Ussr Armed Forces

NATO said Wednesday that the shattering events in the Soviet Union will have a major effect on the Western alliance's policy and that a new era of international relations has begun. It was the first time that the alliance, set up in 1949 to face what the West perceived as a threat from Moscow, had publicly acknowledged that the new Soviet revolution would affect its own political and military aims.

The Soviet Union's political turbulence spread into the heart of Muslim Central Asia on Saturday as the republics of Uzbekistan and Kirghizia declared independence and the president of neighboring Tadzhikistan was swept from office. The two Central Asian defections from the crumbling Soviet empire brought to 10 the number of republics that have formally sought to break away in an accelerated exodus brought on by the attempted coup two weeks ago by reactionary elements of the Kremlin.

A strapping guard stands watch over the damning documents, just in case a guilty official with too much to lose resorts to violence to get at them. Nearby, the phones ring repeatedly as the calls pour in: neighbors denouncing neighbors, workers denouncing bosses and co-workers. The accusation: showing too much enthusiasm for last week's attempted coup. "They taught us for so long how to inform on each other," Yuri Khramov, a deputy on the Moscow City Council, said Wednesday.

The very speed of the dramatic upheaval in the Soviet Union has raised deep fears in the White House that such a rapid unraveling could lead to further turmoil. "The gut feeling is that the whole thing is going to fall apart," said one Administration official of what he said are mounting concerns among senior advisers to President Bush that the Soviet Union stands at the brink of dangerous disintegration.

The breathtaking pace of change in the Soviet Union continued unabated Sunday as the defense minister announced plans for an 80% shake-up of the military leadership, and the Communist Party hierarchy, just as discredited by the right-wing coup, agreed to abolish its nucleus, the Central Committee. Appearing on evening TV news, Col. Gen. Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov said his Defense Ministry--one of the hotbeds of support for last week's abortive bid to overthrow President Mikhail S.

The Leningrad military commander refused to send his troops into the city, the air force balked at the odious orders from above and one appalled officer in the Pacific fleet even talked his skeleton crew into slipping their crippled submarine out to sea rather than serving the upstart junta. As reports filter out on the extent of military opposition to last week's attempted coup, reformers say they are ever more convinced that the Soviet armed forces will never be the same.

One by one, 20 KGB commanders refused to storm the Russian Parliament building in what may have been the turning point in last week's attempted coup against President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin said Sunday. Yeltsin said in an interview with Russian television that commanders of the KGB's elite anti-terrorist Alpha Group resisted intense pressure, including "threats of court-martial, execution, et cetera" by their superiors.

In old-style Kremlin politics, the rightists who sought the ouster of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev appeared to have lined up most of the key forces: the army, the police, the KGB, the prime minister, the Cabinet and Gorbachev's own vice president. What they overlooked were the people, historically the pawns of power politics.

A week before the Soviet coup, U.S. intelligence officials warned the White House of "a real possibility" that hard-liners in the KGB or the Soviet military might act to block the scheduled signing of the new Union Treaty, senior government officials said Wednesday. But they conceded that they knew too little about potential coup plans to enable President Bush to act.