Russia’s month-old Chechnya operation has been a disaster for the army – and its commander in chief. Boris Yeltsin was in political trouble already, thanks to a sinking economy and the perception that he has given in to both the mafia and the hard-liners. But since the invasion, his popularity has sunk to an all-time low: a recent poll indicated that three quarters of the population disapproved of his policies. Russians have watched their first televised war unfold – sickening images of dead civilians, decapitated soldiers and sullen captives. Now they – and the rest of the world – are asking what Yeltsin is up to, and whether he is in control of his own military. Worried leaders in Europe and Washington began to back away from the beleaguered president. “Apparently, he has gotten some quite bad military advice,” Secretary of State Warren Christopher told NBC.
Yeltsin’s own behavior has scarcely been reassuring. At the start of the conflict, he took a two-week leave of absence for seemingly minor surgery. Since then he has led a Soviet-style disinformation campaign, with public promises to curtail airstrikes invariably followed by an escalation in the fighting. (It is apparently not a case of Yeltsin himself being misinformed; he gets daily intelligence reports, which he returns with handwritten notes.) Late last week he staged a bizarre televised meeting of his Security Council in which he demanded to know who was responsible for the continued bombing of Grozny in defiance of his orders. Glaring ominously at Defense Minister Gen. Pavel Grachev, Yeltsin said, “I want to hear absolutely precise information from the defense minister.” At the weekend, Moscow buzzed with rumors that Grachev might resign.
His departure could hardly undo what has become a brutal and botched adventure. Three days after the Russian tanks rolled in, Grachev proclaimed that his forces controlled the center of Grozny. Indeed, hundreds of Russians occupied the area around the presidential palace. But they were mostly dead and wounded – soldiers felled by Chechen snipers, charred remains spilling out of blackened armored vehicles and tanks that had been immobilized by rocket-propelled grenades and finished off with Molotov cocktails. Forced to retreat, the Russians left groups of comrades surrounded and suffered casualties unknown since the Afghan war. Late last week a mortar shell killed Maj. Gen. Viktor Vorobyov, head of the Interior Ministry task force charged with snuffing out Chechen resistance. A Moscow legislator who toured the smoldering city called the invasion “a complete military catastrophe for the Russian Army.”
Poorly trained, corrupt, underfinanced and shrinking by the day, the armed forces have been rotting for years. “The real military weakness of the Soviet Union was Moscow’s main defense secret throughout the cold war,” says Pavel Felgenhauer, a defense correspondent for the daily Sevodnya newspaper. “For 40 years, the awesome Russian bear held the West together and helped keep Western defense and intelligence expenditures high.”
Russian forces, dependent from Napoleon to World War II on sheer size, U.S. analysts say, couldn’t make the leap into a modern force capable of waging high-tech and mobile warfare. That was the chief lesson of the Afghan conflict, which left the military badly bruised and demoralized. Not long afterward the dismantlement began. When Mikhail Gorbachev, desperate to trim the defense budget, agreed in 1990 to reduce conventional forces in Europe, the military lost a significant network of bases, depots, men – and a sense of purpose. They reorganized along a new front line in Ukraine and Belarus. Then came the breakup of the Soviet Union and the loss of yet another front, as well as a prodigious amount of equipment and infrastructure that newly independent republics expropriated because the assets lay on their territory. That left the Russian Air Force with barely one third of its advanced MiG-29 fighters; less than one quarter of its best strike aircraft (the Su-27) and strategic bombers (the TU-95M and TU-160), and half its airfields. The army had to redeploy hundreds of thousands of men – and hastily set up depots where vast quantities of tanks and artillery pieces still lie rusting.
The humiliations mounted. Months after 600,000 Russian soldiers pulled back from Central Europe and the Baltics, nearly half couldn’t find permanent housing and spent the winter in slum hotels, tank sheds or tents. Pay has plummeted: last year a major general in the air defense forces earned one third as much as an unskilled autoworker. Many soldiers supplement their income by “signing up” their wives, who may show up for guard duty at, say, weapons storage sites, without training or uniforms. Individual divisions suffer, too. Charles Dick, a Russian military expert for the British chiefs of staff, tells of the commander of the air defense forces so desperate to help his pilots train that he pledged his word of honor to get 26,000 tons of fuel on credit. “He now owes 11 billion rubles,” says Dick.
The military is shrinking without becoming more efficient. The Russian General Staff has downsized the armed forces from some 2.7 million in 1992 to around 1.4 million today; virtually all units have been kept, but gutted of regular troops. Because the ratio of officers to men in most units is now close to 1:1, officers often do menial tasks. There is a basic shortage of conscripts, with new recruits consisting largely of “illiterate workers and peasants,” says a general who heads the Russian ground forces training directorate. A shrinking military budget – $11 billion, or about 4 percent of what the United States spends per soldier – has resulted in fewer training exercises, poorly maintained equipment and extensive corruption. Typical graft includes selling weapons and embezzling regimental funds.
Even before Chechnya, Yeltsin did little to bolster the armed forces. In November he berated top commanders for their lack of combat readiness and discipline. Some have returned the favor by repeatedly condemning the invasion – and upbraiding the president for relying on the advice of a coterie of hard-liners. Critics call them Yeltsin’s politburo: Grachev, who defied leaders of the failed 1991 putsch and opposed the 1993 insurrection by conservative parliamentarians; Oleg Lobov, leader of the Security Council; Sergei Stepashin, head of the Federal Counterintelligence Service (the domestic successor to the KGB); Viktor Ilyushin, who controls Yeltsin’s information flow, and Maj. Gen. Aleksandr Korzhakov, the president’s chief bodyguard. As Yeltsin’s drinking companion and tennis partner, Korzhakov enjoys unusual privileges. Lately he has abused that power – first by pushing to reimpose state controls over the oil industry, then by dispatching masked gunmen to beat up employees of a powerful entrepreneur who is friendly with Moscow’s mayor, a potential presidential candidate in 1996.
Will the generals now turn on Yeltsin? “If the politicians continue to act this stupidly, they may provoke the military to play a more active role,” says Aleksandr Konovalov, a defense specialist with the Institute of USA and Canada in Moscow. That is a specter that deeply worries the West, which has tracked the Russian military’s decline. A resurgent Russia is dangerous – and a weak one is, too. Moscow can’t afford to invite mischief from other restive regions, much less its opportunistic neighbors such as China, Iran and Turkey. Washington has little leverage and, for now, is simply keeping its fingers crossed. If Yeltsin isn’t up to the job of strengthening the military, the top brass may well look for someone who is, and promote him at the polls – or by some other means.
