By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — During 1996, the head of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, General Viktor Samsonov, told journalists recently, about 500 of the country's military officers committed suicide. As recently as 1991, the corresponding figure had been no more than 100.
What cost the lives last year of an additional 400 officers? Samsonov implied strongly that it was the crisis now afflicting the armed forces, wrecking morale and often leaving service personnel ill housed, poorly clothed and half fed.
Military chiefs have not been prepared, at least in public, to denounce the government's strategy — reform plans that aim to leave the Russian war machine "lean, efficient, increasingly professional" and a good deal smaller. But a reformed military, the commanders insist, will cost far more than the government plans to spend on it.
In the battle over armed forces funding, government budget-cutters have pressed ahead to find new ways to reduce state outlays. Senior military officers, while claiming to defend the very survival of the armed forces, have sought to perpetuate a host of cherished — and often lucrative — institutional arrangements. Since late in 1996, the fight has come increasingly into the open, as armed forces leaders have learned the art of the alarmist press statement, adding it to their traditional skills in bureaucratic intrigue.
Among modern-day military machines, that of Russia is an outstanding candidate for thorough reorganisation. According to one recent count, Russia has a total of 17 federal ministries and agencies that maintain their own military or paramilitary units. There are dramatic disagreements as to the total strength of these forces; the Economics Ministry estimates the number of service personnel at around 3.7 million people, while other official sources cite a figure of 2.4 million.
What no-one has disputed, especially since the rout suffered in Chechnya, is that the main elements of the armed forces are in dire condition. Defence minister Igor Rodionov complained recently that he headed "a disintegrating army and a dying navy".
The armed forces newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda reported early this year that 80% of the military's weaponry is obsolete. Medium and large-scale exercises have almost ceased, meaning that an increasing proportion of officers have little experience of command under battlefield conditions. The air force commissioned no new planes in 1996, and pilots' flying time, at an average of 30 hours per year, is considered too little to maintain safety levels.
A Defence Ministry survey conducted early this year showed that in various units, 30-70% of officers whose five-year contracts expire in 1998 do not plan to renew them.
According to the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta during February, some 95% of officers questioned by pollsters maintained that surviving on their salaries (a young lieutenant receives the equivalent of about US$90 a month) was practically impossible. Adding to the problems is the fact that officers' salaries routinely go unpaid for months.
For rank and file soldiers, clothing is often inadequate and food supplies are haphazard. In Moscow and other cities, citizens have grown used to the sight of hungry soldiers begging the price of a loaf of bread.
Against this background of visible decay, the military chiefs' new public relations machine has swung into action with a series of statements designed to shock and upset. The armed forces could soon be transformed into "a chaotic mass of people uncertain about their status", a Defence Ministry report claimed early in February.
Even the missile complex, the defence minister stated on February 6, was in critical condition. "No-one can guarantee the reliability of our control systems", Rodionov said. "Russia may soon reach the threshold beyond which its rockets and nuclear systems cannot be controlled."
With their images of unpaid officers running amok, and of decrepit missiles blasting spontaneously from their silos, these reports seem well calculated to make a terrified population reach deep into its collective pockets. But are the armed forces really underfunded?
The current line from the Defence Ministry is that reform can go ahead only if extra financing of 30-40% is provided this year. The military leaders argue, for example, that the total cost of disbanding an army division is some four times that of maintaining it for a year.
Despite cutbacks, however, the proportion of Russian GDP spent on the military, at 3.8%, is still roughly the same as in western Europe. Meanwhile, the pleas for extra funding to aid reform have been undercut by revelations of gross waste and duplication.
Documents published by Izvestia on March 11 noted the example of the Moscow anti-missile defences. Though of very low effectiveness, these consume vast amounts of money. Organisations such as the military-space forces and strategic missile forces, Izvestia reported, maintain their own command and administration structures and separate training establishments, despite performing closely related tasks.
The commanders' plaints have been further undermined by reports of massive embezzlement by senior officers. "The number of cases of financial fraud has grown by more than 220% in the past three years", the English-language Moscow Tribune reported on March 5. During 1996,more than 100 criminal cases were opened against high-ranking officers, including 16 generals and admirals.
Perhaps most compromising of all has been the revelation that a severe pay crisis last year, when large numbers of officers went without their salaries for as much as five months, was deliberately engineered by the then armed forces chiefs as a way of applying pressure to boost military spending. Money allotted for officers' pay, as well as for energy and other utility bills, was reassigned to procurement, defence construction and weapons development.
From such reports, the picture emerges of an armed forces hierarchy fighting with guile and ruthlessness to preserve as much as possible of the existing military structures, and of the power and privileges that go with them. This is not surprising, in light of the plans outlined in January by the government's leading military reform strategist, lawyer and Defence Council secretary Yury Baturin, to discharge at least 500 of Russia's 2865 generals, as well as to increase civilian control and drastically streamline defence administration.
It is by no means certain that the generals will lose. The prevailing view is that the only person who could force decisive changes in the armed forces is Boris Yeltsin. The president, however, has opted for his characteristic ploy of dividing up influence — in this case between Rodionov and Baturin — and then manoeuvring between the two sides.
Yeltsin has ordered the Defence Ministry to cut its enlisted personnel this year from 1.7 million to 1.5 million. But according to leading defence commentator Pavel Felgenhauer, the ministry even today has no more than 1.5 million people in uniform.
Whether the president pushes for real cuts and vigorous reform will depend on the extent to which he feels he needs backing from the armed forces chiefs, and from the defence industry managers and nationalist political currents that are generally aligned with them.
The public has been remarkably indifferent to the struggles around military reform. Neither the prospect of Chechen secession nor the likely expansion of NATO has caused Russians to rally round calls for a massive Soviet-style military. The relatively small and cheap but mobile and highly trained forces of the reformers' dreams appear to leave most Russians cold as well.
What would a reformed military do? Fight more Chechnya-style wars, only more competently? Blow the deputies out of future parliaments, but more expeditiously than in 1993? Whatever the case, most Russians do not seem to feel that it is their interests that the country's armed forces defend.