20 Years After the USSR: Problems of the Military Reform and Interethnic Relations

The first session examined aspects of interethnic relations and nationalism before and after the Soviet collapse. Carnegie Moscow Center’s Alexey Malashenko moderated.

The History of Post-Soviet Russian Nationalism

• The End of the Twentieth Century: From perestroika through to the end of the 1990s, Russian nationalism was, in the words of Alexander Verkhovsky of the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, a “historical reconstruction.” It was characterized by attempts to reconstruct the pre-revolutionary ultra-nationalist Black Hundreds movement, and influenced by the notion of transplanting German Nazism or Italian fascism to Russian soil. This nationalism was ultimately unsuccessful, Verkhovsky said.
   
• After 2000: Russian nationalism underwent deep and rapid change after 2000, Verkhovsky noted. Its leaders no longer looked for historic roots; instead, they sought to shed the legacy of the 1990s, with its ideas of a specifically Russian path for development, and instead to build a national state “like everyone else.” Verkhovsky added that Russian nationalists have been attempting to create a party along the lines of the ultra-right parties in European parliaments. However, the most active representatives of modern nationalism, unlike its predecessor in the 1990s, in general seem focused on violent action, which prevents the successful establishment of a Western-European-style nationalist party.

Interethnic Relations and Ethnic Minorities in the USSR and the Post-Soviet Period

• During the USSR: Emil Pain of the Center for Ethnopolitical and Regional Studies commented that many ethnic minorities in the former Soviet Union take a positive view of the internationalism and “friendship of peoples” of the Soviet period. They do not view the Soviet policy as assimilationist or focused on russification, he explained, because they felt that their own national identity was always highlighted and everyone “knew just who they were.” At the same time, Pain noted, Soviet civic-political identity held sway over ethnic-religious identity during this period. This created a hierarchy of identities that created opportunities for integration, Pain said, unlike assimilation, where the ethnic majority absorbs the minority, or multiculturalism, where the minority gets some advantages through positive discrimination policies.
   
• After the Soviet Union’s Collapse: The early 1990s was characterized by a rapid religious and ethnic mobilization among the non-Russian ethnic minorities, while the Russian ethnic majority remained in a state of indifference, Pain said. But the situation changed after the start of the first Chechen war (1994), when, as Pain said, the activities of ethnic minorities started to quiet down, while the Russian majority became more active.
   
• The 2000s: Pain noted that by the start of the 2000s, a reverse process had begun, with the minorities once again becoming more active. The ethno-political elites of the early 1990s had been replaced by new leaders who were less well known but more radical in outlook. He added that political preferences have changed too, with national-democracy giving way to conservative traditionalism.

A Multi-Ethnic and Unstable Region: the Situation in the North Caucasus

• “Supranational” Insurgents: Grigory Shvedov of the website Caucasian Knot stressed that the conflict in the North Caucasus is not currently ethnic in nature. Those fighting against Russia do not associate themselves with a specific ethnic group, but see themselves as part of a supranational organization, Shvedov added.
   
• Less Violence: Shvedov noted that the 1007 people were killed and injured as a result of the smoldering conflict in the North Caucasus between January to September 2011. In 2010, 1710 people were killed or injured. There were fewer terrorist attacks and murders in the region over January-September 2011 than over the same period in 2010, Shvedov said, meaning that there is no evidence of increasing violence in the North Caucasus as authorities have claimed. This drop in violence is perhaps linked to the willingness of security and law enforcement authorities to conduct a dialogue with the insurgents. However, Shvedov cautioned, it is still not possible to speak of the region as stabilized. Russian security and law enforcement personnel still suffer a high number of casualties, people in the region still do not trust the authorities, and the slogan “Quit feeding the Caucasus” is gathering support in the rest of the country.  

Mikhail Gorbachev and the National Question

William Taubman of Amherst College in the United States said that Gorbachev’s time as president of the USSR was characterized by a unique combination of idealism and optimism, which prevented him from recognizing the seriousness of the ethnic issue in the country. Gorbachev believed in a reformed version of socialism which he thought would appeal not just to the Russian majority but to ethnic minorities too, Taubman explained. Gorbachev himself grew up near the multi-ethnic North Caucasus and, based on his own experience, assumed there was just one possible solution—interethnic cooperation—and believed sincerely in the “united family of Soviet peoples.” He established the Plenum on National Issues in 1989 to address the problem, but it was already too late to stop the Soviet Union from disintegrating. Gorbachev admitted himself that his approach to ethnic policy did not produce positive results, Taubman added.

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.