By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — 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 roubles would no doubt spring to mind.
Cutting all funding for the 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 population — the new rulers nevertheless look toward the armed forces as an area where economies can be made.
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". In the last year or so there has arisen an increasingly organised and angry "military opposition".
New strategies
Until the late 1980s, the armed forces swallowed a ruinous portion, at least 20%, of the USSR's gross domestic product. The demands for a less expensive military — the current medium-term target is to spend 3.5% of GDP on defence — have been accompanied by a drastic reformulation of the tasks assigned to the military.
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 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 fiefs until "normal" funding resumed. Partly to convince the generals and admirals that the old days were gone, the 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 fly 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 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.
Plummeting morale
Particularly in the ground forces, government cuts, misdirection of funds and large-scale theft have brought chaos and disintegration. According to retired general Lev Rokhlin, the chair of the parliament's defence committee, the army in 1997 received only 64% of its food and 23% of its clothing budget.
Morale in the ranks has fallen catastrophically. Soldiers are often hungry and cold, and the brutalisation of conscripts 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 will do almost anything to avoid being called up. Through legal exemptions, by bribing medical examiners or by going missing, around 80% of potential conscripts dodge the draft. Those who serve are mostly the poorest and least educated.
The situation of junior officers is little better. For lieutenants and captains, even those with families, home is often an overcrowded barracks. Career prospects are dim, since the government's plans include a drastic culling of the senior ranks.
Many officers have reacted by becoming sharply politicised. The view is now commonplace that the army chiefs would no longer side with President Boris 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 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 Lev Rokhlin formed 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.
Toward a showdown
As the officer corps has become politicised, the government has moved toward a showdown with the whole complex of 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 Moscow Tribune, this plan involves cutting total military personnel by 500,000, to a figure of 1.2 million, 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%. 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.
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 should have been converted to producing goods for the civilian market. But in 1995 the Federal Defence Industry Conversion Program received only 25% of its anticipated funding, and in 1996 only 11%. No funds at all were assigned in 1997.
By writing off more than a thousand defence industry enterprises, the government has launched an attack of staggering scope on 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' 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 stand-offishness on the part of the civilians. The KPRF leadership, which 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 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. 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.
Big gamble
The moves 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. 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 government and its armed forces are obviously good news. But while alliance with the military opposition may be a necessity for the labour movement at particular points and around certain issues, it holds great perils if pursued as a 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 the 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 such a movement must be fought against.