The Collapse of the Soviet Military [Hardcover]

Gen. William E. Odom (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 11, 1998

In this text, a United States Army officer and scholar traces the rise and fall of the Soviet military, arguing that it had a far greater impact on Soviet politics and economic development than was perceived in the West. The author asserts that Gorbachev saw that shrinking the military and the military-industrial sector of the economy was essential for fully implementing perestroika and that his efforts to do this led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Odom enhances his account with interviews with key factors in the Soviet Union before, during and after the collapse. He describes the condition of the Soviet military during the mid-1980s and explains how it became what it was - its organizational structures, manpower policies, and military-industrial arrangements. He then moves to the events that led to its destruction, taking us to the most secret circles of Soviet policy making, as well as describing the public debates, factional struggles in the new parliament, and street combat as army units tried to repress the political forces unleashed by glasnost. Odom shows that just as the military was the ultimate source for the multinational Soviet state, the communist ideology justified the military's priority claim on the economy. When Gorbachev tried to shift resources from the military to the civilian sector to overcome economic stagnation, he had to revise the official ideology in order to justify removing the military from its central place. Paralyzed by corruption, mistrust, and public disillusionment, the military was unable and unwilling to intervene against either Gorbachev's perestroika or Yeltsin's dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

William E. Odom, a retired Lt. General with a Ph.D. from Columbia, served as a top advisor in both the Carter and Reagan administrations (including a stint director of the National Security Agency). He writes surprisingly well about the quiet disintegration of the Soviet armed forces: "In a mere six years, the world's largest and arguably most powerful military melted like the spring ice in Russia's arctic rivers as it breaks up, drifts in floes, and slowly disappears." He also offers key insights, particularly in his analysis of Soviet war philosophy, including the reasons Marxist theory made a huge military almost inevitable and why Gorbachev's attempt to reduce its size posed a threat to the whole Communist system; he also traces the influence of von Clausewitz's thinking on Lenin. But this is all by way of introduction to Odom's discussion of what happened when Mikhail Gorbachev foisted perestroika on the Soviet Union and its armed forces. Odom personally interviewed many of the participants, lending considerable detail to his chronicle of Russia's 1991 August Crisis and the rise of Boris Yeltsin. --John J. Miller

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1ST edition (October 11, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300074697
• ISBN-13: 978-0300074697
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,572,206 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Honest and Original, May 21, 2000

By 

John Dolan (the eXile, Moscow) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Collapse of the Soviet Military (Paperback)

How could the huge, powerful Soviet Army have vanished so quietly? William Odom, an American general, takes on this question and in the process of answering it demolishes many of the more smug conclusions drawn from the collapse of the USSR.

Odom writes of Soviet military culture with understanding, knowledge and respect. If there's a failing in the book, it's that Odom spends so little time on Soviet military adventures themselves, focusing instead on the organizational quirks of the military/industrial/ideological complex. He mentions only in passing episodes like the border war between Russia and China along the Amur, and spends only a few pages on the war in Afghanistan.

Odom's conclusion is that the Soviet military, grown sluggish and top-heavy, became the focus of Gorbachev's hatred, and could not stand up to his relentless attacks. Gorbachev comes across, in Odom's account, as an anti-Lenin, as avid in destroying the Soviet system as Lenin was in forging it.. When he managed this destructive feat, Gorbachev was astonished to find that the whole structure fell almost instantly. As Odom concludes, Gorbachev had failed to realize what even the fatuous Nicholas II knew: that the Army has always been the heart of the Russian state.

Thouasands of writers have swarmed over the carcasse of the USSR, most of them interested only in profiting from or gloating over its fall. One of its last ironies is that one of the most respectful, subtle appreciations of its life and death has come from an enemy general.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Valuable -- thorough, lucid, and interesting, September 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Collapse of the Soviet Military (Hardcover)

I discovered William E. Odom when a lecture of his was shown on BookTV. His talk showed an understanding of the Russian military so informed and thorough that I had to find and read his book. I found the book even more valuable and influential on my thinking than I expected. If I had known anything of William E. Odom's work and reputation, I would have known, as I do now, that his book would be lucid, detailed, and written so that its complex subject becomes clear evn to the amateur. He sets a standard of sound historical vision and attention to fact that all of us can enjoy, admire, and follow.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Better Than Most Cold War Surveys, August 14, 2008

By 

R. L. Huff "An old reader" (Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Collapse of the Soviet Military (Hardcover)

- But still encased in ideological blinkers.

