State Militarism and Its Legacies: Why Military Reform Has Failed in Russia

Russia's economy and political system have undergone enormous changes since the end of the Soviet era. A burgeoning market system has replaced the Soviet command economy, and open multiparty competition for representation in Russia's political institutions operates in place of the Communist Party that ruled the country exclusively for more than 60 years. In the areas of defense and security, however, radical changes to the organizational and operational system inherited from the Soviet Union have yet to occur. After more than a decade of reform efforts, Russia's armed forces have shrunk to less than two-thirds of their 1992 size of 3.7 million.¹ Russia's military leaders, nevertheless, have been adamant about preserving Soviet-era force structures and strategic plans. Why have Russia's armed forces—nearly alone among the core institutions of the Russian state— resisted efforts to change their structure and character in accordance with institutional arrangements operative in Western liberal democracies?

This question is all the more baffling because Russia's military has been mired in an institutional crisis that predates the 1991 Soviet collapse. Currently, the Russian military is laboring under conditions of acute infrastructure decay and extreme shortages of equipment, a recruitment crisis exacerbated by a dysfunctional conscription system and the exodus of junior officers, a lack of combat-ready forces for deployment to the ongoing conflict in Chechnya, and force structures and strategies that are woefully inadequate to address the country's security threats. As during the Cold War, the military persists in preparing for large-scale war against a formidable enemy (or enemies) while failing to develop its capacity to manage smaller regional conflicts and threats from nonstate actors, even as the conflict in Chechnya enters its eleventh year.

Reform advocates within Russia as well as foreign experts have repeatedly proposed concrete measures to reorganize and modernize Russia's military. Their proposals have emphasized the need for reductions in force size, a gradual decrease in the use of conscripts in favor of volunteer (or "professional") soldiers, the creation of a professional noncommissioned officer (NCO) corps, drastic changes to officer training and education, the restructuring of relations between the ministry of defense and the dozen other "power ministries" that maintain military units, and greater political oversight of military spending.² The principal objective behind these reform proposals has been to transform Russia's military into a smaller, more modern armed force better suited to the realities of the country's economic situation and to the post-Soviet strategic environment.

High-ranking Russian military officials, however, have almost uniformly resisted efforts to bring about fundamental structural and operational changes away from the Soviet model.³ More surprising, Russian government officials have consistently balked at imposing changes on a recalcitrant defense ministry and General Staff, despite rhetoric emphasizing the necessity for reform.⁴ Since 1992 the Kremlin has approved several programs intended to reform aspects of the military system—in 1992-93, 1997, 2001, and 2003.⁵ None, however, have come close to effecting a transformation of the overall force structure and strategic posture of Russia's armed forces.⁶

Most Russian analysts point to four explanations for the failure of military reform in Russia: (1) a lack of consensus among military and political elites regarding the substance of reform, (2) fear among political elites of military intervention in internal political power struggles, (3) a shortage of financial resources, and (4) the ongoing conflict in Chechnya. We conclude that none of these explanations, either individually or in combination, are satisfactory.

We argue instead that military reform efforts in Russia have failed for reasons traceable to the institutional and ideational legacies of military power that began during the reign of Peter the Great (1705-25). Three interrelated aspects of this militarist legacy are particularly important. First, the Russian people and their leaders have long associated the prestige of their state with the...