The conference’s second session was devoted to military reform, which began during the perestroika period and is still very much underway today. Svetlana Savranskaya, the National Security Archive’s director for cooperative projects with Russian archives and institutes and editor of the Russian and East Bloc Archival Documents Database, moderated the discussion.

Obstacles in the Way of Military Reform

  • Lack of Understanding: Russia’s armed forces have changed considerably over the last twenty years, said Alexander Sharavin of the Institute for Political and Military Analysis. Although recent changes have affected the armed force’s size and organizational structure, the main element of reform has not been carried out because there is still no understanding that the old security institutions inherited from the USSR cannot be used in modern conditions. The authorities talk constantly about the need for a new army, but the rhetoric is limited to giving the armed forces a “new look” and introducing a new uniform, when what is really needed is to address the armed forces’ very purpose and nature.
     
  • Unchanged Attitudes: The attitude toward servicemen has not changed either since the Soviet period. As Sharavin put it, “they have not become ‘citizens in uniform.’”
     
  • Personal Factor: The personal factor has had a big impact on military reform over the last twenty years, Sharavin noted. He said that first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, was wary of the armed forces and tried to appease and keep the armed forces on his side by handing out titles and privileges. In the early 1990s, Sharavin noted, there were also attempts to establish the National Guard, a new force that was to have become the core of Russia’s new armed forces. But this project was headed by Russian Vice President Alexander Rutskoy, who later joined the opposition against Yeltsin. As a result, Yeltsin saw everyone involved in the National Guard project as Rutskoy’s men, did not trust them, and buried the whole idea.

Ill-Considered Reforms

Over the last 20 years, reform of the armed forces has been very uneven and disorganized, said Vladimir Dvorkin of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of World Economy and International Relations.

  • Gorbachev: Gorbachev was fully aware that the Soviet armed forces were not up to the new international situation that emerged after the end of the Cold War, Dvorkin said. There was a need for cuts to both the nuclear and conventional forces. But inertia and the state bureaucracy’s unwillingness to carry out radical reforms got in the way. Gorbachev’s ideas thus weren’t fully realized. Dvorkin added that Gorbachev began such important transformations as the creation of a unified strategic command of the nuclear forces, but the Soviet Union’s collapse put an end to the further integration of the armed forces.
     
  • Military Reform Today: The current stage of military reform aims to transform the armed forces and make them as effective and equipped as those of the United States and Germany. Unfortunately, Dvorkin said, this goal is being pursued without a carefully considered reform program, and this has led to chaos, oversights, and organizational and financial costs and problems. All of these problems will have to be sorted out sooner or later, he concluded.    

Two Military-Political Problems Inherited from the USSR

U.S. journalist David Hoffman of the Washington Post and the Foreign Policy examined two problems that arose from the Soviet collapse and are still significant today:

  • Biological Weapons: After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union both created big biological weapons stockpiles. In 1969, U.S. President Richard Nixon decided to stop biological weapons production and close the stockpiles. But the USSR continued producing these weapons secretly even after ratifying the 1975 Convention on the Prohibition of Biological Weapons. Twenty years later, President Yeltsin promised the West that these weapons would be destroyed, but there is no evidence that this promise was fulfilled, Hoffman said. The problem with the 1975 convention is that it does not stipulate verification and compliance measures. The international community is now trying to revise these provisions.  
     
  • Missile Defense: In 1983, U.S. President Ronald Reagan proposed deploying a new global missile defense system that would make nuclear weapons redundant. The U.S. Congress continues to spend billions of dollars on building such a missile defense system, although smaller in scale. Russia fears that this system will threaten its nuclear deterrent. The two sides will soon have to decide if they can find a way of cooperating on the missile defense issue, Hoffman concluded. It would be a big mistake, he added, for them to fail to reach an agreement and launch a new arms race instead. 

Military Reform: The Road to the 21st Century

  • Gorbachev’s Transformations: Alexander Belkin of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy noted that Gorbachev made a major step forward by renouncing the idea of a fundamental division of the world into two competing systems. The next step would have been to take the military transformations further—from the foreign policy to the domestic policy level—but Gorbachev did not succeed in this, Belkin said.  
     
  • “Courageous Ignorance”: Throughout the years following the Soviet collapse, the authorities recognized the need for reform but did not know how to go about it. Belkin said that the policies followed by Russian defense ministers since the Soviet collapse have been distinguished by their “courageous ignorance”: they have scaled back the armed forces and cut numbers, but without really thinking through the consequences. This policy continued under Vladimir Putin, Belkin added. 
     
  • The Only Truly Reformed Institution: For all its shortcomings, Belkin argued that the recent military reform has made the armed forces the only successful reformed institution since the Soviet collapse. The first stage of military reform has been completed, even if this was not done by the best of methods and did not produce the best results. However, Russia has replaced its continental offensive army designed for seizing others’ territory with an army that has the potential to be shaped into a modern force designed to prevent and resolve local conflicts.

State Militarism

According to Alexander Golts of the website Yezhednevny Zhurnal, the problem of military reform is linked to the militaristic core that has been an intrinsic part of the Russian state since the times of Peter the Great. Russia has never managed to shake off this legacy of state militarism. Nevertheless, in Golts’s opinion, after twenty years of post-Soviet development, the authorities seem to have come to a realization of what military reform should look like. For example, Russia’s current abandonment of an army based on mass mobilization is a huge step forward. Also, the success of today’s military reform—though this effort is still incomplete—is linked to the fact that the globalized world and global economic processes lead to the inevitable decay of a militaristically organized society, Golts concluded.