Democratic Breakdown and the Decline of the Russian Military
Introduction
The fifteen years since the founding of the new, post-Communist Russian
Army have been marked by the unprecedented deterioration of the once-proud
Soviet military. Unprecedented, that is, because there is no similar case
in world history of a dominant armed force so rapidly and so thoroughly
deteriorating without being defeated in battle. As a perceptive 2001
article noted, "Russia's fall from military superpower Number Two to a
country whose army can be neutralized by bands of irregulars fighting with
little more than the weapons on their backs" was one of the most
spectacular elements of the Soviet Union's collapse. The army's decline
had actually begun during the late-Brezhnev era in the early 1980s and
then had gathered momentum in the late 1980s under President Mikhail
Gorbachev. The rule of Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin, however,
was synonymous with a virtual free-fall of the military's effectiveness
and overall standards.
A plethora of articles and books published in Russia and abroad have
depicted the shocking condit ... read full excerpt from Democratic Breakdown and the Decline of the Russian Military ebook
