ABSTRACT

In the mid-1980s, the Soviet army was at the peak of its international prestige. Despite being bogged down in Afghanistan, it was still considered a powerful enough conventional force to be capable of conquering Western Europe in a conventional war with NATO. To be sure, there were many internal problems, such as a growing gap in technological capabilities vis-à-vis the United States, discipline problems, rampant hazing among conscripts, and corruption among the officer corps. But these problems were overshadowed by the sheer size of the military in terms of both manpower and equipment, as well as its approximately 45,000 nuclear warheads (about double the number possessed by the United States at the time). The military capabilities that Russia inherited as the Soviet Union collapsed were seen by all observers as sufficient to ensure that Russia would be a major international force for the foreseeable future. As it turned out, a combination of economic problems and internal instability ensured that Russia rapidly slid into virtual irrelevance in international politics. At the same time, these problems, combined with a changed international environment, ensured that the military would cease to be seen as critical to Russia’s survival and would begin a fairly rapid decline, which has still not been completely reversed twenty years later.