Ussr Armed Forces

Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze has issued a fresh warning that another right-wing coup could take place in the Soviet Union, according to a weekly newspaper. Megapolis-Express, in an issue dated today, said Shevardnadze told a recent meeting of his Democratic Reform Movement that "the threat of a right-wing putsch is growing and becoming more and more real."

For 10 years, Sergei Kushpetovsky loyally served the Motherland, rising to the rank of captain in the Soviet army. Then eight months ago, the unthinkable happened--the Motherland fired him. "I gave everything I had to the country and got nothing back," Kushpetovsky said. "I have a family to support, and they didn't give me a kopeck to live on."

The 1991 edition of the Pentagon's annual publication "Soviet Military Power" was released Friday, a mere shadow of its former self. Gone are the menacing photographs of jackbooted Soviet troops parading in Red Square, the warnings about Soviet designs for world domination, the general tone of fear and loathing that pervaded earlier editions. Even the title of the publication's 10th edition is changed.

In just a few weeks, Boris Teselkin, a soft-spoken captain in the Red Army's Taman Division, has gone from protecting a Russian president--and helping to make history--to pulling up cabbages from the mud. But for Teselkin and thousands of his military colleagues, putting food on the Russian table this winter may now be just as important to their nation's future as protecting the life of Boris N. Yeltsin.

The Soviet Union, which has the world's largest armed forces, is considering plans to cut them by as much as half in the next three years, a senior Soviet Defense Ministry official said Tuesday. Col. Gen. Pavel Grachev, the newly appointed first deputy defense minister, told a legislative hearing that the reduction could take the Soviet armed forces from the present 4.2 million to as few as 2 million or 2.5 million by the end of 1994, the news agency Interfax reported.

The new Soviet defense minister, committing himself to "radical, fundamental reforms" of the country's military, announced plans Friday to scale down the Red Army, turning it into a smaller, more professional force and halving the time served by conscripts. Air Marshal Yevgeny I.

President Bush told the presidents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on Tuesday that he will exert U.S. pressure on the fraying central government of the Soviet Union to remove thousands of Soviet troops from the newly independent Baltic republics. "All three presidents did ask (Bush) for his support . . . in getting Soviet troops out of their countries," White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said after a hastily scheduled meeting between Bush and Presidents Arnold F.

A high-level delegation from the Soviet Union's Ministry of Defense began a crash course Monday at Harvard University on the role of the military in a democracy. The privately funded, two-week program brings 28 Soviet officers to Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government for classes ranging from a primer on the U.S. Constitution to lessons of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf.

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.

U.S. military intelligence analysts are scrambling to keep up with the upheaval in Moscow, sorting through a deluge of information to try to discern the shape of the military force that will emerge from the political changes in the Kremlin.