The Collapse of the Soviet Military

Foreign Affairs

A superb account... A remarkable synthesis of history and political science.

Stephen Kotkin

What emerges...is a semi-acknowledged paradox: the Soviet Union was a mortal threat, the Soviet Union was a hopeless mess....
—New Republic

W. Bruce Lincoln

No other single volume rivals the thoroughness of Odom's account....[A] brilliant study....This book will be essential reading for everyone who wants to understand why America's Cold War rival acted the way it did and what caused that opponent to become a colossus with feet of clay.
— Washington Post Book World

Library Journal

Odom, a former National Security director and currently director of national security studies at the Hudson Institute and adjunct professor of political science at Yale, uses his extensive background to clarify and chronicle the fall of the Soviet military. Whereas Robert Service, in A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (LJ 3/1/98), weaves the military into the general conditions that caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, Odom looks at the root causes of the fall of the military itself. During the Cold War, Western scholars were forced to study the Soviet military as archaeologists might study civilizations: from remnants of past expeditions. Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika were responsible for changing the foundations of the military's existence. Lenin had adapted Clauswitz's views to match Marxist theory, and Gorbachev's reorder of this position reined in the military, causing its collapse. This scholarly treatise is not for the faint-hearted. Recommended for academic libraries.--Harry V. Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. System, Iola

Stephen Kotkin

What emerges...is a semi-acknowledged paradox: the Soviet Union was a mortal threat, the Soviet Union was a hopeless mess.... -- The New Republic

Kirkus Reviews

A subtle, profound, and authoritative assessment of the life and sudden death of the Soviet military by the former director of the National Security Agency. By almost every measure, the Soviet armed forces were the largest in the world. By 1985, they were nearly 6 million strong, with another 25 million reserves. Behind that force stood a military-industrial complex far larger than the West understood, accounting for at least 20 percent and perhaps more than 30 percent of GNP. It was plain to Mikhail Gorbachev and even to military leaders that, if the Soviet Union was to deal with its economic crisis, it had to bring these expenditures under control. The genius of this analysis is to show how a þcold, calculating, and brilliantly duplicitousþ Gorbachev outmaneuvered not only his opponents in the Politburo and the military but even himself. His weakness in economics has been widely commented on, but Odom shows that his large, unilateral reductions in the size of Soviet forces, intended to show the West that the Soviet Union was serious about negotiating mutual reductions, began the process of disintegration. Glasnost also turned a harsh light on the realities of military life. Odom argues that there was a serious moral deterioration in the military in the1970s and '80s, that hazing became increasingly dangerous and uncontrolled, and that resistance to conscription developed rapidly. Many in the military saw the danger and opposed his policies, but the close relationship between the party and the armed forces made independent action difficult. The military leadership was also þtoo corrupt, weak, careerist, and indecisive to act on its own.þ The final irony was whena group of generals around Yeltsin, for corrupt reasons of their own, schemed to prevent the Soviet military resuscitation in the short-lived Commonwealth of Independent States' armed forces. A careful, thoughtful, and outstanding contribution to the understanding of a tumultous period.