РУСКИТЕ ВОЕННИ: НОВА ПОЛИТИЧЕСКА СИЛА?
Ренфри КларкMOSCOW - How much should Russians be made to pay for the armed
defence of their country's new capitalism? Among millions of
half-fed, seldom-paid workers, the figure of zero rubles would no
doubt spring to mind.
Cutting all funding for the Russian armed forces, however, would
not solve the really painful question: how would you cope with
the vast apparatus you had declared redundant? What would you do
for the military officers whose careers were cut short, not to
speak of huge numbers of workers in defence-related enterprises?
Posed originally in the era of Soviet perestroika, the challenge
of military ``downsizing'' is now bedevilling Russia's
capitalists. Mindful of their need for military defence - above
all against an embittered Russian population - the country's new
rulers nevertheless look toward the armed forces as an area where
economies can be made and solutions found to at least some of the
state's financial problems.
Needless to say, these plans are not to the liking of military
officers, defence plant directors, or the several million workers
employed in Russia's ``military-industrial complex''. The last
year or so has seen the rise of an increasingly organised and
angry ``military opposition''. Arguably, this now poses a much
more real threat to the government than the tame, compromising
communists.
Until the late 1980s the Soviet armed forces swallowed a ruinous
portion, at least 20 per cent, of the USSR's gross domestic
product. The demands for a less expensive military - the current
medium-term target is to spend 3.5 per cent of GDP on defence -
have been accompanied by a drastic reformulation of the tasks
assigned to the military by government strategists.
The Soviet-era goal of being able to use conventional forces to
mount overwhelming counter-blows against attack has been
abandoned. Deterrence is now to be provided by Russia's nuclear
arsenal; the ground forces are to have the capacity to fight only
limited wars directly on the country's borders.
The initial response of the General Staff chiefs to this new
thinking was disbelief, together with manoeuvres aimed at
protecting their fiefdoms until ``normal'' funding resumed.
Partly to convince the generals and admirals that the old days
were gone for good, the Russian government funded the armed
forces at levels well below those promised in state budgets.
The result is that naval vessels now rarely put to sea; air
force pilots are in the air for only a fraction of the time
needed to maintain their combat skills; and the army, as shown by
its humiliation in Chechnya, lacks the ability to fight even the
limited border wars foreseen in the new strategies.
Rearguard actions by military chiefs have continued. According
to Moscow journalist and military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer,
defence officials deliberately divert funds meant for officers'
salaries in order to pay for weapons procurement, research and
development, and military construction. Defence Minister Igor
Sergeev, Felgenhauer states, has pooled all the money he has been
able to find in the defence budget in order to begin production
and deployment of a new nuclear missile, the Topol-M. The salary
backlogs - officers are now owed an average of a month's pay -
have been put to political use, giving the defence chiefs a
weapon in their campaign for funding increases.
Particularly in the ground forces, the combination of government
cuts, misdirection of funds by top officials, and large-scale
theft has brought chaos and disintegration. According to retired
general Lev Rokhlin, the chairperson of the Russian parliament's
defence committee, the army in 1997 received only 64 per cent of
its food and 23 per cent of its clothing budget.
Morale in the ranks has fallen catastrophically. Soldiers are
often hungry and cold, and the brutalisation of draftees is a
continuing scandal. Suicides are frequent, and in a spate of
recent incidents, soldiers have run amok and turned their weapons
on comrades.
Understandably, young men in Russia will do almost anything to
avoid being called up. Through legal exemptions, by bribing
medical examiners, or simply by going missing, around 80 per cent
of potential conscripts dodge the draft. Those who serve are
mostly the poorest and least educated.
The situation of junior officers is little better than that of
rank and file soldiers. For lieutenants and captains, even those
with families, home is often an overcrowded barracks. Career
prospects are dim, since the government's cost-cutting plans
include a drastic culling of the senior ranks.
Many officers have reacted by becoming sharply politicised. The
trend of military opinion has held little comfort for President
Boris Yeltsin. The view is now commonplace that the army chiefs
would no longer side with Yeltsin in a crisis as they did in
October 1993, when they agreed to the president's demand that
they shell the parliament.
Serving officers in Russia are barred from political activity,
but are quite capable of organising themselves behind the scenes.
Meanwhile, there are no checks on activity by retired officers.
