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Faced with continuing social and economic disarray, many Russians yearn for strong national leadership. There are many indications that the military—led, perhaps, by Marshal of Aviation Yevgeni Shaposhnikov (right)—is ready and more than willing to provide it.
The dramatic defeat of the August 1991 coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and the consequent death of the Soviet Union and birth of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in December 1991—all overseen by Russian President Boris Yeltsin—have obscured for some time a critical development: the transformation of the former Soviet military from a tightly controlled servant of the state to an autonomous, politically active institution.
Despite the lofty words of the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, Marshal of Aviation Yevgeni Shaposhnikov at a January 1992 Officers Assembly in the Kremlin—that “we [the officer corps] will never sink so low as to dethrone someone or to enthrone someone with our bayonets’^—evidence abounds that many Soviet officers—Marshal Shaposhnikov included—were among the inner circle of military leaders who plotted against Mikhail Gorbachev. They also played a kingmaker role by putting the armed might under their control behind Boris Yeltsin. Further evidence suggests that the speedy demise of the Gorbachev regime—and the Soviet Union—was facilitated by a mutual agreement between President Yeltsin and Marshal Shaposhnikov.
Flexing Political Muscles
It is important to realize that the political alliance between the Yeltsin government and the military leadership was not based on a common commitment to democracy and reform, but on a temporary merging of common political interests, such as opposition to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Even before the 1991 coup, the military shared Boris Yeltsin’s antagonism toward Mikhail Gorbachev and was not shy about expressing it. In early 1991, the leadership
of the Soviet Navy spearheaded an effort to strip President Gorbachev of the title—and powers—of Supreme Commander-inChief. In April 1991, Admiral V. Ponikarovskii- chief of the Kuznetsov Naval Academy, and Admiral A. Mikhailovski' openly argued in the General Staff journal Voeti- naia my si’ that only a professional military man should have that position, never a civilian—even if he was the President of the Soviet Union. It is inconceivable that such an article could have appeared without the prior approval of the top Navy leadership.
The deep-seated hostility of the Soviet Navy’s leadership to Mikhail Gorbachev was put even more bluntly i11 an article by Admiral Vladimir N. Chernavin, Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy, published in the nationalist newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia on 20 June 1991. Admiral Chernavin compared the situation in June 1991 to that in June 1941 and equated Mikhail Gorbachev’s “boundless” faith in the “new political thinking” with Josef Stalin’s willful underestimation of the threat of war with Nazi Germany. He argued that only “military chiefs” could correctly assess the “real operational-strategic situation.” The implication was clear—a civilian leader could make disastrously mistaken assessments of threats to the state and, therefore, could not be entrusted with command of the armed forces, even in peacetime.
Admiral Chernavin was not the only military leader who considered Mikhail Gorbachev unfit to be commander-inchief. He was not, however, among the inner circle of military leaders plotting against Gorbachev. In fact, he was informed of the coming coup by Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov only one day before the state of emergency was declared on 19 August 1991.'
Two of the main military participants in the coup were Marshal Shaposhnikov, the chief of the Air Force, and General Pavel Grachev, the chief of airborne troops. According to retired Army General Mikhail Moiseev—the Chief of the General Staff until he was fired by Mikhail Gorbachev two days after the coup—it was General Grachev and Marshal Shaposhnikov who provided, respectively, the paratroopers and the transport aircraft that were sent to the Moscow area on Defense Minister Gtnitri Yazov’s oral orders starting on 2 August—almost three weeks before the coup.2
The Enemy of My Enemy . . .
If Marshal Shaposhnikov, General Grachev, and others in the Soviet high command had harbored treasonous thoughts and seditious designs against Mikhail Gorbachev, '''hat was it that caused them to withdraw support from the coup and cast their lot with Boris Yeltsin? Available evidence suggests that it was not a love of democracy that drove them to that decision.
An idea of the real reasons emerges from statements niade by the participants at a May 1991 roundtable discussion, which shed light on the attitudes of many in the Soviet high command toward those who plotted the abortive coup—and vice versa.3 When asked point-blank about the possibility of a military dictatorship in the So- Met Union, Admiral Chernavin replied that the military "'ould not be averse to running the Soviet Union if a sit- "ation ever arose when there was a “paralysis of the state.” Yt that point, he said, only the military would be capable of maintaining internal order and external security— society, having lost its ability to govern . . . itself [would he| delegating this function to the army.” He then asked rhetorically: “Is this really a military dictatorship? It is a burden, a heavy and horrible burden!”
