Letter From Officer X

By Officer X

Aggrieved as they are by the humiliations inflicted on their armed forces in Chechnya, Russia's military men are wary of speaking out. But one well-placed army officer, who fears his career would be ruined if his name were disclosed, has set down his views in a remarkably candid manuscript obtained by TIME. He describes a mood of truculent, often anti-American patriotism among his fellow soldiers.

Now more than ever, Russian officers are bitterly questioning what has gone wrong with their army. Trained to fight, many feel only aversion for the slaughter of fellow countrymen, which their government has forced upon them in Chechnya. They say they dream of one thing: to hear the announcement that President Boris Yeltsin has resigned, Defense Minister Pavel Grachev has been fired, and the new head of state has started negotiations to end the war and bring the troops home. But our men continue to follow orders, shooting and dying, and hope the day will come when the military will never again have to be called on to solve political problems.

Not many officers, particularly in the Defense Ministry and on the General Staff, entertained any illusions that Russia would accept the independence of the defiant Chechen republic. But since large stockpiles of weapons were left behind in 1992 when President Jokhar Dudayev deported the Russian units serving in his region, army leaders and the President's advisers could hardly have believed the Chechen crisis would have a bloodless resolution. Chechen civilians have been dying, not because the military aimed to kill them, but because many soldiers have forgotten -- or never learned -- how to shoot straight, and often their missiles hit civilian houses instead of military targets.

Today Russian servicemen feel like second-rate citizens. Career officers find themselves in 13th or 14th place on the pay scale, behind the doormen of expensive Moscow restaurants and the maids who work for Russia's novy rich class. In fact, many officers now have to moonlight as bodyguards or laborers to feed their families.

Many senior generals accuse Defense Minister Grachev of being a weak, incompetent minister with the mentality of a commander of a troop division rather than of a minister charged with his country's security, who has proved himself skilled only in political intrigues. They fault him for surrounding himself with an entourage of loyal but dull military hacks, for not fighting hard enough to defend the military budget, and for covering up corruption.

Grachev, whom Yeltsin appointed Defense Minister in 1992 over many generals with more experience, manages to hang on because of his loyalty to his patron. As commander of the Soviet Airborne troops during the attempted coup in 1991, he refused to storm the building where Yeltsin was holed up; in October 1993, when the leaders of Parliament dared to challenge Yeltsin in the streets, he sided with the President. According to people close to the President's office, Grachev even reminded Yeltsin after the October putsch: "Boris Nikolayevich, I have twice saved you." Officers have nicknamed the Defense Minister "the President's shooting crutch."

Grachev knows how to create a good impression. He gets in touch with the President at 10 each morning and gives him cheerful briefings about the high combat readiness and morale of the armed forces. Yeltsin loves these reports. When Grachev was confronted by a Moscow newspaper last summer with accusations that his briefings were not objective, he dismissed the charges as opposition intrigues.

Although Yeltsin has protected Grachev in the past, military analysts believe he will eventually abandon the minister. When there is danger of social explosion -- quite possibly because of Chechnya -- or when he needs to gain points for the 1996 presidential election, Yeltsin will dump Grachev to save himself.

Grachev, 47, is painfully jealous of the prestige and authority of Deputy Minister of Defense Boris Gromov, 51, who was his former commander in Afghanistan and reportedly castigated him for tactical combat mistakes there. The more Grachev senses his own inadequacy in the job, the cooler his relations have become with his powerful rival.

When Gromov was named as Grachev's deputy in June 1992, he was not even given an office on the so-called commanders' floor of the Defense Ministry. Instead, he had to move into a run-down building across the street. To get back at Grachev and save face among his subordinates, Gromov made sure his office was beautifully renovated. The jealous Defense Minister began to keep a close watch on Gromov, monitoring all his travels and activities.

The Defense Minister made his move to get rid of Gromov just before the action in Chechnya, by announcing plans to eliminate several deputy-minister slots. Gromov is now in bureaucratic limbo, since Yeltsin has yet to ratify the shake-up. He has tried to stake out an independent position for himself, even carrying on private telephone negotiations with Dudayev before the military intervention. Gromov has continued to call for an end to the bloodshed and even upstaged Grachev by making a holiday hospital visit to wounded soldiers from the front.

Slogans about the military remaining aloof from politics are nothing but populist declarations that do not reflect present-day reality. Yeltsin has failed to grasp that his armed forces, proclaimed to be democratic and nonpartisan, remain communist. Many generals and senior officers admit they still keep their Communist Party cards, and some continue to pay party dues.

Among soldiers, ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky jumped from fourth to second place in popularity polls last year. He received strong support from the army in parliamentary elections 13 months ago: according to confidential Defense Ministry data, more than 60% voted for him. The only way for Yeltsin to win back the sympathy of servicemen would be to buy them off with a hefty pay raise, but the government simply does not have that kind of money. Soldiers will vote in the next presidential election for a leader who will protest more vigorously the feeble overall reforms of the present government; who will express the hopes of an exhausted people for a better life, stability, law and order; and who will infuse the military with new faith in its combat potential. This leader might be Zhirinovsky or General Alexander Lebed, commander of the 14th Army in Trans-Dniestr, who is popular for his role in stopping a bloody war there and for his outspoken criticism of military corruption. Or it could be former Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, a onetime combat pilot famous for his exploits in Afghanistan, who has always been more popular than Yeltsin among the military.

In carrying out reform of the military, political leaders failed in one significant way. They did not develop a constitutional mechanism that would exclude excessive involvement by the military in politics. More than a dozen servicemen are parliamentary deputies, representing a variety of political factions. There are an additional 50 organizations whose members include servicemen, and some of which have their own paramilitary structures. They are supposed to provide for the social and legal defense of servicemen, but such goals may quickly change if instability in Russia grows. Then these nonpolitical organizations might carry out armed actions, and the military deputies in parliament may also grab their Kalashnikovs and urge their fellow officers to join them at the barricades.

A number of major differences have emerged recently between Russia and the U.S. So whose fault is it that the specter of cold war might be coming back? We believe the political and military leadership is to blame for pursuing a line of total camaraderie with the U.S. A strong America promised billions of dollars in support, always dictating its own conditions. They were sometimes humiliating, but Yeltsin, Foreign Minster Andrei Kozyrzev, and Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin accepted them without a murmur. Now Yeltsin realizes he has given away too much, too fast. He knows patriotism and a healthy nationalism will be the watchwords in the next election, so he is trying to change horses and has made a number of statements against U.S. policies.

What Americans don't understand is that while they have been secretly trying to achieve the collapse and disintegration of Russia -- though they take pains to deny it -- they have only increased the possibility that the tired, exhausted and embittered Russian armed forces may one day explode, with dire consequences -- not only for the U.S. but also for the world. American and NATO military bases still encircle Russia, despite declarations about the end of the cold war. The U.S. military budget keeps growing, along with Washington's combat strength. We monitor this closely. Only naive people who do not know Russia might believe that our military will accept the position of second best in the world. We seek to be equal to the strongest. Yeltsin has denied us our most precious professional feeling: a sense of pride in our own might. The military will never forgive him for that.