supply, his own electricity, or to beg for his pay. Pay him on time, and make sure there’s enough fuel for planes to fly and ships to sail.”