It was then that Oleg Baklanov, then first deputy chairman of the Defense Council and later a key figure in the c°up, spoke up. Basically a representative of the massive Soviet defense industry, he asserted that the military could rUn the government only “for a certain period of time and at an extremely low level.” Mr. Baklanov then rather condescendingly suggested that the military would need “serious intellectual support” in order to stabilize the economy and, therefore, would have to transfer control of the government back to those with organizational experience— specifically, the top managers of state industries.
Mr. Baklanov’s comments could not have been any more impolitic. At the time, the leadership of the Navy and the Air Force were embroiled in a dispute with the barons of. the defense industry—and, through them, the Defense Council—over control of the procurement process. On separate occasions, the chief of the Main Naval Staff, Admiral Konstantin Makarov, and the Air Force chief, then Colonel General of Aviation Shaposhnikov, had said publicly that they wanted to assume control of their own budgets and procurement processes.4
Mr. Baklanov’s remarks reflected the assumption of the defense industrial elites that in the wake of a military takeover they eventually would take control, almost as a matter of course. It is not to difficult to see why many top officers recoiled from the idea of carrying out a coup simply to perpetuate the power and privilege of the party and defense industry bosses.
Another critical factor that probably turned the Soviet military leadership against the coup leaders was the fear that the military was being set up as the fall guy, in the event the coup failed because of adverse political reactions. Such precedents already existed in the aftermath of the Tbilisi, Georgia massacre in 1989, the Baku intervention in 1990, and the aborted coup in Lithuania in 1991. In fact, during the roundtable discussion mentioned earlier, Admiral Chernavin turned to Colonel General Igor Rodionov—who as commander of the Transcaucasus Military District in 1989 had been held responsible for the Tbilisi massacre—and reminded him of how “they [the leadership under Gorbachev] send the army into zones of ethnic conflicts . . . and later when it carries out its duty, they ‘thank’ it—by submitting it to be tormented by pseudodemocrats.”
Admiral Chernavin was not alone in his contempt for the “pseudodemocrats.” In August 1990, in an interview in the Soviet Air Force magazine, Marshal Shaposhnikov had railed against “the games of political pluralism” that are “very dangerous for the country”—an obvious reference to the process of democratization unleashed under perestroika. He echoed these sentiments in an interview published in the General Staff Journal in February 1991 in which he branded the political groups attacking the military as “reactionary forces”—an ideologically loaded term which, in the past, had been used by the Soviet leadership to denote nationalist and antisocialist forces. The military, Marshal Shaposhnikov stated, was the only institution with “a powerful potential for stability, immunity from nationalism, nihilism, and other societal ills.”
The disgust with which Admiral Chernavin, Marshal Shaposhnikov, and other high-ranking officers viewed the “pseudodemocrats” was only slightly less intense than their suspicion of the coup plotters—men like Defense Minister Yazov, KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, or Soviet Vice President Gennadi Yanaev who had served Mikhail Gorbachev but tried to depose him. Many officers must have seen them as ungrateful backstabbers. Furthermore, some of the actions of the cabal—such as Defense Minister Yazov’s strict orders not to use force and Gennadi Yanaev’s statement that it was possible that Mikhail Gorbachev would return to power—probably did not instill confidence in their resolve. Furthermore, the fact that the coup was carried out by Mikhail Gorbachev’s hand-picked team must have made the entire affair suspect to the military leadership, regardless of what happened to Mikhail Gorbachev himself.
The patronizing attitude of the anti-Gorbachev civilians and the wavering, inept leadership offered by the plotters probably made it very easy for officers like the commander of the Strategic Rocket Forces General Yuri Maksimov—along with General Grachev, Marshal Sha- poshnikov, and Admiral Chemavin—to heed the adage: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and throw their support behind Boris Yeltsin.
High-Level Horse Trading
About a month after the collapse of the coup, the campaign to strip Mikhail Gorbachev of his title as Supreme Commander-in-Chief was renewed in earnest—this time by Marshal Shaposhnikov, who had been appointed as Defense Minister after the coup. About that time, Army General Vladimir N. Lobov, the Chief of the General Staff, had outlined two options for reorganizing the military command structure.5 The first plan, which General Lobov favored, provided for two parallel and independent structures—the Defense Ministry and the General Staff—both subordinate to the Soviet president as Supreme Commander-in-Chief. In the second plan, which was supported by Marshal Shaposhnikov, the armed forces would be directly subordinate to the Defense Minister, the implication being that the Defense Minister could very well assume the title of Commander-in-Chief.
