Condemned to Repetition?: The Rise, Fall, and Reprise of Soviet-Russian Military Interventionism, 1973-1996 (review)

Condemned to Repetition? The Rise, Fall, and Reprise of Soviet-Russian Military Interventionism, 1973-1996. By Andrew Bennett (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1999) 387 pp. $35.00 cloth $17.50 paper.

This is a mixed book. The parts about Soviet-Russian military intervention are quite good. The parts about learning theory and International Relations (ir) theory--well over a third of the text--are not. Bennett insists that "Learning theory does predict outcomes regarding patterns of Soviet and Russian military intervention, if only in a general way" (124). How does it do so? "The predicted outcome is that successful military interventions, or failed noninterventions, should have increased the Soviet and later Russian propensity to intervene, while failed interventions or successful restraint should have had the opposite effect" (124). This proposition will likely strike historians as trivial and general readers as tedious, while failing to convince many international-relations theorists.

Things improve thereafter. The chapters dealing with Soviet intervention in Angola and Afghanistan are excellent accounts based on a wealth of evidence not available until the 1990s, and they are exceptional for giving deserved attention to role of the official ideology in Soviet leaders' thinking. Theory, however, intrudes again. Although Bennett's treatment of Mikhail Gorbachev's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is convincing, his claims about Gorbachev's "learning" are hard to square with the Soviet interventions that he ignores--in Kazakhstan (1986), Georgia (1989), Azerbaijan (1990), and Lithuania (1991). Gorbachev wanted them all to succeed as the last three did in varying degrees--but he also wanted to avoid public blame if they failed. He equivocated, denied responsibility, and blamed others, especially the generals.¹ This strategy undercut his support among the generals and allowed Boris Yeltsin to rally the national separatist movements, eventually destroying Gorbachev politically. In the case of the Baltic republics, Gorbachev would not even consider letting them secede.² Learning theory would seem to make us expect Gorbachev to abandon them, as he did Eastern Europe. Bennett is certainly right that Gorbachev's view of the West was remarkably new. As Anatoly Chernyaev suspected in early 1986, Gorbachev rightly believed that the Soviet Union could disarm unilaterally without fear of attack by nato countries.³ In nationality politics, however, Gorbachev's decisions reflected his basic misunderstandings of the Soviet political system and no learning.

Concerning the intervention in Chechnya, Bennett again may overestimate "learning" while underestimating political factors. For example, Knezys and Sedlickas credibly argue that Yeltsin's fear that Ruslan Khasbulatov (leader of the parliament that Yeltsin disbanded with force in October 1993) could gain a political base in Chechnya actually prompted the failed covert operation in November, leading to open war in December 1994.⁴ Bennett leaves readers convinced that Yeltsin and his aides had "learned" too much to intervene again in Chechnya, but they were planning to do so even as this book was being published. Why does Bennett fail to predict it? Admittedly, he warns that "lessons learned, even those learned at a very high price, can be unlearned" (346). Fair enough, but then does not learning theory merely offer partial post facto explanations rather than allow predictions?

William E. Odom
Yale University

Notes

1. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven, 1998), 244-271.

2. Ibid., 343.

3. Ibid., 93.

4. Stasys Knezys and Romanas Sedlickas, The War in Chechnya (College Station, 1999), 43-58.

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