The fighting in Chechnya between the Russian Army and various pro-Dudayev units can only make one feel disgusted, as do all modern wars in which more civilians than soldiers are killed. However, the Chechen conflict has also astonished observers: No one, it seems, anticipated that the Russian Army would fight so poorly and would be unable to cope with Dudayev's irregulars even after four weeks of engagement. Could this really be the same army that the West looked at with such fear for 40 years?


The truth is that the Russian (and Soviet) Army was never really as powerful as it appeared from paper comparisons between numbers of tanks and artillery pieces held by East and West. The real military weakness of the Soviet Union was Moscow's main defense secret throughout the Cold War, a secret that Western spies were never able to reveal. The main reason for this, most likely, was that Western intelligence agencies never really wanted to know about it. For 40 years the awesome Russian bear held the West together and helped keep Western defense and intelligence expenditures high.


Once they started to lie, Western generals and agents simply couldn't stop. Any serious re-evaluation of the Soviet military threat would, to say the least, have involved some pretty unpleasant explanations of past lies, and would have led to cutbacks in military programs. In short, it would have been a real catastrophe for Western military and military-industrial establishments. As a result, year after year evaluations indicated the Red Army was becoming stronger and stronger. Anyone who disagreed was dismissed as an agent of Moscow, or at least a communist sympathizer.


The Soviet Army's failure in Afghanistan, however, began to foment doubts both in the West and among Moscow's generals about the Red Army's real strength. I know several highly placed officers in Military Intelligence (GRU) who tried in the 1980s to prove that our army was not prepared, and that the 100,000 tanks the Eastern bloc had amassed during the Cold War buildup would not help. If an attack on Western Europe had indeed taken place, Russian tanks would have burned in the streets of Germany, just as they are burning now in Grozny. Our forces not only would not have made it to the English Channel; they would have been defeated before they even reached the Rhine.But no one would listen to these officers: They were simply dismissed from service. The country's military command had one answer to every objection: "If we run into any problems, we will resort to tactical nuclear weapons."


When Russian officers complain today that they cannot use "all available firepower" or "all means at our disposal," they are most likely really complaining that they can't destroy Grozny with a few tactical nuclear strikes. The Russian Army was designed to fight a nuclear war, and therefore it doesn't meet with much success in conventional fighting.


The Russian Army simply has too many aging tanks, and not enough well-trained infantry. As one high-ranking Russian officer complained to me on Jan. 3, "We have too few troops to control such a big city as Grozny. When our troops broke through the Chechen defenses and entered Grozny, the Chechens simply closed ranks behind them and cut them off from the rear. On Jan. 2 we lost contact with our forward units."


For several hours the situation in Grozny was extremely dangerous. The Russian Army faced serious defeat, and its already low morale may well have broken. Control of the army could have been lost, and in the end the army might have turned its weapons on the democratic institutions of the executive and legislative branches of government. That, by the way, is exactly what happened in 1917.


The Russian Army does not really have any elite divisions. All units are understaffed, undertrained and not battle-ready. Those that are currently fighting in Chechnya are practically the best we have left. If discipline breaks down, there will be no one to restore order to these units.


Nonetheless, our soldiers -- for now -- are continuing to fight. In many ways, the Russian Army is basically the same unpolished but stubborn force that, after a dismal start, crushed the German Army in World War II. If the army can hang on now and fight it out, it will win the inevitable war of attrition with the Chechens -- and once again, as in October 1993, save President Boris Yeltsin.





Pavel Felgenhauer is defense and national security editor for Segodnya.