Political Science Quarterly
Volume 114 No. 2 (Summer 1999)

 

The Collapse of the Soviet Military
By William E. Odom. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998
Reviewed by Kimberly Marten Zisk

 

William Odom has written a definitive history of the final years of the Soviet military organization. Synthesizing a variety of sources, ranging from the recently published memoirs of the involved actors to his own extensive interviews with officers, Odom paints a detailed picture of the political, economic, and ideological battles that surrounded defense affairs during the years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership.

Odom shows how Gorbachev’s original push for a restructuring of the Soviet military budget, when combined with the tactic of glasnost (publicity) in order to justify the need for change, led inexorably to an expansion of political participation in the area of defense affairs. The plethora of new actors voicing opinions in this formerly secret policy realm in turn generated a fog of contradictory rhetoric and crosscutting political pressures for the command to sort through, as senior officers struggled to maintain control over the situation and to discover exactly whom to cultivate in order to ensure the safety of their careers. The result, according to Odom, was a loss of clear direction. What began as an exercise in strong leadership by a single individual, Gorbachev, ended in disarray and ruin as political expediency overtook sound strategic planning.

While the basic outlines of this story are well known, Odom fills in a wealth of encyclopedic detail that will be of use to specialists as much as it is to the general reader. His discussion of the use of military troops for domestic purposes against nationalist protesters throughout the Soviet republics in the Gorbachev era is particularly well done, as he painstakingly demonstrates how new factors changed the surrounding political environment, and thus the effects of these actions, as time went on. Some of the most interesting and novel pieces of Odom’s history are the brief summaries of what he learned from his interviews with individual officers. For example, former Defense Minister Yevgenii Shaposhnikov tells Odom how his own sense of identification with Communist party ideals declined as his career ascended and argues that officers from different service branches were likely to have varying relations to Communist ideology.

Odom uses sources well and is careful in the footnotes to specify the likely biases of individual officers whose stories he reports. His discussion of the August 1991 putsch is especially notable for its objectivity. He examines all of the available interpretations about who was responsible and what their motives may have been, and comes to the conclusion that the putsch resembled the Kornilov affair of the revolutionary era of 1917: some conservative military leaders took political action believing they did so in the name of a leader (in the latter case, Gorbachev) who turned out not to support their goals.

Throughout, Odom’s analysis is consistent and for the most part convincing, as he demonstrates how central the military organization was to the Soviet state’s definition of itself. The only argument here that is less incontrovertibly supported by the evidence is Odom’s claim that the underlying ethic of both state and party was geared toward “overthrowing the bourgeois international order, not merely to ensure the security of the Soviet state within that order” (p. 390). The debate between those who see the developed Soviet state as revolutionary and those who see it as defensive continues to this day, and some of the best work emerging from an examination of the archives concludes that both motives coexisted uncomfortably within the Soviet mindset. This book does not fundamentally challenge that newly emerging consensus. Both the clarity and comprehensiveness of Odom’s research and analysis make this book an outstanding reference source, and it is recommended for both novices and experts interested in why the cold war ended as it did.