MOSCOW — When Oleg Baklanov stepped out from behind the scenes to join the rightist junta that tried to seize power last month, he confirmed suspicions that the defense industry, a vast empire ruled by the grayest of bureaucrats, had long been the real force running the Soviet government.
Baklanov, a regular-featured, middle-aged man like so many of his anonymous cohorts, oversaw defense production from dual posts in the government and the Communist Party. Whenever he spoke in public, he praised glasnost, perestroika and democracy.
But the industry he represents--which accounts for a whopping 30% of total Soviet production, according to Western experts--was thrown into such agony by the cutbacks and turmoil of Kremlin reforms that it became arguably the most reactionary faction in the Soviet Union.
And Baklanov became the motor behind the putsch, well-informed politicians here believe. He is now charged with high treason.
"If you figure, using Marxist thinking, that economics is the basis of everything, then Baklanov was the basis of the coup," said Vladimir Prokhratilov, a journalist and Russian government adviser who once worked in the space industry. "What happened was a putsch by the military-industrial complex."
Baklanov may be gone, but the system that spawned him lives on, largely impervious to the perestroika of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The defense industry is so huge, pervasive and corrupt, experts argue, that it resists step-by-step reform. Now, the Soviet military-industrial complex may face something more dramatic.
Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin is proposing the massive privatization of defense plants and the cutoff of all government subsidies to the industry within two years. Such a task would be both massive and risky.
But it must be done, experts say. The Soviet defense industry accounts for a huge share of the economy, enjoying first call on raw materials. And it has locked away the majority of the country's best minds and engineering talents in "post office boxes"--the Soviet expression for secret installations.
The system "must be dismantled and rebuilt as a rational productive system," said John G. Hines, a senior Soviet military analyst at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica. "The only way to fix it is to break it completely."
