The Gulf War crisis and the Soviet military

By Sam Marcy (Jan. 17, 1991)

Jan 8--At this writing, a crucial aspect in the developing war crisis in the Gulf is the Bush administration's concern over a projected summit meeting with Soviet President Gorbachev scheduled for February.

The White House seems most anxious to delay the meeting. But they are afraid of offending Gorbachev at a critical time when he needs U.S. imperialism's support. At the same time there is a real concern in the upper echelons of the U.S. government that the Soviet side is holding back on a nuclear arms treaty that is key to the continuing arms discussions between the U.S. and the USSR.

The U.S. seems to have suddenly realized that the Soviet arms negotiating group is expecting some modifications to which both sides apparently had agreed. All that was necessary was to sign this particular treaty regarding long-range nuclear missiles. Now Congress has suddenly got on its hind legs and seems to want to remind the USSR that all the treaties and agreements between the two countries need congressional approval.

Whether Bush really intends to cancel the summit meeting or is merely threatening to do so in order to get all the concessions he wants is not clear.

U.S. dilemma regarding Soviet military

The real concern of the Bush administration--and especially the Pentagon--is the Soviet army. Where is it going and what do the attacks against Eduard Shevardnadze by colonels Nikolai Petrushenko and Viktor Alksnis mean? That's the real issue as the U.S. moves further and further along on its war-mad drive to attack Iraq.

To understand Washington's concern about the Soviet military's position, bear in mind first the rebuff the Pentagon got from the Soviet chief of staff, General Mikhail A. Moiseyev. He was invited here in early October, presumably at the invitation of Gen. Colin Powell and over the head of the Gorbachev administration. But it boomeranged. The Soviet chief of staff made very clear that Soviet forces would not be included in any kind of military operation in the Gulf.

But that didn't stop Bush and the Pentagon from continuing to try by various means to involve the USSR in combat operations in the Gulf. During Shevardnadze's tenure as foreign minister, the USSR became a cosponsor of the UN resolution authorizing the war. That Nov. 29 vote gave the U.S. and its allies an unequivocal green light to attack Iraq unless Saddam Hussein unconditionally evacuates his military forces from Kuwait by Jan. 15.

Since then, Shevardnadze has resigned. He continues, however, to meet with U.S. diplomats. According to the New York Times (Jan. 8), he is holding discussions with representatives of the U.S. in Moscow. Meanwhile, no replacement for him has yet been named.

The critical point to bear in mind in this crisis is that the U.S. is most deeply concerned with inveigling the Soviet armed forces into its Gulf military operation. But it has come up against a very, very formidable obstacle. There is strong resistance from the Soviet armed forces, despite the pro-imperialist Gorbachev/shevardnadze foreign policy.

The Mathias Rust affair

It should be helpful to review some important facts about the evolution of the Gorbachev administration's relation to the armed forces. It will clarify the Soviet military's reluctance to join the imperialist conspiracy to take over the Middle East.

When the Gorbachev administration first took over in 1985, it made a number of significant changes in the military. This is not unusual; a new governing group usually makes cabinet changes as well as changes in the military command. However, it must be noted that since the summer of 1985, Gorbachev has reshuffled the top leadership several times, changing 10 out of the 16 deputy defense ministers.

What probably interested the Pentagon most was when Gorbachev replaced the chief of the strategic rocket forces, the heads of the group of Soviet forces in Germany, Poland and Hungary, and the commanders of the Moscow and Byelorussian military districts.

At the time, however, none of these changes could be seen as clearly politically motivated. Not until May 28, 1987. That date seems to mark an important turning point in relations between the Gorbachev administration and the military leadership in the Soviet Union.

On that date Mathias Rust, a young German, landed his small Cessna 172 airplane right in the middle of Red Square. His flight had apparently gone undetected by the Soviet air defense forces.

It caused an international sensation and was a serious embarrassment to the Soviet military forces. How could such a thing take place when the air defenses of the USSR had been regarded as impregnable? Gorbachev immediately dismissed Marshal Aleksandr I. Koldunov, head of the Soviet air defense forces, and retired Defense Minister Sergei Sokolov.

Unquestionably, an investigation was called for, along with a re-examination of the air defense structure. Above all, it called for a dispassionate investigation--and, in light of glasnost, a full public discussion.

