War-Scarred Soviets Not Up to Arabia : World reaction: Nonviolent posture of officials has the support of the rank and file.

MOSCOW — Anyone who dreams of U.S.-Soviet cooperation on a Persian Gulf battlefield would be rapidly disabused by talking to Anna Kalinov. The Moscow engineer with the careworn face has a good memory--and a son who is about to turn 18.

“Only recently, we had Afghanistan, and our soldiers were sent there on a ‘fraternal mission,’ ” Kalinov, a woman in her mid-40s, said Saturday as she juggled bags of groceries. “We know how this ended, with thousands of dead and wounded, and nobody to blame. Let the Americans send their soldiers to face the bullets. It would be better if ours help farmers get in the crops.”

The Soviet Union, Iraq’s chief arms merchant for 20 years, has joined with the Bush Administration in condemning the invasion of Kuwait and turned off the flow of weapons and munitions. “This is clearly a reflection of new thinking,” said one Western diplomat approvingly, using the same buzzword-- new thinking --that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev uses to refer to his policies.

But there are limits, and they have now become apparent. Presumably sharing Kalinov’s memories, or concerned about how she and other citizens might react, Kremlin officials don’t want to involve the 4-million-member Soviet army, the world’s largest standing military force, in operations to contain the forces of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

That nonviolent posture has the support of many rank-and-file citizens, who also note the staggering litany of domestic problems their country must face, a list that seemingly grows every week and that cannot conceivably be shortened by securing the flow of Persian Gulf crude oil to the West.

“The Soviet government was selling weapons to Iraq. I wouldn’t call that a mistake--I’d call it a crime,” said Vladimir Goryushin, 36, an accordion player out for an afternoon stroll in Moscow. “It is good the Americans are trying to settle this conflict by force, but it would be wrong for our army to join in. The Soviet army has other problems to solve--I mean, ethnic conflicts inside our country.”

“Yes, I feel sorry for Kuwait, but I will not volunteer to go and defend them,” declared Sergei, a 19-year-old army sergeant from Byelorussia who won a 10-day pass to Moscow for outstanding service. Referring to his 13,000 comrades-in-arms who perished on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Sergei added: “We’ve had enough. Let the Americans test their forces.”

In the barracks and wardrooms, conceivably because of the same “Afghanistan syndrome,” there seems to be little thirst for battle. Moscow-based correspondents were given a rare opportunity to tour Soviet army bases in Russia, Byelorussia and the Ukraine last week, and they found warriors of the Red Army persuasively talking about the need for peace, as they usually do.

“I think the (Persian Gulf) problem will be resolved just fine, with the Soviet Union and the United States together,” Maj. Gen. Vladislav Lisovksy, deputy commander of the Leningrad Military District, told journalists who visited him at an artillery range in Pushkin near Leningrad. “It will be solved peacefully, through pressure.”

At a paratrooper unit recently repatriated from Hungary to barracks near the Byelorussian city of Brest, Senior Lt. Bilal Mirzoyev said his soldiers would serve alongside GIs “with pleasure.” But he added that he and his subordinates, in true army fashion, are “always in favor” of orders they receive.

The Kremlin’s action in the Iraqi-Kuwaiti conflict, by its agreement to a coordinated diplomatic stance with the United States, was a great switch from the sort of global leapfrog played for Third World advantage by the superpowers for decades. It could not possibly have the undivided support of Soviet officials in the defense and foreign ministries, some of whom built careers as “Iraq hands.”

“I’d be astounded if you suddenly had a 100% shift in everyone’s way of viewing things,” the Western diplomat said. A U.S. Embassy employee in frequent contact with Soviet officials reported that the “new thinking” on the Persian Gulf had touched off squabbles at the Foreign Ministry’s brooding, Stalin-era headquarters on Smolensk Square.

The variety of points of view has been obvious. One Moscow newspaper, Rabochaya Tribuna (Worker’s Tribune) accused Saddam Hussein of running a “totalitarian regime.” Perhaps because of such vehement talk, a great contrast with onetime Soviet praise for “peace-loving” Iraq, Gorbachev interrupted his vacation Friday to issue his first statement on the crisis and specifically denied that his country had turned “anti-Iraqi.”

By all accounts, the Moscow-Baghdad axis was a result of pure calculation on both sides and a product of the Cold War. After the British-dominated monarchy in Baghdad was ousted in 1958, Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev rushed to support the fledgling Iraqi republic, an act, he boasted later, that “further enhanced our prestige in the Arab world.”

Thousands of Soviet oil workers, advisers and technical specialists would ultimately set off for Baghdad, which was bound to Moscow by a Treaty of Friendship in 1972. Many of the visitors would service and teach the Iraqis to use their Soviet purchases: T-72 tanks, and MIG-23, MIG-25 and MIG-29 warplanes.

“It was a good arrangement for both countries; they paid us top price for the arms,” an important consideration for the foreign-currency-hungry Soviet government, an official of the Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee noted.

Intriguingly, one of the Baghdad-bound specialists was Yelena Bonner, who later would marry human rights champion Andrei D. Sakharov. Bonner was in Iraq for two years after 1958 as part of a 26-member medical team. She found there was little love among her colleagues for their Arab comrades building socialism.

“There were lots of Soviet officials there, and their relation to the Arabs, to the Iraqis, indicated no understanding or internationalism,” Bonner told an interviewer years later. “They behaved worse than colonialists in Kipling’s times. That one of these chinovniki , senior bureaucrats, could say such rude things to our faces about some Arab or dark-skinned person! It was all irrational to me; these insults were worse than swear words.”

For Soviet progressives, Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) policies and Iraq’s brutal practices--such as gassing its own citizens during the Iran-Iraq War--erased any allure that Saddam Hussein’s government might have had. By last spring, the New Times weekly, a barometer of liberal opinion, criticized Iraq as a country where “people can choose their diet, while the party chooses what they can read.” That is, the exact opposite of the Gorbachev-era Soviet Union.

The soothing tone the Soviet president used in his Friday statement was apparently designed to put an end to this kind of rhetorical bridge-burning. Although a Kremlin spokesman had said one day earlier that his country was ready to talk about military action in the framework of the U.N. Security Council, as distinguished from the U.S.-led multinational force, Gorbachev did not pursue that option. He called instead on the Arab League to put affairs in order in their part of the world.

Nevertheless, according to all available evidence, the massive Kremlin involvement in Iraq that dates back to Yelena Bonner’s days is coming to an end. The Italian foreign minister, Gianni De Michelis, said in Rome on Saturday that all but 700 of 7,830 Soviet residents in Iraq have been evacuated.

However, Moscow’s account of events was different. The official Tass news agency said Saturday that Gorbachev ordered the creation of a special government commission to organize the evacuation of 880 Soviet nationals in Kuwait and the wives and children of the Soviet workers in Iraq.