Russian Soldiers in the Late Twentieth Century

Abstract

When Marshall Yazov initiated his quick and bloodless coup against the Soviet President in December 1991, the world witnessed a radical shift in civil-military relations. The Soviet penetration model constructed under the rubric of Stalin's totalitarian regime in the 1920s had survived over thirty years and helped build the Soviet Union into one of the world's two great superpowers. Yet this penetration model, as conceptualized by Eric Nordlinger, did not collapse as much as it evolved. Nordlinger correctly describes the early form and function of the penetration model but did not take into account changes in Soviet civil-military relations over time. Even today, well into the twenty-first century, the twelve-year old armed forces of the Russian Federation struggle to maintain a corporate identity, mission and resources in a time of both economic and political uncertainty. Russia's military faces a position of inferiority in relation to its former Cold War adversaries as well as internal conflict. Just how the armed forces act and react will likely be based partly on past behavior and experience. The Early Years of the Russian Army and the Penetration ModelThe Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the first to utilize what Eric Nordlinger calls a penetration-type of civil-military relations. In this instance, civilian governors obtain loyalty and obedience by "penetrating" the armed forces with political ideas or even fully developed ideologies via the use of political personnel. 1 Military officers are intensively imbued with the civilian governors' political ideas and political conformity is rewarded. To maintain control over the military officers' education and supervision, extensive use of surveillance is used. In fact, the adoption of a penetration model is generally limited to regimes where there is a single locus of power and cannot be used effectively where there a competing centers of power. 2 Indeed, Nordlinger theoretically conceptualizes a type of political control that is nearly absolute. Meanwhile, he also discussed another type of political control which is far less extreme. This liberal-type of civilian control is explicitly premised upon the differentiation of elites according to their expertise and responsibilities. 3 Civilians are responsible for and skilled in determining domestic and foreign goals while military officers are trained and experienced in the managerial and applied utilization of force and for protecting the state against external attack and the government against domestic threats. The key emphasis is that both civilian and military leaders are autonomous in their own spheres even though the military accepts a distinctly subordinate position in overall decision-making to elected civilian leaders. Nordlinger makes rather broad distinctions between civilian domination of the military and civilian control over the military. Similarly, Huntington makes a grand differentiation between Western societies like the United States and Great Britain which ideally r...