
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 3, 1990                   TAG: 9004030317
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                LENGTH: Short

NUMBER OF SOVIET DRAFT-DODGERS SOARS

In at least eight of its 15 republics, the Soviet Union faces large-scale resistance to the spring military draft that begins this week, setting the stage for a potentially dangerous confrontation between the military and grass-roots nationalist movements.

Gen. Mikhail Moiseyev, the chief of the general staff, told Pravda Monday that the official number of draft-dodgers grew eightfold between 1985 and last year, from 837 to 6,647. "The statistics are alarming," he said.

Several hundred thousand 18-year-old males will be summoned to local draft boards between now and June to sign up for their obligatory two years of service in the Soviet army, the KGB border guard, the domestic riot-control troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs or the railroad troops.

For years, young men from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and the Transcaucasian republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan have quietly resisted serving, partly because they faced harassment or brutality from mainly Slav fellow soldiers and officers.

But over the past few years, as nationalism has emerged from underground in virtually all of the non-Russian republics, the draft has become a political flash point.

by CNB