Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 18:47:52 +0200
From: m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se (Hugh Rodwell)
Subject: Ex-USSR -- whose finger on the trigger?


Here's  an article I couldn't resist reposting from the EEurope-changes
mailing list.

It reveals (indirectly) the complete lack of a stable political base for
the current restorationist regime. In fact the battle between various
military pretenders to the role of a Bonaparte seems to be hotting up.
Yeltsin is floating above the conflicts -- as a good Bonaparte should --
but he's floating so far away he might Bonaparte himself out of the arena.

Interesting the way the generals with personal experience of the Stalinist
fiasco in Afghanistan are against crushing the rebels at all costs.

Cheers,

Hugh


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Date: Tue, 27 Aug 1996 15:05:09 -0400
From: Ross Hedvicek <naafetee-AT-wat.hookup.net>
Subject: Which Russian finger is on the nuclear button?

Which Russian finger is on the nuclear button?
By
Eric Margolis 26 August 1996

Consider this scenario:  A senior army general appears at
the underground command facility of Russia's Strategic
Rocket Forces southwest of Moscow.  He orders the base
commander to launch a `preemptive' nuclear strike against
Washington and all US offensive nuclear forces.

The base commander refuses. He has not received proper
launch codes from the Kremlin or Defense HQ over the
national command authority.  The general screams, `The
American are about to attack and destroy Russia.'

`The president is dying. Before he went into coma, he signed
this order. ' The general  shoves a letter on Kremlin
stationary under the commander's nose which orders him to
launch a nuclear attack. The order is signed:  Boris
Yeltsin.

The commander calls the national command authority  on his
special secure phone. The president is `unavailable.' So is
the defense minister, and Rocket Forces Commander.   `You
must launch immediately,' yells the four-star general, `or
you will be shot.'

Pulp fiction melodrama?  Look at what happened this week in
war-torn Chechnya.

As Russia's national security chief, Aleksander Lebed
struggled to shape some sort of peace settlement with
Chechen independence fighters, Russia's federal commander in
Chechnya, Gen. Konstantin Pulikovsky, announced his big
guns, rocket batteries and warplanes would end Chechen
resistance in Grozny for good- by pulverizing what remains
of the city,

Pulikovsky is a general of the powerful Interior Ministry's
200,000 man plus internal security army.  The Interior
Ministry(or MVD) and KGB began the war against Chechnya and
have been its most ardent partisans.  Both MVD and KGB are
making a great deal of money from the Chechen war by
diverting hard currency `economic aid' supplied by the IMF,
US and Europe, into their coffers.

When Lebed ordered Pulikovsky to desist, Pulikovsky pulled
out an order on Kremlin letterhead, signed by President
Boris Yeltsin, ordering the assault to begin.

Lebed furiously denounced the order as a forgery.

Russia's new defense minister, Col. Gen. Igor Rodionov,
proclaimed the offensive would go ahead. A day later, he
reversed himself, saying it would not, and that Gen.
Pulikovsky was being `reassigned.'  As of this writing, the
Final Solution to Grozny is on hold, and more negotiations
are underway.  But that could change any moment, as Russia
is convulsed by political and military infighting.

Last week, a smiling Boris Yeltsin suddenly rematerialized
on TV, after spending a week, the Kremlin claimed, scouting
sites for his next vacation!  Gogol would have relished this
exquisite piece of Russian farce.

Critics of Yeltsin claimed he was ducking the Chechen mess
and allowing his feuding subordinates to deal with what
seems an insoluble problem.  Others maintained the president
was truly disabled. Last week, this column reported Yeltsin
had suffered a stroke.

Whatever the truth, the row over who is in charge in
Chechnya brings us back to the question: whose finger is on
the trigger of Russia's huge nuclear arsenal?  How many
vodkas have dulled the brain that controls the finger that
can unleash thermonuclear war?  No one seems in charge of
Russia's nuclear weapons, armed forces, secret police,
internal security army, and border forces?

Pretty scary stuff, this.  It may get scarier.  The
humiliating fracas in Chechnya between Lebed and Pulikovsky
might be the opening salvo of what Russians have feared
since the anti-Gorbachev coup exactly five years ago this
month: civil war.

Right after the coup, senior Russian army officers in Moscow
told me some of their units had almost come into conflict
during crisis.  There were also hair-trigger confrontations
between army troops and elite Interior Ministry units, known
as OMON, backed by KGB.  Patriotic Russian army officers
managed to prevent bloodshed.

But the seeds of future conflict had been sown.  The late
Chechen leader, Dzhokar Dudayev, predicted, before his
assassination by the Russians, that the war in Chechnya
would eventually destroy Russia.  Yeltsin also warned the
conflict could ignite civil war in Russia.

The regular armed forces have openly split over the war.
Older brass tend to favor the war; younger officers, notably
veterans of the disastrous Afghan War, called `Afghani,'
like Lebed and Gen. Boris Gromov, oppose it.

This week, the highly respected Gromov, the last Russian
soldier to leave Afghanistan, called for a Russian pullout
>from the tiny mountain republic.  He and Lebed speak for the
honor of the Russian Army.  The army that so nobly won
Borodino and Stalingrad, is now being forced to disgrace
itself in Chechnya by slaughtering civilians and battling
lightly armed freedom-fighters.

As the struggle to secede the ailing Yeltsin intensifies, so
do the dangers that the military - which was  the last
effective, cohesive force in battered Russia - is being
drawn into the political maelstrom.  What would have
happened if Gen. Pulikovsky had refused to call off his
offensive, and Lebed relieved him at gunpoint? This could
have produced a major battle between  army and MVD forces in
Chechnya, a conflict that might have quickly spread to
Moscow.

Russians are rightly aghast. The Communists were lousy at
providing consumer goods and brutes, but they knew how to
keep order and discipline. And when they ruled, at least
Russia didn't look like a banana republic.
copyright Eric Margolis 1996
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