One cannot help but think of the famous U-2 incident in 1960. The Soviets shot down an American spy plane. That exposed Eisenhower's hypocrisy in speaking of a new era of peaceful relations with the USSR while at the same time probing Soviet air defenses with a highly secret intelligence mission.

With the May 1987 Rust incident, however, it quickly became plain that Gorbachev had other ideas. He was intent on utilizing it, not so much to find out whether there was gross negligence or other defects in the USSR's air defense system, but to discredit military leaders he suspected of opposing his perestroika experiments.

Privatizing military-related industry

At the beginning of his tenure in office, Gorbachev had presented to the armed forces what then appeared to be general plans to modernize industry. There seemed to be particular emphasis on restructuring the sectors in the civilian economy most intimately connected with the defense of the USSR. To modernize the sectors that supply the military with the latest and most sophisticated technology could only be a welcome development to the military leaders in the USSR, or any country.

But it soon became clear that the Gorbachev administration was not only concerned with modernizing and rationalizing industry. They wanted to introduce capitalist restoration schemes. These moves to privatize would split up the centralized character of Soviet industry and make it subject to the whims of the capitalist market. If carried to their logical conclusion, they would actually destroy the effectiveness of the Soviet military-industrial complex.

U.S. military-industrial centralism

Despite all the talk about free enterprise in the capitalist establishment of the U.S., the Pentagon lays down the rules and regulations concerning the organization of the military-industrial complex. The Pentagon centralizes equipment buying and selling. The profit motive predominates, but it's all within the framework of a monopoly capitalist structure.

Competition, such as it is, rotates around how much the public can be bilked through extortionate prices. Corruption and indictments are a regular feature of Pentagon/industry relationships. But this does not at all affect the character of the centralization that is necessary for Pentagon control.

In the USSR, any move to dismantle civilian industry in favor of privatization poses a truly incredible danger. And it was bound to provoke opposition from the military.

The swift retirement of Defense Minister Sokolov in May 1987, and his replacement by deputy defense minister General Dimitri Yazov, might have seemed very proper because Sokolov was reaching the normal retirement age. But Gorbachev bypassed several other officers to choose Yazov as defense minister. While not an unusual development, that had to be seen in the light of Gorbachev's attempt to impose a new policy on the Soviet armed forces.

`Democratization' of military?

Removing those who resisted perestroika was a major concern in many new appointments Gorbachev made. But apparently these appointments did not suffice for Gorbachev to impose his new policy.

Mathias Rust's penetration of Soviet air defenses gave the Gorbachev ruling group an opportunity to discredit the armed forces. Gorbachev began to push glasnost, or democratization, in the armed forces.

Indeed, the armed forces could stand a great deal of democratization, particularly as between the rank-and-file and the officer corps. The question of privileges, the restoration of rank (which had been abolished early in the Revolution), and so on, could all stand genuine proletarian democratization. But, even with the bureaucratization process that has gone on in the USSR for decades, there's more democracy in the Soviet army than in any bourgeois army anywhere.

What was Gorbachev's motive in pushing glasnost in the armed forces? Under any circumstances, it would be a delicate matter. The mission of the Red Army is to defend the Soviet Union against imperialist attack. For that it has to be ever vigilant. Discipline is a must, more so than in the civilian sector. But that doesn't matter, because Gorbachev's real goal was not to push for greater popular democracy in the armed forces, or to generate proletarian democracy and strengthen relations between officers and soldiers.

The aim of Gorbachev and his collaborators was to head off the incipient opposition to his bourgeois restorationist schemes. They wanted to weaken the Red Army's generally militant stand, a stand that should not be confused with any unprovoked aggressiveness against the imperialist forces that today still surround the USSR.

So the Rust incident provided a perfect pretext for opening up an attack, first of all on the air defense leadership. And who should lead the attack? None other than Boris Yeltsin. In a June 1987 speech in Moscow he used extraordinarily abusive language against the military leaders. It was a downright provocation. And others followed.

Afghanistan and bourgeois pacifism

It was precisely then that Shevardnadze publicly brought up the subject of Afghanistan in a speech attacking the Soviet role there. While supposedly aimed at the Brezhnev leadership, it nevertheless undermined the Soviet armed forces.