During the weekend of 7 December, when the Commonwealth was being bom, General Lobov was dismissed from his post, ostensibly through a decree signed by Mikhail Gorbachev. But according to Colonel General Dmitri Volkogonov, a close military aide to Boris Yeltsin, “Gorbachev only learned of the decision from the Defense Minister [Marshal Shaposhnikov] and simply ratified it.”6 Thus, the action was presented to the politically impotent Mikhail Gorbachev as a fait accompli—undoubtedly with Boris Yeltsin’s concurrence. On 8 December, Marshal Shaposhnikov declared his support for the Slavic Commonwealth, which sealed the fate of the Soviet Union and ended Mikhail Gorbachev’s political life. The timing of the sacking of General Lobov and Marshal Sha- poshnikov’s declaration of support for the Slavic Commonwealth suggests that the former was a quid pro quo for the latter. This was all but confirmed a few days later, when upon being asked who was commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Gennadi Burbulis—Yeltsin s chief of staff and the mastermind behind the Slavic Commonwealth —responded simply: “The armed forces obey Marshal Shaposhnikov.”7
In an interview published on 17 December in the Soviet Army newspaper Krasnaia Zvezda, Marshal Shaposhnikov cited as a reason for General Lobov’s dismissal his attempt to “break up the top echelon of the military command into two parallel structures” in order to “remove the general staff and the armed forces from the defense minister’s control.” According to a Defense Ministry official, during the closed-door session during which Mikhail Gorbachev lobbied for military support for the Soviet Union, he was rebuked for trying to “shatter unity in the ranks”—a reference to his support for General Lobov’s reorganization plan.8
The New Praetorians
Despite their support of Boris Yeltsin’s defiant stand on the steps of the Russian White House, no one should harbor any illusions about the loyalty of many of these officers to Boris Yeltsin’s government, their commitment to democracy, or their support of a rapprochement with the West.
On the contrary, many opposed Mikhail Gorbachev s more conciliatory policy toward the West and still harbor stridently anti-Western sentiments. They firmly believe that the West—especially the United States—is trying deliberately to cripple Russia and destroy its most potent symbol of power—the armed forces.
After ascending to his present position, Marshal Shaposhnikov demonstrated that he still held such attitudes. In his speech at the Officers Assembly meeting in the Kremlin in January 1992, he maintained that attempts in Ukraine and elsewhere to split the military originated front some amorphous “social class.”9 In an impromptu speech at the same meeting, he expressed resentment toward officials of the Gorbachev regime for reneging on their pledge to make it easier for the Soviet armed forces to counter the military threat from the West,10 and criticized his predecessors for kowtowing to the demands of these civilians—who, he asserted, wanted to humiliate the Soviet military leadership.
One of Marshal Shaposhnikov’s key appointments reflected his authoritarian leanings. In December 1991, he chose as the Chief of the General Staff Colonel General Viktor Samsonov, who had been General Rodionov’s chief of staff during the time of the Tbilisi massacre. It also is relevant to note that, after a lengthy investigation, the St- Petersburg city council voted to request General Samsonov’s removal as commander of the Leningrad Military District, because of his “energetic activities” in support of the coup during its initial hours"—although he did quickly reverse course to support Boris Yeltsin.
In May 1992, undoubtedly aware of Marshal Shaposh- nikov’s statements, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk vowed to remove him from power and demanded administrative control over the two Strategic Rocket Forces divisions in Ukraine. That month, President Yeltsin removed all forces, except strategic nuclear forces, from Marshal Shaposhnikov’s command, although it is unclear whether it was in response to President Kravchuk’s demands of the Marshal’s statements and appointments.
Either way, if President Yeltsin’s purpose was to break up a center of opposition, he may have outwitted himself
Russian military against the civil government.
when he gave control of Russian general-purpose forces to the newly created Russian Defense Ministry, headed by General Grachev. General Grachev immediately gathered around him a group of generals from the second tier of the former Soviet high command, many of whom are intensely nationalistic “Young Turks” who had undergone a baptism of fire in Afghanistan.
If the examples of Army General Boris Gromov and Major General Aleksandr Lebed are any guide, these officers may be even more brash and self-confident—and oven less amenable to civilian control—than the former Soviet high command. General Gromov, a deputy defense niinister, is well-known as the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan. Somewhat less Well-known is that while serving as the number-two man in the Soviet Interior Ministry, he signed an anti-Gorbachev nianifesto shortly before the 1991 coup. General Lebed, another Afghanistan veteran,
Was sent to command the 14th Army in Moldova, and was Praised widely by Russian nationalists for his decisive actions to protect a secessionist Russian enclave there. He has criticized the former Soviet high command for its lack of independence and initiative, and reveres the famous World War II Soviet commander Marshal G. I.
