RUST UNDERMINES THE RED ARMY
Bohdan Nahaylo reports
how Gorbachev is turning a stunt to political advantage
THE sheer audacity of Mathias Rust's penetration of the Soviet Union's elabo- rate air defences and spectacular landing in, of all places, Moscow's Red Square, has created a new hero and provided no end of amusement. For all, that is, apart from the Soviet government and especially the country's top brass. For them the young German's incredible feat of airmanship, with all its military ramifications, is a very serious matter that has already had major political repercussions. Apart from Rust's stunt itself, what has been so remarkable about the entire epi- sode is how swiftly and decisively Mr Gorbachev acted to turn a major national embarrassment to his political advantage. He used the affair to launch a bold shake-up of the military in order to streng- then his grip on them and ensure that the generals fall in line with his push for economic and social 'restructuring'. The replacement of the defence minister, Mar- shal Sergei Sokolov, by a relatively junior military figure, the dismissal of the air defences chief, Marshal Aleksandr Koldu- nov, and the Politburo's blistering public attack on the defence ministry amount to the most serious political setback for the Soviet military since Nikita Khrushchev jettisoned his former ally Marshal Zhukov 30 years ago.
The forceful way in which Mr Gor- bachev has suddenly moved against the defence establishment is nevertheless rather surprising. Under the present Krem- lin leadership, the generals have been kept firmly in their place and their political influence at the highest levels had been conspicuously less than under Mr Gor- bachev's immediate predecessors. In fact, ever since the controversial Marshal Niko- lai Ogarkov was removed as chief of the general staff in September 1984, the milit- ary has lacked an assertive and forceful spokesman. Marshal Sokolov, who was regarded as a hangover from the past, was not even made a full voting member of the Politburo.
Mr Gorbachev is known to have met the military leaders in secret as early as July 1985 to explain his policies and lay down the new line. It is likely that the Soviet leader initially obtained the backing of a good many of the generals for his plans to modernise the Soviet system, as the com- manders of the armed forces know only too well how important it is to reduce the technological gap with the West. Since then, however, the Kremlin's helmsman has steered a course that has evidently left some of his military crew less than enthu- siastic.
Even with the introduction of greater openness in the press, it has been difficult to detect definite signs of friction between the Gorbachev leadership and the military establishment. There were, however, some indications of unease among the military during the Kremlin's extended unilateral moratorium on nuclear teasting and one can only guess how the Kremlin's 'new thinking' on eliminating nuclear weapons, keeping defence expenditure in check, and for that matter, pulling out of Afghanistan, has gone down. A clue was provided by Sergei Federenko, an analyst at a leading Soviet research institute, who was asked in El Pais of 22 May about resistance to Mr Gorbachev from the military. `For soldiers of any country,' he replied, `any reduction of the military arsenal seems undesirable. Soldiers always believe that it is better to have more. They are slow to accustom themselves to a different logic. I believe there is not any strong pressure, but a reluctance, since their job is to guarantee the Soviet Union's security.'
The first admissions that there were problems in the armed forces with `restruc- turing' began to appear only at the begin- ning of this year and it was none other than Marshal Sokolov who first acknowledged the difficulties. By early May, Marshal Viktor Kulikov was publicly disclosing that `the process of reconstruction is taking place very slowly' and that `the forces of inertia are making themselves felt'. It was proving difficult, he told Isvestia on 7 May, to move `from mere words to the imple- mentation of the words in practice'. As for rectifying the situation, he assured the newspaper, 'We are pressing now for a strengthening of the Party's influence over all aspects of the life of the military communities.'
One thing that some of the most senior military figures have openly expressed their reservations about, though, is the policy of more openness in the press and what it is leading to. This was evident at the conference organised last summer by the ministry of defence on the role of literature and art in the `military-patriotic upbringing of young people'. Marshal Sokolov himself declared: 'We do not have the right to allow the appearance of films, books, or shows which . . . suffer from a narrow view of the world, from an unde- manding world outlook.' Another speaker, General Alexei Lizichev, head of the Armed Forces' Political Directorate, warned that 'you will not inculcate' in young people `patriotism, or pride in be- longing to our heroic armed forces by showing them negative phenomena'.
More recently, at the end of April, General Lizichev's deputy, General D mit- ry Volkogonov complained at a plenum of the USSR Writers' Union about 'pacifistic' tendencies in current Soviet writing. He gave as an example a recent newspaper article in which a writer had asked the commander of a Soviet nuclear submarine if, on being ordered to make a retaliatory strike against the United States, he would press the button. The commander re- directed the question back to the writer who responded with an emphatic `no'. Furthermore, Volkogonov criticised Soviet authors and journalists for whom it has become `fashionable' as he put it, to refrain from `offending the enemy' in their writ- ings.
It is this `reluctance' to change with the times that has made the armed forces one
of the centres of conservative resistance to Mr Gorbachev's policies and why the Soviet leader has seized on the opportunity to purge the top brass. With a crucial meeting of the Party's Central Committee to discuss economic issues only weeks away, he hopes that this deft political move will strengthen his hand. If it does, then the appearance of Rust's Cessna outside the Kremlin walls will indeed have been a blessing in disguise for Mr Gorbachev. On the other hand, if the Soviet leader's latest political gamble were to backfire, the young German pilot might not be the only one to get his wings clipped.
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