By Tom Jordan
and Steve Painter
"We ran at the tanks and they ran away", 19-year-old Moscow engineering student Kostya Borodyenko told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly by phone last week. The fact that relatively small demonstrations around the Russian parliament were able to hold off tanks and troops reflects the state of the Soviet army today.
Traditionally, conscript armies have been unreliable when called upon for internal political repression, and the Soviet army is at least 75% conscript at rank-and-file level. Military service is compulsory for all young men around the age of 20. They serve two years if they join the army or 3-4 years in the air force or navy.
But even among the officers there has been unrest for some time, partly as a result of the Afghanistan war. A clandestine organisation called Shield (Schshit) emerged as early as 1982, well before the Gorbachev era, led by paratrooper Lieutenant Colonel Vitaly Uratchev, who is now a member of the Russian parliament and who, according to some reports, was arrested in the early stages of the August 19 coup.
The organisation was based among junior and middle-level officers, who felt they had to act because conditions in the army were so bad. During the Afghanistan war, morale deteriorated badly, and hashish smoking and brutalisation of new conscripts became widespread.
Today, the situation may be even worse, particularly among troops returning from eastern Europe to prospects of unemployment and economic insecurity. The winding down of the international arms race has also meant a slashing of military budgets.
According to some reports, the Soviet army lost more casualties through accident and suicide in the past five years than the 13,000 killed in Afghanistan. There have been thousands of desertions, particularly from units scheduled to be sent back from eastern Europe.
After Shield went public in 1988-89, many of its leaders were demoted from the regular army to the reserve, but the group still claims 25,000 members, about half serving military personnel and the rest retired or relatives. The group has long-standing contacts with western European conscript organisations, some of which are illegal.
According to Socialist Party of the USSR leader Boris Kagarlitsky, officers are well aware of the dangers of the army disintegrating if called upon to carry out internal political
repression, and are anxious to avoid being used in this way. Gorbachev is widely disliked because of his use of the army against nationalist unrest in non-Russian republics.