European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - February 2, 1994, Darmstadt, Hesse                                In i a r l a not Cape. Ant fre a Tarada and his wife Larissa live in a single room with their children in Russia. They were formerly stationed in East Germany.  4 at russian army Ato la so a r a x or >4 russian Soldier steeps on a Bench while his comrades rest near the russian parliament during the government s standoff with hard liners in october. By Serce Schmemann the new York times d dismembered and demoralized no longer As feared in the West or loved at Home As before the russian armed forces Are the most unwieldy and troublesome legacy of the soviet Empire. Draft evasion is rampant and if the current Call up goes As badly As some fear officers might actually outnumber enlisted men. Young officers Are quitting in droves leaving behind a top heavy and hollow Force. By some accounts there Are More generals now on the russian general staff than there were in the soviet Days even though the russian army is less than 40 percent of what the soviet Force was. Officers reduced from the elite caste of an Empire to an impoverished disunited and often homeless mass have become less the guardians of than a menace to the sovereignty of Russia and its 14 new neighbors. By Many accounts military support for president Boris n. Yeltsin against the militant legislature in october was far from unified or certain. In Moscow a new Quot military doctrine Quot was finally produced grandly declaring that the russian army no longer considers any nation or bloc to be its foe and that its new Mission will be to react quickly to local conflicts. But interviews with russian officers enlisted men and civilian specialists indicate that economic and political forces rather than policy Are shaping the future of the Force. A shrinking military budget barely suffices to sustain the troops leaving precious Little for fuel maintenance or the future. More than 180,000 officers Are without housing. Warships Are sold for scrap Metal the Mig design Bureau Sells rides in state of the Art Mig-29s for $8,000 each and soldiers sell their weapons or serve As mercenaries in regional wars. It is common to see soldiers in fatigues openly Selling fuel from army tankers /. Quot a tremendous military machine second to none has All of a sudden found itself in the position roof a Defeated army said Sergei m. Rogov a military specialist at the Institute of the . And Canada a Moscow research organization. History offered no precedent for so abrupt a collapse of an Empire virtually under its own weight. The third Reich fell in War the ottoman Empire slowly degenerated Britain gradually withdrew from its global Empire but the soviet Union simply crumpled As its ideology ceased to hold and the Cost of the ponderous instruments of Security finally overwhelmed its Economy. Perhaps the closest demobilization in recent times was when the United states reduced its world War ii Force of 11,8 million troops so that by the korean War Only 1.5 million troops were in uniform Rex but the american Force reduction was one of jubilation the one taking place in the former soviet Union is accompanied by multiple miseries. Paradoxically it was in making their Empire virtually Invulnerable that the soviets brought about its collapse. Too mighty to tempt any enemy into armed attack the military also proved to be so Large that the soviet Union was t Able to sustain it. I Quot i cannot think of any parallel to this kind of collapse Quot said Richard pipes a professor of russian history at Harvard University. Quot great empires usually Wear Down or Are Defeated in War but this kind of implosion is unprecedented. But then the whole soviet Experiment was  the North Atlantic Alliance after four decades of grandiose spending and anxiety about the soviet military buildup no longer rates Moscow s non nuclear forces even As a threat. But the former members of the Warsaw pact have not lost their fear of the russian forces to their East that occupied them at the end of world War ii and have been forced to leave Only in the last few years. For their part Many senior russian officers humiliated by forced withdrawal from Afghanistan a where a soviet installed government was ultimately Defeated a and Eastern Europe do not hide their vexation at America s treatment of former soviet allies like Iraq. The unexpected depth of resistance in the military to the stars and stripes