#12
Moscow Times
December 19, 2002
The Military's Festive Fracas
By Pavel Felgenhauer

As the year ends and Russia drifts into the period of the Christmas and New Year closedown, tensions inside the Defense Ministry are growing. There are constant rumors of imminent changes at the top that will be followed by extensive middle-ranking personnel changes. But it seems that no one knows who is slated to go up and who down, so all normal work has terminated long before the onset of the official holiday season.

It is rumored that Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov will be promoted out of his present position to be a supreme coordinator of defense policy in the rank of deputy prime minister, for example; while his present No. 2 man -- Anatoly Kvashnin, head of the General Staff -- will be bumped up to the top position.

Kvashnin has long had aspirations of becoming defense minister and if he succeeds, his supporters within the ranks -- already the most prominent clan of generals in the ministry -- will receive plenty of promotions.

Ivanov has a reputation in the Moscow elite of being highly ineffective. Since being appointed defense minister in 2001, Ivanov has strained relations with virtually all prominent defense journalists and is getting lots of bad publicity. The uniformed military also scorn him as incompetent and ineffective.

But the majority of his uniformed colleagues, the press and the Moscow elite equally despise Ivanov's archrival Kvashnin for his incompetence and ineffectiveness. Ivanov is a trusted personal friend of President Vladimir Putin, while President Boris Yeltsin promoted Kvashnin to his present position in 1997, when oligarchs unfriendly to Putin ruled in the Kremlin.

It's obvious Putin has a situation on his hands inside the Defense Ministry. Most likely Putin, as on many other occasions, will try to do nothing and postpone for as long as possible any drastic personnel changes. But can the president afford to pay the price of continued indecision, with the military disintegrating at an alarming pace?

Ivanov recently presented the outline of his long-awaited military reforms, but has failed to convince any of his critics. Liberals are outraged by plans to continue the draft indefinitely, while generals who do not want to downsize the Soviet military machine continue to sabotage attempts to create all-volunteer combat units.

Ivanov has announced that the airborne 76th division, based in Pskov, near the border with Estonia and Latvia, will be the first model unit of the new army, manned only by "contract" soldiers. But this official "experiment" has already gone wrong: The authorities have failed to find enough volunteers to man a single regiment of the 76th division.

The pay of contract soldiers is low -- just over $100 a month. An ambitious project to build new housing for soldiers in Pskov has been cancelled. Last month, Kvashnin announced that in several months the new contract soldiers of the 76th will be sent to fight in Chechnya "to demonstrate what they are worth." To die or get severely wounded for $100 a month is hardly an attractive proposition even in Russia, so it is no surprise that volunteers are not coming forward. And many Russian generals secretly applaud this fiasco.

Military reform is teetering, discipline is collapsing, conscripts are deserting in droves and this week a leading general, the three-star commander of forces in the North Caucasus and Chechnya Gennady Troshev, publicly challenged the authority of the defense minister.

Troshev, a popular member of the Kvashnin clan, who is accused by human rights groups of major war crimes and murder of civilians in Chechnya, told journalists that he had refused an offer from Ivanov to become the commander of the Siberian military district. In the North Caucasus, Troshev is today in command of most of Russia's battle-ready units, while Siberia is a backwater of a district with virtually no conventional combat troops.

In 1997, Kvashnin was promoted from the North Caucasus district to Moscow, becoming No. 2 in the military hierarchy. Troshev, Kvashnin's long-time loyal subordinate, was also awaiting promotion to Moscow (in recognition of all the war crimes he has committed in Chechnya in Putin's name).

Troshev has publicly dismissed Ivanov's offer of Siberia as an unjust demotion and also an unwarranted attempt to end the carnage in Chechnya.

If Putin was hoping to maintain the status quo in the Defense Ministry, Troshev's open insubordination may force the president's hand and speed up top-level changes.

Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.

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