Customer Reviews

The Collapse of the Soviet Military

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

- 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.

This is an outstanding account of why the Red Army collapsed, and with it the Soviet state. Odom does a great job explaining the Soviet military, its ideological underpinnings and its evolution in the 1970's and 1980's, as well as the impact of Gorbachev's reforms. Odom explains why in the end the Red Army could not pull off the coup against Gorbachev even with the support of much of the rest of the government. It had collapsed from within, and so it was powerless to stop either Gorbachev or Yelstin. If you are interested in military affairs or Russian/Soviet history, this is a book you should read.