There won’t be a hearty welcome then, when Ivan comes marching home. The Soviet Union is already overloaded. One example: in Dzerzhinsk, 230 miles east of Moscow, 27 Soviet military families are now living two families to a room; all 70 people share two toilets and a single kitchen. Things are so bad, some of them even long for the barracks they left when they pulled out of Eastern Europe. “I lived under normal human conditions for two years in Czechoslovakia,” laments a 30-year-old major who now lives in the cramped office of a PX with three other bachelor officers. “Now I know that was the best time of my life. I’ve come home to a dreadful society.”
When Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl reached agreement last week on terms for German reunification, they altered forever the postwar military lands^ape of Central Europe. Bowing to what he called “that well-known German word. realpolitik,” Gorbachev dropped objections to German membership in NATO. The two leaders agreed further to begin negotiations on withdrawing the Soviet Union’s 360,000 troops on German soil. Kohl acceded to a corresponding reduction in German forces, to a total of 370,000, “within three or four years” after reunification. He also said Germany “will refrain from producing, holding or commanding atomic, biological and chemical weapons”–a promise that may affect the military strategies of NATO’s nuclear nations, including the United States with its German-based arsenal of nuclear artillery shells. Left unsettled was the fate of non-German NATO troops in Germany once Soviet forces are gone. Kohl’s commitment was simply to keep his country inside the Atlantic alliance–not to any particular force structure (page 28).
Diplomatic points: Back in the U.S.S.R., the military is coming face to face with the general economic breakdown. About 25,u00 Soviet soldiers returned from former satellite countries last year; bilateral agreements with Czechoslovakia and Hungary call for an additional 100,000 to be pulled out during 1990. The agreements scored diplomatic points for Gorbachev abroad, but left Soviet military officials with a planners’ nightmare. Seven months ago officials counted 166,000 officers’ families without apartments, 8,800 more lived in ramshackle quarters or grim communal barracks. The situation can only deteriorate. “Moscow has already drawn down the numbers they originally planned for,” says a Western diplomat in the capital. “The real logistic and political problems are yet to come.”
The Kremlin cannot count on civilian sympathy. In Soviet cities, most families wait up to 10 years for an apartment of their own. They are also well aware of the relative privileges enjoyed by Soviet Army officers stationed in Eastern Europe: with salaries paid partly in local currencies, officers had access to consumer goods generally superior to those available in the Soviet Union itself. “People used all their connections, friends and relations to get an assignment there,” says retired Col. Vladimir Kovalevsky, a former instructor at the Frunze Military Academy. “The locals will say, “These officers’ women are dressed in silks, and we have nothing to eat or wear.’ This will be yet another social conflict.”
Antimilitary sentiment was already on the rise. Once revered for saving the motherland in World War II, the 4 million-member Soviet armed forces have lost face with the Afghanistan generation. It has also suffered from glasnost, which brought long-silenced criticisms into the open and uncorked ethnic feelings. Now desertions, assaults on military officers and draft dodging are all on the rise–especially in the restless non-Russian republics. In Lithuania and Georgia, only about one third of the 18-year-olds called up so far this year actually reported; in Armenia, a mere 7.5 percent showed up. Russian soldiers assigned to quell ethnic unrest in Kirgizia were beaten and their departing trains stoned, says Tigran Aslamasyan, a spokesman for Shield, a new military reform group.
Mothers of conscripts are demanding an accounting of the deaths since 1986 of some 15,000 soldiers in peacetime accidents, suicides or violent hazing incidents–called dedovshchina, or “tyranny of the elders.” Older soldiers have routinely humiliated and terrorized 18-year-old draftees, said Aslamasyan: “The elders beat them, they break their ribs, and the commanders just cover it up.” Activists in the non-Russian republics allege that local youths drafted into the Soviet Army have been singled out for mistreatment as “retaliation” for the republics’ aspirations for independence. Many officers and soldiers are demanding life insurance and higher salaries–the average foot soldier makes just $11 a month. Some even advocate a trade union for soldiers. Shield and other Soviet liberals are calling for an even more drastic remedy: an end to Communist Party control of the armed forces. Earlier this month, 47 prominent intellectuals and military reformers-including Georgi Arbatov, who directs the Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada and advises Gorbachev on foreign affairs–issued a letter suggesting that citizens could not count on the Army to protect their interests as long as it remained tied to the party. “Which side will [the Army] take in the event of new collisions in our society?” the letter asked.
‘Abnormal forms’: Conservative senior military officers bridle at such talk. “AntiArmy propaganda is acquiring abnormal forms,” warned conservative Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov last February. Recently a group of Soviet military leaders and politicians published an angry letter of their own denouncing demands to free the armed forces from party control. Among the signatories was Army Gen. Albert Makashov, who earlier declared Kremlin foreign policy had weakened national security, and that “we are being driven out [of Eastern Europe] without a fight.” But many of the general’s fellow officers didn’t agree. According to a poll by the Soviet news agency Novosti, Makashov was supported by two thirds of Soviet generals and 55 percent of colonels–but rejected by the overwhelming majority of majors and more junior officers. By withdrawing the troops from Europe, Gorbachev has consigned the hard liners’ doctrinal fear of “imperialist encirclement” to the ash heap of history. As a side effect, the Soviet Army finds itself besieged by its own unhappy society.
PHOTO (COLOR): Facing ‘realpolitik’: Kohl (left) and Gorbachev at a press conference in the Soviet resort town of Arkhyz last week, Soviet troops(below) preparing to leave Juterbog, East Germany
1918 Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Soviet Russia unilaterally withdrew from World War I hostilities with the German alliance, giving up claims on Poland, Finland, the Baltic States and the short-lived Ukrainian Republic. Altogether, Russia lost a third of the population it previously controlled.
1939 A cynical secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact divided Central Europe into zones of fascist and communist domination. It led to general war through the German invasion of Poland. Hitler reneged on the pact in 1941 when Nazi tanks rolled onto Soviet territory.
1990 Burying the legacy of World War 11, Mikhail Gorbachev agreed that a united Germany could be a member of the NATO alliance. He pledged to begin negotiations on the withdrawal of the 360,000 Soviet troops still occupying Eastern Germany. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised to limit German forces to 370,000 troops.