Zhukov—who was removed from the Army by Nikita Khrushchev in the late 1950s, for harboring “Bonapartist” tendencies against the party and the state. He vows to live by a dictum attributed to Marshal Zhukov: “I answer for power, for no one but I can defend it.”12
But such views from top military leaders do not necessarily translate into a threat to a civilian government if Ihe officers who command operational units do not share them. A poll conducted by the All-Russia Public Opinion foundation—released in September 1992—showed that a vast majority of Russian Army officers favored the restoration of the union in one form or another—even under the guise of Russian nationalism. Furthermore, 75% of those Who responded preferred the command economy over free enterprise, and nearly 60% supported the reactionary, Nationalist opposition to Boris Yeltsin.13
There are grounds, therefore, for believing that in both the CIS and Russian military high command, and in the Russian officer corps, there are men who would lead and support an alliance of the “Red”—hard-line Communists— and the “Brown”—ultranationalists—that Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev talked about so alarmingly in the summer of 1992. A formal coalition of these groups— the National Salvation Front—was created and almost immediately banned in October 1992, but still holds public demonstrations.
In an ominous development, on 12 November 1992, General Grachev met with Aleksandr Prokhanov, the Front’s co-founder. In an account of the meeting which appeared in the 22 November 1992 issue of the Front’s newspaper Den’, General Grachev stated categorically that he would not favor the introduction of a state of emergency in support of President Yeltsin during his battles with the Russian Parliament. The general asserted that his loyalty was to “the President, the Supreme Soviet, and the people.” By distancing himself from President Yeltsin,
General Grachev robbed him of his political trump card; and, thus, he contributed somewhat to President Yeltsin’s political setbacks in December 1992.
Furthermore, the military has shaken itself loose from tight civilian control of the Soviet era. When the Soviet Union was swept away, so too were the control mechanisms that civilian leaders had used to exert oversight over the military through the party’s Central Committee and the KGB. In addition, the need to secure the military’s support for the Slavic Commonwealth made Boris Yeltsin accept what Mikhail Gorbachev had stoutly resisted: the transfer of the title Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief from a civilian leader to a military man— Marshal Shaposhnikov. This act not only raised the issue of whether the commander-in-chief would have to answer to anybody, but also left open the possibility that, in a crunch, the armed forces could obey only the commander-in-chief rather than individual heads of state.
Something else which has raised concerns about the ultimate loyalty of the military is the absence of an oath of loyalty to Russia. The 22 November 1992 Den’ reported that, on 23 October 1992, Russia’s top military leadership discussed adopting such an oath, but the matter died when the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy, Admiral Feliks N. Gromov, the commander of the Air Force, Colonel General Pytor Deinekin, and unspecified “others” opposed it. And, although, at a 23 November meeting with the Russian and CIS high commands, President Yeltsin complained about the lack of a loyalty oath and pointedly observed that draftees still swear allegiance to the Soviet Union, no action has been taken.
The Last Straw?
There is no longer a question of whether there is a potential for the military to move against civil authority.
There remain, however, two questions: What will prompt the military to act? And, what form will the action take?
One possible bone of contention is the future of the CIS itself. The alliance between Boris Yeltsin and Marshal Sha- poshnikov soured because the Commonwealth did not turn out the way either one expected. On one hand, Marshal Shaposhnikov’s hope that-President Yeltsin could get Ukraine to agree to a unified military command was dashed by a resurgence of Ukrainian nationalism. On the other hand, Boris Yeltsin’s reliance on military support for his Kremlin power grab against Mikhail Gorbachev has made many in Ukraine suspicious of his actions with respect to nuclear weapons and the Black Sea Fleet. President Yeltsin’s agreement with President Kravchuk in early August 1992—to keep the Black Sea Fleet under joint Russ- ian-Ukrainian control while excluding the CIS high command from the arrangement—represents his current preference to defer any such potentially dangerous decisions until the domestic situation becomes more stable.
Another possible impetus for a military move to seize power could very well be the worsening Russian economic situation. The internal dissatisfaction with Russia’s economic performance, as well as the pace and direction of the Yeltsin government’s economic reforms, is growing more intense. With the Communist Party system in shambles and the network of Boris Yeltsin’s reform-minded appointees still weak, the condition which Admiral Cher- navin described as the “paralysis of the state” may arrive if the situation becomes any worse. The military, which is presently the only coherent, organized, and disciplined institution still functioning in Russia, may find it necessary to take action.