Shevardnadze presented the Afghanistan issue in the framework of democracy. The anti-imperialist struggle of the oppressed people, to which the USSR had been pledged since the days of the revolution, was all but denigrated. In fact, the bourgeois restorationists for whom Shevardnadze spoke actually identified the principle of revolutionary solidarity as the problem in their increasing attacks on the Soviet Union's history of anti-imperialist aid over the decades.

In the public discussion about the Soviet role in Afghanistan and the difficulties encountered in the Afghanistan struggle, it was all but forgotten that the U.S., Britain, France, West Germany, Pakistan and also China were arrayed against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and still are.

When the foreign minister of the USSR discussed Afghanistan, he should first have noted the Soviet Union was called on for aid by a sister country. There was an imminent danger of counter-revolution, which among other things was a direct threat to the USSR because of Afghanistan's geographical proximity. So the Soviet intervention had a defense aspect.

Instead, Shevardnadze's comments were in the spirit of bourgeois pacifism, and they helped open the door to the bourgeois "independence" forces then rising in Eastern Europe. His attack was devoid of any progressive content, any revolutionary spirit. It was a move to humiliate the military forces and a blatant appeal to win favor with imperialism.

None of this--including glasnost--evoked a lively spirit of revolutionary defensism of the USSR. Instead, it degenerated into bourgeois pacifism.

It got to the point where Lt. General V. Serebriannikov, a well-known military publicist, wrote an article accusing "certain writers and publicists" of expressing "decadent and cowardly thoughts which sow the seeds of pacifism." In an analysis in the Summer 1988 issue of Foreign Affairs, F. Stephen Larrabee, a member of the National Security Council under Jimmy Carter, wrote, "Under the guise of glasnost, he [Serebriannikov] charged, these writers `virtually compete with one another to put forward the most sensational and venomous revelations.' "

Krasnoyarsk radar station

As though this weren't enough, Gorbachev, in his eagerness to win the collaboration of U.S. imperialism, capitulated to the demand that the USSR open up the Krasnoyarsk military installation for inspection by U.S. intelligence. On this topic, Larrabee went on to say, "Perhaps the most telling sign of the shift in Soviet [military] policy ... was Gorbachev's willingness in September 1987 to allow a group of American congressmen to inspect the controversial radar site under construction near Krasnoyarsk, which the Reagan administration claims is a violation of SALT II. The congressmen were allowed to roam freely within the facility and take nearly 1,000 photographs. In permitting them to visit and photograph the site, Gorbachev appears to have concluded that the political benefits of defusing the controversy on the eve of a possible summit outweighed the military concerns about possible U.S. intelligence gains."

The truth of the matter, as can now be seen, is that the Soviet military seems to be so politically overwhelmed by the U.S. military that the Pentagon could publicly ask--or was it a demand?--combat collaboration by Soviet forces in U.S. imperialism's Gulf adventure. In return, the concessions Gorbachev got are nil. The U.S. is continuing with SDI (Star Wars), developing weapons, and so on, and it now claims it won the Cold War.

Class struggle breaking out

This is where the situation now stands. Bush's dilemma on what to do in relation to the summit meeting arises from the fact that there has been a genuine resurgence of communist opposition among the Soviet masses--and certainly within the armed forces. They are against the Gorbachev administration's policy of collaborating and kowtowing to the demands of imperialist banditry.

It is too early to tell how strong the progressive, anti-capitalist, pro-socialist opposition in the Soviet armed forces is at the present time, given the limited amount of public information. But it is plain to see that a truly classic struggle is going on.

It is not a struggle by the military against a civilian government, as frequently happens in capitalist countries. This is an across-the-board struggle. It is in essence a class struggle. The contenders in the arena are now clearer than ever. It is a struggle of the working class, the peasants and the progressive intelligentsia against the bourgeoisie, both within and outside the Soviet government.

The bourgeoisie grew up under the wing of the bureaucracy, which then cultivated it. It infiltrated and took over the Communist Party apparatus to the point where it endangered the very existence of the Soviet Union.

That's where it is at. The imperialist bourgeoisie have become disenchanted with Gorbachev, formerly their darling. They are willing to try everything in their power to support the capitalist restorationist elements. But they are fearful of throwing in billions of dollars that could be lost should a genuine revival of proletarian class struggle topple the Gorbachev regime and resume socialist construction as it was originally conceived by Marx and Lenin.

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