Will the army take over?

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.

In the 1970s, I spent many hours with the first defector ftom the Third Chief Directorate, Captain Aleksei Myagkov, whose book, Inside the KGB (1976), paints a vivid picture, both sordid and alluring, of the life of privilege he had left behind. As John Barron, the American authority on the KGB, puts it in his book KGB, "the entire Soviet armed forces are honeycombed with KGB spies who continuously provide the Party with an ideological appraisal of individual officers as well as a political evaluation of individual units."

During Stalin's Great Terror, the KGB conducted wholesale arrests within the armed forces, often on flimsy or imaginary grounds, thus decimating the Soviet officer corps in advance of Hitler's invasion of Russia. It was at the height of this paranoid massacre (in 1937) that Marshal Tukhachevsky was shot (see NR, October 14).

Was Tukhachevsky, then, guilty of "Bonapartism"? Almost certainly not, although Stalin may have feared that he was heading that way. The socalled "Stoyko documents" found in the captured German archives described a major split between the Party and the military some years earlier, but some leading specialists (notably John Dziak in his highly condensed study, Chekisty) dismiss the documents as Soviet forgeries.

But the real point, surely, is that Tukhachevsky was shot. There was no Bonaparte. And twenty years later, in the 1957 crisis during which Khrushchev sacked Marshal Zhukov, there was again no evidence of a plot. The Marshal was merely behaving as if his boots were several sizes too small for his feet.

So far, the grotesquely disproportionate share of the Soviet national income allocated to the Defense Ministry's budget has remained apparently inviolate. Whether that share is a "mere" 15 to 17 per cent, as the CIA's published estimates state, is a much-debated detail. Some American specialists believe that the Soviet economy, instead of "stagnating" as Gorbachev says, has actually declined significantly. As a proportion of total expenditure, the Defense establishment could well, consequently, have risen to 35 per cent. This would mean that the militarized Soviet system spends eight to ten times as much on soldiers, sailors, airmen, and weapons as on health. (In comparison, Thatcherite Britain is wildly "compassionate.")

As Western loans and credits pour in, the General Secretary has given no hint of impending cuts in the Defense budget. He did, however, when addressing the Young Communist League on October 29, hint at reducing military service from its present level of two years. Could this be a beginning?

If Gorbachev went too far in arms control, so that the Defense establishment feared that the United States might be in a position to pull ahead, Option Two could not be ruled out. It would not be a true military coup, but a takeover by disgruntled soldiers and Party opponents of Gorbachev's reforms. Any resulting regime would embark on a new round of internal repression. Glasnost would go. Western bankers would be faced, not for the first time, with the consequences of their follies. As for perestroika, a hard-line military/civilian junta in the Kremlin would face the paradox that an efficient consumer economy is incompatible with totalist rule.

Indeed, the predictable international isolation that would follow Option Two is itself a powerful disincentive to Gorbachev's internal enemies. And he knows it. This option would simply demonstrate what the skeptics (myself among them) have been saying: that the system is unreformable. Either Lenin's millenarian tyranny survives, or it collapses.

No Longer Unthinkable

THE POSSIBILITY of collapse makes Option Three the most interesting of all. Options One and Two would leave history on its faltering course. Option Three would change everything.

Again, let us be precise. Bonapartism in the true sense is out. In the militarized Party state, no single soldier is going to seize power in the style of either Napoleon I or Napoleon II. No Directoire, no 18 Brumaire, no Second Empire looms ahead. If any Soviet marshal should find himself afflicted with that kind of hubris, he would soon share the fate of Tukhachevsky.

Nevertheless, Option Three is not impossible. The unthinkable would become possible if the Soviet domestic situation got out of hand. It is hard to say whether the wave of unrest now regularly reported is a truly new phenomenon, or merely one that is made visible by glasnost. Probably some of both. Ethnic aspirations are manifest, as are resentments of the people who have discovered that the "bright" future of Communism never comes.

Eastern Europe, too, is in ferment. As Mrs. Thatcher is discovering, Poland, seven years after the faked coup, is in deep trouble. The Hungarian experiment has reached the limits beyond which a regime ceases to be Communist. In Czechoslovakia, the legacy of 1968 is still heavy. Bulgaria is, as always, virtually a 16th Soviet Republic. Rumania is a Stalinist monstrosity.

East Germany seems relatively stable, and Honecker may well feel that with Chancellor Kohl in charge on the other side of the barbed wire, things are going his way. Yugoslavia, though not a part of the Soviet empire, is nevertheless a highly visible case study of a disintegrating Communist system. Every passing day vindicates the dissident diagnosis of Milovan Djilas and diminishes the posthumous aura of Marshal Tito.

Is the Brezhnev doctrine still valid? Having decided to occupy Czechoslovakia, Brezhnev justified his actions after the event in the sacred cause of defending socialism. Gorbachev has neither confirmed nor discarded the doctrine. To do so might indeed be otiose. Can an ideologically bankrupt imperial power enforce the ideology in restless provinces?

In this fast-changing situation, a general breakdown of order is no longer unthinkable. In such a situation, Option Two could evolve quite quickly into Option Three. The Party/military junta, having seized power (sans Gorbachev, sans Yakovlev), could well face the chastening reality of Leninism as an obsolete and discredited dream, and guide Russia back to the safe haven of old-fashioned nationalism.

It is in the light of such hypotheses that President-elect George Bush and his European allies will have to reconsider the reigning fashion o "helping" Gorbachev.