Russia Turns the Corner

Stephen Sestanovich

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1994

Summary:  Despite apparent anarchy, Russia is passing three important tests for establishing a democracy. The military is acquiescing in the new democratic order, the old managers of the economy are losing their political grip, and the new regime has come to embody patriotism and legitimacy in the mind of the populace. A fledgling Russian republic may succeed where the Weimar Republic failed.

Stephen Sestanovich is Director of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

For all their rhetoric about neutrality, a great many officers became active in Russian politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the vast majority of them were anti-Yeltsin extremists. They ranged from the organizer of the hypernationalist Officers? Assembly, Colonel Stanislav Terekhov, a proponent of a loony foreigners-are-brainwashing-us theory of Western subversion, to Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi, whose challenge to Yeltsin was especially ominous because, as an Afghan war hero and serving general, he was thought to have a large residual following in the armed forces.

The conservatives? attempt to find supporters in the military meant that they posed a completely different threat to the army from that posed by liberals. Yes, the Yeltsin government?s program of economic shock therapy meant privation for officers and their troops, but conservative politicians were actually trying to split the military as an institution. As early as last spring, General Grachev complained angrily to parliament about the support it provided for meetings of the Officers? Assembly, offering a platform for the group?s wild calls "to use force and man the barricades." Said Grachev:

Is that really constitutional? Is that really just? Is that really within the framework of the laws which state that the army is outside politics and should not get involved?

Saying he had raised this problem before without getting any help from legislators, the defense minister called on parliament to back a crackdown on political agitation within the military.

In making such an appeal, of course, Grachev knew that he had no chance of getting the support he wanted. Yeltsin?s opponents could not afford to encourage military discipline. To succeed, Rutskoi and then-Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Ruslan Khasbulatov needed to break the military apart; it was Yeltsin who was trying to keep it together. As a result, steering a neutral course between the president and parliament became less and less viable for Grachev. Such a stance merely created the conditions for drawing the army deeper into politics.

Against this background, the high command?s support for Yeltsin during the confrontation of September and October 1993 was barely a matter of choice. On the first full day of the crisis, Grachev said that he and his colleagues were "appalled" that parliament had appointed General Vladislav Achalov as its own defense minister--a move, he warned, designed to set soldiers against each other in battle. As the army?s newspaper editorialized when the uprising was over, the survival of the military depended on preserving unity of command:

If the Army, despite everything, maintains its unity, controllability and stability it becomes in itself a factor of colossal stabilizing force for all society. However, if it does not hold firm, allows itself to be split, or starts living not on the principle of a "single order," but of two, three or ten orders, then it is no longer the Army but simply "matériel"--"cannon fodder" for a civil war.1

The generals acted against the conservative-nationalist insurrection not as part of a deal, or because Grachev saw that he too would go down if Yeltsin fell, or even because there was a threat to public order that the police could not handle by themselves. The military leadership, for all practical purposes, had made its choice before the crisis, and its support for the government was based on the strongest of instincts--institutional self-preservation. It is no small matter for Russian democracy that the generals see their survival this way.

There has, of course, been another threat to the integrity of the military: economic necessity has obliged many units to fend for themselves, to negotiate their upkeep with local politicians, enterprise directors and farm managers. Extrapolate this trend into the future a few years, and it is not hard to conjure up military formations independent of headquarters, serving regional rather than national interests; in a word, warlordism. But extrapolation of this kind misses the time-bound sources of today?s problems, many of which will not recur. Above all, the resolution of the standoff between president and parliament puts most political problems in a new context. It has not ended the economic crisis that subjects military units in the provinces to so much stress, but it means that they will no longer receive political protection from those in Moscow who see them as a lever to bring down the government.

The high command now clearly has a freer hand to do what it has wanted to do for some time--tighten discipline in the ranks. Grachev knows, for example, that the Officer?s Assembly and similar opposition groups are much better organized in the country at large than they are in Moscow, and he will try to curtail their activities. He is in fact likely to be far less patient with all kinds of political activity and agitation in the armed forces. This is why, breaking with the practice of recent years, senior officers now say that being a politician is incompatible with being a soldier; those who run for office will be suspended from their military duties. In looking ahead to the state of Russia?s armed forces five years from now, this trend toward a stricter separation of military and political roles is the right one to extrapolate.