Collapse of the Soviet Military, The

The Collapse of the Soviet Military, William E. Odom. New Haven, Connecticut and London: Yale University Press, 1998. 480 pp. $45.00 hardcover.

General William E. Odom is widely respected as one of the leading experts on the Soviet military. His book Collapse of the Soviet Military represents a well-thought and admirably researched analysis of the Soviet armed forces. In it he recognizes that the Soviet military reflected the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet society. At the same time, he does an thorough job of explaining why it largely stood on the sidelines during the fateful days of August 1991 when the Soviet state unraveled. Odom's description of the putsch is informative, balanced, and notably willing to state that the evidence is ambiguous as well as offer explanations for why.

The books is organized into sixteen chapters and contains useful tools for students and scholars, such as well-developed maps and charts, a list of abbreviations, a valuable chronology, biographical references, detailed footnotes and an excellent bibliography. A major strength of Odom's analysis is that he understands that the Soviet Union was an empire and "that when the army of an empire can no longer recruit effectively, the regime itself is in danger" (272). That situation existed as much in 1917 as it did more than seventy years later.

Furthermore, Odom clearly makes the point that the Soviet military power couldn't "be understood apart from Soviet political power." This had several key elements: (a) the role of official ideology was critically important for the military's own justification and claims on resources; (b) the military's role in the command economy was often not appreciated in the West (due to methodological obstacles, it is hard to determine with accuracy the size of Soviet defense spending-there are reasonable arguments that it was anywhere in the range of 20-40 percent of Soviet GDP; [235-366, 429, n.1]), (c) the military was an integral part of the Communist Party; and (d) the Soviet military's approach to nuclear weapons and arms control was frequently misunderstood in the West (389-90).

In writing about Mikhail Gorbachev, Odom raises a critical question: "How could a man who could rise to become general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union be so oblivious to the requisites for the system's stability?" Odom observes that Gorbachev "obviously failed to grasp the force of nationalism in several of the republics. That he never held a party leadership position in a non-Russian Republic has been widely noted to explain this blind spot. That he never served in uniform has received less attention." He also had less experience with the Soviet military and contact with senior officers than his predecessors (397).

If one has to identify a gnawing weakness in this book, it is a lack of "self criticism" on the part of the U.S. military and intelligence establishment. Although Odom raises the question whether the Soviet military was a "paper tiger" and insightfully describes the reasons for its rapid demise (principally, "corruption in the senior officer ranks, brutality in the barracks, and disaffection in the junior officer ranks"), he does not go the next step to examine whether the United States and its NATO allies spent unnecessary billions of dollars for defense as a result either of exaggeration of the threat or of the political dynamics of defense spending. Rather he states that "it is simply illogical to infer from the disintegration of the Soviet military in 1989-91 that it had little or no capacity to wage effective war in Central Europe" (291). On this point, I am less convinced. With the large number of nuclear power plants spread throughout the Soviet homeland, the United States had the option of producing scores of Chernobyl-type releases of radiation, which would have made large portions of the USSR uninhabitable. If one accepts that view, the exercise of political control over its Warsaw Pact "allies" seemed to be the Soviet military's primary mission.

In 1980, the development of computer technology in the West (principally, the United States) had a revolutionary impact on the East/West balance of power. The economies of the United States and the other NATO nations were able to integrate computers into production and management in an extraordinarily successful manner. This unleashed a level of productivity that allowed for high levels of defense spending, without placing a huge drag on the economy. At the same time, advances in command, control, communications, and intelligence meant that the Soviet military's advantage in the number of its troops, tanks, and so forth was less significant. The Soviet Union faced a major dilemma: undertake major economic and political reforms or face a less-favorable "correlation of forces." Such reforms, however, would inevitably release nationalist forces not merely in Eastern Europe, but within the Soviet Union as well. Once such forces were released, the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact proved irreversible. While programs such as the Strategic Defense Initiative are sometimes credited with forcing the Soviet Union into an arms race (170), that it could neither afford nor win, the Soviet leadership's policies in this area are better understood as symptoms rather than causes of this problem.