However, the form a coup would take might not be one in the classic image—tanks in the streets, soldiers on every corner. It could be a silent coup, in which Boris Yeltsin, recognizing the fragility of his personal power base, would himself move back toward the Communist line, perhaps in alliance with a powerful defense-industrial lobby headed by Arkady Volsky, a former aide to the late Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, and Aleksandr Rutskoi, the current Russian Vice President. The danger of this option, of course, is that Boris Yeltsin may find himself in the same precarious position that Mikhail Gorbachev occupied before the 1991 coup. Sooner or later, he might be presented with an ultimatum by his new-found “allies —either become a fig leaf of legitimacy for their policies, or be deposed.
A second scenario would be a coup undertaken under the pretext of stemming widespread civil unrest. If the Russian economic shock therapy does not succeed soon, President Yeltsin could face spontaneous—or staged rebellion in the streets. Should the civilian government be incapable of establishing order (again, Admiral Cher- navin’s “paralysis”), the military could take over—on the grounds that it would be carrying out the will of the people. In an open letter to Sovetskaia Rossiia on 19 December 1991, Major General Leonid Kozhendaev, head of a General Staff directorate, gave a glance at the military’s perspective on such a scenario. He asserted that what really “frightens the powers that be” is the fact that “the Army will not act against the people, whose patience
will soon be exhausted.”
The third type of coup would be an outright military takeover by a Bonapartist figure, a “man on horseback.” But wouldn’t such an action precipitate mass popular opposition, such as occurred in 1991? Possibly not. In December 1991, the liberal weekly Novoe Vremia went so far as to opine that even an undisguised takeover by the military would not encounter “bitter opposition” in Russia, even though there could be a few “little wars” in i Ukraine and Central Asia. One must wonder what the popular reaction would be today, after another year of pervasive economic hardship and social disarray.
The Man on Horseback
If the second Russian Revolution goes through its own 18th of Brumaire—a Bonapartist coup by a military imbued with its own ethos and unshackled from the traditional control exerted by civilian leaders—its leader would have to be someone who could hold together a “Red- Brown” coalition. At this point, no one other than Marshal Shaposhnikov seems to have the potent combination of high stature and prestige within the military, an ambitious political agenda, the audacity, and the shrewd political acumen (as proved by his actions during 1991) to lead such a movement. Given Russia’s current uncertain political situation and its dire economic straits, however, even if Marshal Shaposhnikov declines to become the Russian man on horseback, there is no dearth of candidates who could play—and would be more than willing to play—such a role in the history of their country. For whoever can command the loyalties of the military—in forging an alliance with the forces bent on preserving a “strong and indivisible” nation and reasserting its national power—could reshape the political landscape of Russia and the other lands of the former Soviet Union. Eventually, he could cast his gaze outward—toward the rest of the world.
'Lieutenant General Leonid Ivashov, “August 1991,” Krasnaia zvezda, 21 AU' gust 1992, p. 4.
interview in Myi, August 24-September 6, 1992, p. 1.
'Den’, No. 9, May 1991, in JPRS Report: Soviet Union—Military Affairs, 21 June 1991, pp. 39-43.
interview with Marshal Shaposhnikov, Aviatsiia i Kosmonavtika, No. 8, 1990, p3, and interview with Admiral Makarov, Sovetskaia Rossiia, 27 July 1991, p. 3- 'Briefing by Army General V. Lobov to foreign military attaches, TASS, 27 Sep' tember 1991, in FBIS Daily Report: Soviet Union, 27 September 1991, p. 34. interview in La Republica, December 12, 1991, in FBIS Daily Report: Sovid Union, 16 December 1991, p. 42.
7USA Today, 11 December 1991, p. 1.
"’’Yeltsin Winning the Army Over,” Los Angeles Times, 12 December 1991, p. ^Moscow Television First Program Network, in FBIS Daily Report: Central Eurasia, 17 January 1992, p. 16.
"’Moscow Television First Program Network, 17 January 1992, in FBIS Daw Report: Central Eurasia, 21 January 1992, p. 26.
"Rossiiskaia Gazeta, 6 November 1991, in FBIS Daily Report: Soviet Union, 2l November 1991, p. 59.
"Interview in Literaturnaia Rossiia, 31 July 1992, p. 2.
,3A. Frolov, “Army Officers Liked Old USSR,” Myi, 7-20 September 1992, p. 1*
A former research analyst at the center for Naval Analyses, Mr. Nguyen is now completing work on his Ph.D. in International Relations at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.