Odom gives a good overview of the Soviet military establishment, top and bottom, in the last years of the USSR, and rightly points the finger at Gorbachev at initiating its demise. His central premise - that ideology is the fulcrum by which the Red Army moved - is misplaced, and reflects the ideological battles of cold war academia in which Mr. Odom, as a military intellectual, found his own casus belli.

Judging the Soviet Army through the lens of Marxism-Leninism is like judging the Spanish Armada or Conquest of America by militant Catholicism. Such faith may be sincerely felt by the warriors flying its banner; higher laws of Truth and Justice are always necessary to motivate large numbers of men to fight, kill, and die. But if to God went the glory, to the Royal Treasury went the gold. And in shortchanging the material interests of empowerment and enrichment, the right and left legs of realpolitik upon which all states stand or fall, Mr. Odom does a disservice to his subject.

Geopolitics has always been the underlying theme of Russian military and political strategy, from Tsarist and Soviet days to the present. For if Marxist-Leninist world revolution and class struggle were the true measurement of Red Army thought, then Stalin's dialectics should have met no resistance from Soviet War Commissar Trotsky and the latter's theory of Permanent Revolution. Stalin, in fact, justified the creation of the Soviet military-industrial complex during the First Five-Year Plan not by reference to Marx or Lenin, but purely in terms of Russian history: "Russia was always beaten for its backwardness, and if we do not catch up in the next ten years with the advanced capitalist world, they will crush us." And this is exactly what nearly came to pass as scheduled. Direct experience, based upon Russia's unchanging position on the periphery of Europe and Asia, has always dictated its military course.

Proof of this was seen just last week on the Georgian border. This is a rerun of the same scenario of 1921, when a Marxist-Bolshevik Russia and a Marxist-Menshevik Georgia clashed over the latter's hostile alliances with Western powers, resolved by Georgia's "admission" into the USSR. Today, things are somewhat different. As Odom would point out, Russia now has no internationalist ideology that could justify re-annexing Georgia. But the underlying tensions between the two bodies of state remain regardless of changes in fashion.

Another point of contention with Mr. Odom is his assertion that Western defense spending in the Reagan years was "necessary" to counteract the offensive potential of the Soviet Army. In truth, it was the Western spending that was on the offensive, its strategy not to deter Soviet aggression but to lock the Soviet military-industrial complex into a war of expenditure it could not win. Surely, the Red Army would have been a formidable foe, despite all its shortcomings, and if attacked at any point of the Warsaw Pact would have rallied with everything it had. But there was never any danger of Soviet expansion beyond the borders of its World War Two conquests, and any realistic analyst knew this all the time. Afghanistan was but the painful exception to prove the rule.

The appeal of Marxism-Leninism, despite all pretentions of a Third International and all attendant ideological baggage, was always very limited. Its spread in Europe was brought by conventional, not revolutionary warfare, and its native allies were motivated by national feelings for Russia as much as revolutionary faith. The Russia-friendly attitude of Czechs, Greeks, Bulgars, and Yugoslavs during WW II was conditioned by their long history of looking to Russia as an ally against Germans and Turks. The Communist Parties of these countries grew because they were identified with Russia. This was in marked contrast to Poland or Hungary, with quite different Russian experiences.

Yet with all these caveats I've still given Mr. Odom's book four stars. He does indeed give a detailed analysis of the structure and social problems of not only the Soviet Army, but Soviet society itself in the 1980s. He is doubtless right that Gorbachev's acts of free will, not historical determinism, pulled the rug out from under the Soviet colossus. He is one of the few analysts who saw the obvious parallel between the 1991 coup plotters and the attempted Kornilov putsch of August 1917.

Yet he tries to again raise the specter of cold war by suggesting that Russia will be democratic only insofar as it restrains its search for military greatness. Aside from what this does for American claims of democracy, even before 2003, let's recall that it was the Russian "democrats" of 1917 who took up the Tsar's war, his tricolor flag, and his ideology of "Russia, One and Indivisible" - as well as his desires for the Dardanelles. If Russia still continues to behave like an empire, it will not be due to any Red residues but in the finest traditions of Russian and European statecraft.