What ever happened to the Red Army? - Defense & Technology

National Review, July 31, 1995 by Brian Crozier

IN the good old days (or bad, depending on whether you were sitting in the Kremlin or the White House) there was a fearsome military machine known collectively as the Red Army. The Cold War was on and the existence of that fearsome machine appeared to threaten to turn it into a hot one, generally thought of as the ``nuclear holocaust.'' (Those were somewhat emotional days.)

One could never rule out the possibility that some maniac in the Kremlin might press the fatal button, but the possibility of a ``holocaust'' was probably remote. Until 1977 - 78, that is. In that period, the Soviet Union started deploying a sophisticated Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) called the SS-20, which was capable of destroying all NATO's military installations in, say, 45 minutes. Because the SS-20 could not have reached U.S. targets, it did not qualify for the strategic ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) label: a dangerous terminological slip.

Those days now seem distant. Fortunately for the world, the aged trio of Soviet leaders in that period (Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko) didn't exploit their temporary strategic advantage, and President Reagan outstared the charismatic Gorbachev, having understood (as Jimmy Carter notably failed to do) that the U.S. could afford to stay in the strategic race, while the Soviet Union could not. Hence, it became the ex - Soviet Union.

And now? Even before the collapse, the rot was gathering speed and malignancy (hence the collapse). The Soviet armed forces -- at that time still (on paper) the mightiest military machine in history -- were in disarray. In 1989 no fewer that 59 Soviet Army officers were murdered. Unofficial ``national armies'' had been set up in Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, and a state of incipient civil war had developed. Indeed, corruption was reported to be rife in the KGB's Third Chief Directorate (whose job was to spy on the armed forces), and the army was thought to be out of control.

When the crunch came, with the attempted hard-line coup of August 1991, Boris Yeltsin had to make sure that at least one section of the divided army would be on his side. He tells the story in the second part of his autobiography, The View from the Kremlin (1994). Shortly before the coup, he dropped in on the Tula Division, a model regiment of paratroopers, and asked the commander, General Pavel Grachev, whether he (Yeltsin) could rely on him in the event of a threatened coup. This was an inspired move, and when the crisis broke, Grachev stood by him.

As Yeltsin put it (page 59): ``at the moment there were really two armies. One . . . [was] the highly professional units that had served in Afghanistan, an army of the highest world standard. The other was the gigantic 'kitchen garden' army, many millions strong, used for harvesting crops, repairing roads, . . . although mainly it served itself.''

Recent history repeated itself in the autumn crisis of 1993, when the hard-liners controlling the Russian parliament (confusingly known as the White House) rebelled. Pavel Grachev, by now defense minister, called 1,300 troops into Moscow, including some from the Dzerzhinsky division (named, ironically, after Lenin's first head of the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB) and various paratroop units. This ``real'' army kept Yeltsin in power.

In international terms, however, the ex-Soviet forces had gone through a series of forced withdrawals which inevitably contributed to the general demoralization. Germany was a particularly difficult case. As early as December 1988, nearly a year before the demolition of the Berlin Wall, President Mikhail Gorbachev, in a speech to the UN General Assembly, had announced that a total of 50,000 troops and 5,000 tanks would be withdrawn from East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. That pullout began, was halted in May 1990, but then resumed in September 1990.

On September 7, 1993, the 54th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland, the withdrawal of the last Russian troops from Polish soil was celebrated in a special ceremony. There was symbolism of a different kind in the departure on June 30, 1993, of the last 3,000 Russian troops -- a motorized infantry brigade -- from Cuba, the first of the Soviet Union's remote-control satellites. This marked the end of a thirty-year-long combat presence on Fidel Castro's island.

A special case of a different kind was that of the Baltic states, which now reclaimed the independence they had lost as a result of the Hitler - Stalin pact of 1939. The Confederation of Independent States (CIS) that succeeded the USSR did not attract them, so the ex-Soviet forces pulled out of Estonia in February 1993, from Lithuania in August, and from Latvia in October. The withdrawal had begun the previous year but had been suspended in October 1992, in part because of the problem of accommodating large numbers of returning troops in Russia.

Withdrawals from other ex-Soviet Republics that remained in the new CIS have proved more difficult because of widespread disorders, attempted coups, and civil conflicts. Examples include Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova. In the latter, the main obstacle was the personal opposition of the commander of the 14th Army, General Aleksandr Lebed, who clashed repeatedly with Defense Minister Grachev.