Pullout Means Fear, Hardship for Soviet Troops : Germany: Discipline is tightened as morale drops. Many worry about what awaits them at home.

In this faded little spa town a few miles west of the Polish border, a small part of a European drama is unfolding: A superpower is in retreat.

The 20-foot-high likeness of a Soviet soldier that had guarded the town’s main square since the late 1940s has been discreetly moved to a military cemetery on the community’s western outskirts. Those staffing a Soviet military hospital near the town center left suddenly three weeks ago. And locals say the 5,000-man tank regiment that arrived in the final days of World War II will be gone by the end of next year.

On the grand scale of events, the changes in Bad Freienwalde and elsewhere in eastern Germany help confirm the end of the Soviet Union’s western empire.

After all, the withdrawal from eastern Germany of 600,000 uniformed men and their dependents marks the end of Moscow’s single largest military deployment outside Soviet frontiers.

On another level, however, the retreat has brought an accumulation of personal turmoil--to lonely, frightened, lovesick young men or worried officers and their families--as history propels them into a future filled with more uncertainty. It has become a tale of sinking morale and dwindling discipline punctuated by occasionally bizarre, tragic incidents.

For the Soviet draftee, conditions are oppressive. An assignment to Germany for them usually means two years without leave or contact with the local population, on pay that is the equivalent of $15 a month.

In reaction to German unification, with its hard currency and democratic freedom, Soviet commanders have only tightened the reins on their troops.

In what is perhaps the ultimate irony, Soviet soldiers and junior officers interviewed here all said they are forbidden from sending care packages home to relatives at a time when the Germans around them mount one of the biggest relief efforts to the Soviet Union since World War II.

For some, it’s all just too much.

A young Ukrainian conscript recently commandeered a tank-like armored assault vehicle from a Soviet base in Potsdam after learning that his girlfriend back home had jilted him. He led local police on a hair-raising chase through Berlin’s commuter crush before finally being corralled by Soviet troops.

Last summer, a 19-year-old Russian corporal stationed near Magdeburg was shot by police after he took weapons and hostages and began firing. Investigations later revealed that he had been refused permission to return to the Soviet Union to deal with family problems.

At an unprecedented news conference last month, the commander of Soviet forces in Germany, Gen. Bors Snetkov, rejected charges that hundreds of soldiers die annually in eastern Germany, saying that last year only 84 deaths had occurred.

However, he added that there had been suicides, mainly among conscripts who had received “Dear John” letters.

“Weak people cannot control their romantic emotions; strong men will find another love,” Snetkov said.

Beyond these headline-creating incidents, however, lies a less dramatic, potentially more troublesome disquiet that extends well into the officer ranks.

For men like 24-year-old 1st Lt. Eduard Lanitz, who has been part of the tank regiment here since September, 1988, life has become one giant question mark.

After graduating from a military academy in his hometown of Brest, near the Polish-Soviet border, Lanitz came to Germany in the belief that he would probably stay for several years. Now the prospect of returning soon to chaotic conditions at home looms ever larger.

The apartment he and his bride of six months share with another family of four in an off-base housing complex for officers is cramped. The adjacent Soviet army shop that once stocked caviar and other delicacies is now empty, and the locals are less than outgoing.

Still, conditions remain better than those the couple will face once they go back to the Soviet Union. But when and how that might be remain unclear. As they wait for a decision, nightly television newscasts, full of details about the mounting food shortages back home, stoke their worries.

Cuts in Moscow’s defense budget have left many junior officers wondering just how long they can stay in uniform.

The lack of housing in the Soviet Union for returning servicemen is so critical that Germany has agreed to build 36,000 new apartment units there as part of the treaty governing terms of the Soviet military withdrawal.

“I guess there’s always going to be a certain amount of homesickness,” admitted Lanitz’s wife, Lyubov. “But when we return, what will happen to us? Will we get housing?”

Added Ina Yevremkov, the wife of a lieutenant and mother of two young daughters, “We’ve had letters from our parents that the food situation is getting worse day by day, but it’s the uncertainty about a place to live that is the hardest thing. . . .”

She said the transfer home would probably separate the family.

“I’ll go to my parents with the children, and the men would live in barracks where they serve,” she said. “No one knows when conditions improve.”

Soviet human rights lawyer Oleg Lyamin says that families have a right to worry. In a telephone interview, he detailed the case of an officer’s wife who was ordered home with her 5-year-old mentally handicapped son, but refused to go because no accommodation awaited her there.

“The officer was sent back on his own after criticizing corruption in his unit,” Lyamin said. “The wife was told to go, but there was no home to go to.”

Lyamin said he is preparing to defend her right to stay put until housing is found.

Corruption has also reportedly intensified sharply in the months since last July’s German currency union as the lure of hard currency has also proved an irresistible temptation to soldiers and junior officers.

A first lieutenant earns the equivalent of $600 per month in hard currency deutschemarks when serving in Germany, but would earn well under half that amount in rubles once back within Soviet borders.

A mounting number of reports indicate a brisk market in stolen Soviet weapons, being sold to German nationals for deutschemarks.

Lyamin notes that of 23 Soviet soldiers awaiting trial in Germany, five are facing charges of stealing weapons.

“Morale has always been low, but no one has written about it,” Lyamin said. “The introduction of the deutschemark has only accentuated the extent of this failure.

“There’s a feeling among officers that tomorrow everything is going to end, so each is trying to take advantage of the situation as best he can. This only agitates the conscripts further.”

The end of East German dictatorship and the freedom of expression it brings have left the Soviet troops the target of insults by angry locals. Several Soviet soldiers have even been attacked by football hooligans and gangs of right-wing extremist youths. It is a situation that has generated worrisome tensions.

Despite this array of difficulties, an acceleration of the Soviet withdrawal seems unlikely.

“There are 2,000 different objects that the Soviets have to hand back, everything from barracks to kindergartens to sheds,” Gen. Joerg Schoenbohm, commander of German army forces in eastern Germany, said recently. “I don’t see any chance for them to move out any quicker--six months maybe.”

Schoenbohm also noted that the Soviets must move more than 1 million tons of munitions.

Indeed, the German news weekly Der Spiegel recently reported that the flow of German relief goods to the Soviet Union had created such a bottleneck at the Polish-Soviet border railhead that the troop withdrawal was being hampered.

Still, here as elsewhere, signs of the Soviets’ 45-year presence are already fading. The Avenue of German-Soviet Friendship is once again the Berlin Road. The Soviet tanks that once clattered through town now carefully detour around it.

Compared to many other eastern German communities where Soviet troops have been based for much of the past half-century, Bad Freienwalde’s relations with the base have been relatively problem-free. But there are few tears at the prospect of Soviet departure. Locals talk of remaking their lives after the last Russian is gone.

Looking out on the square where the statue of the Soviet soldier stood for so long, the town’s mayor, Herbert Blanke, spoke of plans to reopen long-closed hotels and turn the abandoned military hospital into a clinic.

He paused for a moment, then asked, “Who can be sad when an occupation army goes?”