A New Army for a New State

By CONDOLEEZZA RICE Condoleezza Rice, a professor of political science at Stanford, was, until March, special assistant to President George Bush for Soviet affairs.

For the past three years, I've met regularly with senior officers of the Soviet armed forces. Some of them have now been purged for sins of either commission or omission during last month's coup attempt. But the actions -- or, more to the point, the inaction -- of several commanders from Aug. 19 to 21 confirmed what I'd often been told: Soviet military officers are no men on horseback, forever overthrowing political authorities. To be sure, pluralism in the Soviet Union brought out the worst in the army. Senior officers grumbled publicly about reform, and some called for the use of an iron fist. Yet when the crunch came, the army and many of its leaders, including the new Minister of Defense, General Yevgeni Shaposhnikov, stayed on the sidelines. Thus the Soviet army still has a chance to find a place in a stable and democratic successor to the communist Soviet Union. If that is to happen, personnel changes are not enough. A stable democracy needs sturdy institutions, not just charismatic personalities.

The principal instrument of civilian control over the Soviet armed forces has always been the Communist Party. Officers were party members; political commissars were placed in every unit to ensure loyalty. With the collapse of the party, Soviet reformers must move quickly to put new mechanisms in place, including a civilian Defense Minister and means of legislative oversight, particularly of military spending.

As President of the union, Gorbachev is still commander in chief of nearly 4 million troops and an arsenal of almost 30,000 nuclear weapons. Yet the central command faces an uncertain future. Last week's interim agreement between the Kremlin and 10 republics raised more questions than it answered about what kind of state will emerge. Even if they accept Moscow as the capital of a loose confederation, the republics are sure to demand a high degree of control over forces on their territory.

Yet a cluster of totally independent armies would spell trouble for everyone. The Russian republic's overwhelming military might would intimidate others in the confederation. Ethnic conflicts, especially in the south, would be more likely to escalate to all-out war. And a Russian-dominated central army might invite a replay of the disaster that has befallen Yugoslavia, where the supposedly federal army is in reality a Serbian army.

The best solution may be a two-tier system: the republics would raise territorial defense units that would be subject to Moscow's authority only in a crisis and only with the consent of the republics' parliaments, while the confederation would form an army of its own composed of decently paid volunteers from all over. Only that body would have weapons of mass destruction. That way, when the process of transformation now under way is complete, we can be assured that there will still be only one nuclear power on the land mass that is today the U.S.S.R.