The Collapse of the Soviet Military

Few in Western intellectual or policy circles expected the Soviet armed forces to acquiesce without a fight, not only in the collapse of their nation but in the dissolution of their own privileged system. In fact, they exited the stage of history virtually without a whisper. Odom, a former director of the National Security Agency, makes extensive use of interviews with participants to offer the most convincing analysis to date of what happened to the Soviet military in its final years. He begins by establishing the importance of Marxist/Leninist ideology to a Soviet system whose other sources of legitimacy had been eroding for decades. Central to that ideology was the postulate that politics and diplomacy were merely war by other means until the final victory of socialism. The consequences, Odom explains, were an economy based on a permanent war footing and a society based on the maintenance of a comprehensive military establishment. Gorbachev's reformulation of official ideology for internal reform broke the system's mainspring without offering an alternative legal model of party-military relations, however. His force reductions and withdrawals facilitated disintegration: conscripts refused to report, officers sold equipment, domestic order eroded, as did the military's prestige. The attempted putsch of 1991 sealed the armed forces' fate. Odom's well-written account suggests that the Russian successor state is on a new path and that the military may eventually become guardians of a constitutional order. 17 b&w photos. (Nov.)