MOSCOW -- The military debacle in Chechnya has forced Russians to the devastating conclusion that their army is in serious disarray, undisciplined, poorly trained and ill-equipped.
The army's ignominious performance has exposed Russia's ultimate military secret, experienced officers and others say: A decay that set in more than 30 years ago has severely debilitated the nation's defenses.
"The army has disintegrated," said Yuri I. Deryugin, a retired colonel and military sociologist. "The army that won World War II, that strong army, only existed until 1957. Then it gradually began to decline, so slowly that it was difficult to see."
While the United States was spending billions of dollars for powerful Cold War defenses, said Colonel Deryugin, the Soviet army it so deeply feared was beset by the same pathologies that were eroding economic and political life.
Influence and connections began to replace intelligence and hard work in the army as in other institutions. Fulsome reports became more important than actual achievements.
In Chechnya, the first major military test since the failed Afghan war, the army has proven a major embarrassment to the Russian government. Small groups of Chechen rebels have held their ground while Russian soldiers absorb high casualties, destroy homes and kill civilians.
"The whole world has come to know the main Russian military secret," said Lt. Gen. Alexander Lebed, who commands the 14th Army in Moldova.
"Russia no longer has an army -- what it has is only military formations of boy-soldiers which are hardly capable of achieving anything."
Today's Russian army is not only poorly trained but below strength: The latest draft, conducted last fall, produced only 9 percent of the necessary recruits. About 70 percent of army divisions are at half strength; none is at more than 75 percent strength. And over a third of the soldiers failed to graduate from high school, leaving the army ill-equipped to handle modern weapons.
Russia's defense establishment for years neglected its soldiers and their training, relying instead on nuclear weapons, according to Pavel Felgenhauer, defense editor for Russia's Sevodnya newspaper.
"The truth is that the Russian army was never really as powerful as it appeared from paper comparisons between numbers of tanks and artillery pieces held by East and West," Mr. Felgenhauer wrote last week.
"The Russian army was designed to fight a nuclear war, and therefore it doesn't meet with much success in conventional fighting."
Thanks to the general liberalization of society, Colonel Deryugin said, for the first time officers and infantrymen can discuss shortcomings openly.
A 19-year-old soldier named Alexei deserted last week as he was about to be sent to Chechnya. After a year in the army, he feared he didn't know how to defend himself.
"I only used a Kalashnikov once," he said, "and I never managed to hit the target."
Sasha Belov, 18, a tall, black-haired youth, is back from the front, lying in an Interior Ministry hospital outside Moscow being treated for rotting skin on his feet and legs.
"Of course we didn't know how to behave in battle," he said. "We were only taken to the target range twice."
He was sent to Chechnya seven months after he was drafted. His group had five armored personnel carriers, only two of which worked.
"Everything depended on commands from Moscow," he said, "and in Moscow they were wearing holes in their trousers" -- meaning they were wearing out the seats of their pants by sitting in their chairs.
Career officer laments
On a snowy day last week, Col. Mikhail Moskolets sat in a car outside a Moscow army post and talked about the military's fissuring and crumbling. Officers and soldiers going in and out of this military installation showed little hesitation at chatting with a foreigner, giving their names and talking openly.
Colonel Moskolets, 35, has been in the army 18 years: "Every year I have watched the training get worse. On paper the regulations and requirements have gotten stricter, but that's only on paper."
He has watched as higher-ups worried more about privilege than performance. The 4 million-man Soviet army was shrinking to 1.7 million, and troops coming home from the Baltics and Germany set up housekeeping in fields and tents because there were no apartments or barracks for them.
"No one wants to go into the army now," the colonel said. "They know it's a bad life with low pay" -- about $3 a month for privates, less than a prison inmate gets.
From 1981 until 1985, he said, he was stationed in the Crimea, assigned to train soldiers. "The training was weak even then," he said. "Many things were taken out of the air. We reported things we never did."
The colonel said the soldiers in his command were inspected twice a year by a visiting team of higher-ranking officers. "How well the soldiers performed depended on that year's harvest," he said.
The soldiers gave their examiners large bundles of fruits and vegetables they had picked -- the better the crop, the higher their scores.
Bribes for superiors
"You understood that those on the top of the list were the best farmers," he said. "Those at the bottom of the list were usually the best soldiers."
Colonel Moskolets earns 500,000 rubles a month -- $128 -- as head of an elite communications group. His other jobs provide his real income. He works at a bank and as a security guard. He builds cottages in the countryside. In between, he uses his car as a taxi, picking up fares in Moscow. Those jobs produce twice as much income as his army salary.
"It's evident you can't concentrate on your military work when you have to worry about other jobs," he said.
Most of Colonel Moskolets' contemporaries have left the military, he said. They couldn't stand it any longer. He has stayed on, bound by tradition and nostalgia.
He is one of a line of officers in his family, a line stretching back to a great-grandfather. Generation after generation, the men of the family served their country with honor, even if they profited little.
"When my grandfather died, all he left us was his volumes of Marx, Lenin, Mao and Stalin," he said. "We couldn't even sell them. I put them out on the stairs for anyone to take away."
Colonel Moskolets' driving ambition is to make sure his only son, now 6, never has to serve in the army his forebears loved so dearly. The colonel's father created the unit the colonel now commands. "I'm presiding over the end of it," he said. "It makes me very sad."
The generals now running the army are those who ascended during the past 15 years, when the army itself was in free fall.
Colonel Deryugin, the military sociologist, was a lieutenant in 1957 and remembers the gradual breakdown in discipline.
Decline of discipline
Hazing of new recruits by second-year draftees was noticeable, a practice that became so vicious that thousands of soldiers every year were killed or disabled. Peacetime deaths in the Soviet army were a third higher than in the U.S. Army.
Colonel Deryugin, who served from 1954 until 1989, said young men have become so terrified of military service that any parent who can will buy a son's way out. The current price is about $1,000.
"The only ones going into the army now are the most deprived elements of the population," he said, "criminals, the unemployed and the last boy left in the village."
Living conditions have hardly changed since the 1930s. A soldier gets one shower a week, when he is given a change of underwear. He has one uniform, which he then washes out himself. If it's not dry in the morning, he puts it on wet.
He still wraps his feet in cloth foot-bindings instead of socks -- just like the foot soldiers of the czars.
"In 1930, when you joined the army you felt you had reached heaven," Colonel Deryugin said. "Now it's much worse than civilian life."
Can't afford new insignia
Soldiers still wear the red star and the hammer and sickle on their hats, buckles and buttons, though the Soviet Union such insignia represented has died. The army can't afford to replace them.
"Our army is like an old piece of rusting metal," Colonel Moskolets said. "It hasn't had any practice for a long time. It's getting old."
The decline has translated into the near breakdown in Chechnya, where half-strength units are being filled with untrained 18- and 19-year-olds. And they have been the first to die.
The army seemed unaffected by those deaths. The bodies have been left on the streets of Grozny, to be torn apart by dogs. Officially, the number of Russian fatalities is only a few hundred, but eyewitness accounts suggest that 2,000 have died.
Such an account of ruin would appear to offer little hope for Russians wishing to rebuild a faltering nation. But most harbor a deep well of self-preservation. They hope that that instinct will win out.
"Of course the army should be rebuilt immediately," Colonel Moskolets said. "Maybe now it will be."