Last year saw the formation by Lev Rokhlin of the Union for the
Defence of the Army and Military Industry. Raising the call for
Yeltsin's dismissal, this movement has spread rapidly. It now
claims to have 73 regional organisations across Russia.
As the officer corps has become politicised, the government has
moved toward a showdown with the whole complex of Russian
military and military-industrial interests. At the end of
November, a core plan was adopted for a profound restructuring of
the armed forces by the year 2005. According to the English-
language <I>Moscow Tribune,<D> this plan would involve cutting
total military personnel by 500,000, to a figure of 1,200,000, by
the end of 1998.
Accompanying this is a scheme, unveiled by Vice-Premier Yakov
Urinson in the last days of 1997, to cut the total number of
defence sector enterprises by more than 60 per cent. Out of 1760
such enterprises, the new defence production complex will consist
of 670 plants.
Many of the defence plants are out in the cold already, since
the Defence Ministry is failing to pay them for goods and
services delivered. At the end of 1997, the federal debt to
defence enterprises stood at the equivalent of more than US$3
billion.
In all, output by Russia's defence industries has reportedly
fallen by a factor of 11 in the past six years, and arms exports
by a factor of four. Logically, the redundant plants would have
been converted to producing goods for the civilian market. But in
1995 the Federal Defence Industry Conversion Program received
only 25 per cent of its anticipated funding, and in 1996 only 11
per cent. No funds at all were assigned in 1997.
By effectively writing off more than a thousand defence industry
enterprises, the Russian government has launched an attack of
staggering scope on the country's working people. In some cases
it is not just industrial plants that have been sentenced to
economic death, but whole cities. Russia has numerous ``company
towns'' where a defence plant is the only major employer.
The rapid growth of the military opposition has not been matched
by a corresponding rise in its political impact. This is partly
because of divisions within the officers' own ranks, and also
because effective collaboration with civilian oppositionists has
not emerged. People such as Rokhlin and retired general Aleksandr
Lebed, for example, are reluctant to have dealings with Russia's
largest opposition force, the Communist Party of the Russian
Federation (KPRF).
There has also been standoffishness on the part of the
civilians. The KPRF leadership, which has recently shifted its
tactics toward a compromise with the government on key economic
issues, is said by parliamentary sources to regard Rokhlin as too
radical. Commentators have recently predicted that the KPRF will
join with pro-government forces in the parliament to try to oust
Rokhlin from his position at the head of the defence committee.
The communists' opportunism does not, however, mean that the
government can breathe easily. Even without help from the KPRF, a
political bloc consisting of prominent ex-generals plus the
directors of a thousand-odd defence enterprises could prove
highly virulent as an opposition force. Such a bloc would attract
wide popular backing, as is shown by the fact that trade union
bodies in many defence plants have declared their support for
Rokhlin's movement.
The moves by Russia's rulers to sack large parts of the officer
corps and gut the defence complex thus represent an immense
gamble, and show how desperate the government perceives its
financial position as being. If the army chiefs were to take up
the military opposition's demand that Yeltsin quit, there is
little sign that the president could muster the forces needed to
resist them.
According to opinion polls, the army is far more popular than
Yeltsin with the Russian population. Nor would the Interior
Ministry's paramilitary police units be likely to side with the
president, since the Interior Ministry troop commanders are for
the most part former army officers.
For worker oppositionists, the tensions between the Russian
government and its armed forces are obviously good news. But
while alliance with the military opposition may be a necessity
for the Russian labour movement at particular points and around
certain issues, it holds great perils if pursued as a general
strategic approach.
Russia's military chiefs are not a pro-worker force; their
political allegiance is to capitalism, in its subsidised, state-
supported, military-industrial variant. Nor, in any sense, are
the military leaders democrats. If an armed forces takeover saved
the jobs of defence industry workers, it would almost certainly
mean the loss of the only real gain most Russian workers have
made in the past decade - the right to organise themselves and to
engage in political and industrial struggle.
The only circumstances in which Russia's military opposition
could play a progressive social role would be as part of a much
broader movement in which mobilised workers exercised decisive
leadership. Any attempt by the officers to take power outside the
framework of such a movement must be fought against.
(18 февруари 1998 г. - Ренфри Кларк е кореспондент от Москва на австралийския вестник "Green Left Weekly" )
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