Will the army take over? - Soviet Union

A NIGHTMARE is said to haunt Gorbachev and lesser Communist leaders: that the army will take over.

The arguments advanced by Sovietologists to support this assertion are impressive, but the nightmare itself remains imprecise. For just what is meant by an army takeover in a Communist country, and specifically in the Soviet Union?

I see three options, one of which wouldn't cause the General Secretary to lose much sleep. As for the other two, one would raise interesting possibilities, while the other would spell the end of Leninism as we know and fear it.

Option One is a takeover of the Soviet state by the army on behalf of the Party. Easy, that one. Gorbachev could simply follow the example of Stalin and Brezhnev, and proclaim himself Marshal of the Soviet Union and Commander-in-Chief. (For that matter, even the civilian Presidents of the United States are, ex officio,Commandersin-Chief-though General Eisenhower, when he made it to the White House, called himself plain "Mister.")

Option Two is admittedly more worrying: that the top Soviet brass, fearing that the "defense" budget, so long sacrosanct, may be under threat, would decide to take over and run things their way.

As for Option Three, that is the real nightmare, also known as a specter: the specter of Bonapartism. A military strongman takes over for real. At once, the world as we have known it would cease to exist.

Let us take a closer look.

The Polish Gambit

AS IT HAPPENS, recent history gave us a perfect example: in DecemAber 1981, the Polish army, under General Wojciech Jaruzelski, took over the Party's collapsing civilian government. Or did it? Certainly this was the line put out in Western dispatches from Moscow, for instance by Nigel Wade of the London Daily Telegraph. The theory was that, for the first time since 1917, a Communist Party in power had lost control of events to the military. Momentous, if true.

In fact, this was a clever piece of disinformation by Andropov's KGB. True, the (Communist) Polish United Workers' Party had indeed been seriously weakened by successive purges and by the defiant rise of the Solidarity trade union. But Jaruzelski was no more a military man than Brezhnev or Ustinov. He was in fact a typical Party soldier. From 1960 to 1965, he had been chief of the central political department of the armed forces, and he duly joined the Politburo at the end of 1971.

Any remaining doubt on this score was dispelled when President Reagan revealed at his press conference on December 23, 1981, that the martiallaw proclamation issued in Warsaw had in fact been drafted and even printed in Moscow the previous September. The "military coup" thus was a device to relieve the Soviets of the need to intervene in Poland as they had in Czechoslovakia in 1968 or in Hungary in 1956, and of the ensuing odium.

A "coup" of that kind in the Soviet Union is itself in fact a distinct possibility. A recent Politburo call on the armed forces to "improve discipline" is seen to reflect military unease at Gorbachev's reforms. In July, special new powers were given to the army to search personal dwellings and make arrests. At that time, the Supreme Soviet issued two proclamations aimed at containing public dissent. If perestroika leads to dramatic price rises, as the logic of unleashed market forces suggests, martial law (now in effect in Armenia and Azerbaijan) could well be imposed. Military rule could well be the next step. One interesting question would then be whether the Party ruling through the army would still be controlled by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Who Spies on Whom?

ON PAPER, an independent military coup is virtually impossible in the Soviet system, for the armed forces are simply the military extension of the Party. The powerful Defense Council-the supreme body of the armed forces-has been accurately described as the Politburo in military session. Traditionally, the General Secretary takes the chair. In Brezhnev's "era of stagnation," as Gorbachev now calls it, the Chairman could wear his marshal's uniform, medals and all.

There are interesting areas of uncertainty in the Soviet Defense establishment in the new era, however. During the Brezhnev years and into the rule of the gerontocrats (Andropov and Chernenko), the Defense Minister also sat on the Politburo. This was true of Marshal Grechko and Marshal Ustinov. The present Defense Minister, General Dmitri Yazov, is a mere candidate (non-voting) member, and Gorbachev omitted to promote him in his recent Kremlin reshuffle.

The downgrading of the post of Defense Minister could indicate the presence of the "specter" in the leader's nightmares-as could the Kremlin's system of overseeing the armed forces. As if the Defense Council did not suffice to keep the soldiers in line, the KGB's Third Chief Directorate spies on the armed forces. Any argument about the relative importance of the KGB (Committee of State Security) and GRU (Chief Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff) is easily settled: the KGB spies on the GRU, not the other way round.