McNair Paper 34, The Russian Military's Role in Politics, January 1995

One of the most crucial challenges that democratizing states face is that of redefining civil-military relations and transforming the military into a force loyal to the new democratic system. (Note 1) In order to prevent the military from becoming a threat, democratizing governments must re-educate their military professionals and instill in them a sense of respect for democratic institutions and the multi-party system. The goal is to limit the military's role in politics and develop a tradition of an apolitical army.

The problems facing Russia in this regard are multi-fold. It inherited from the USSR an officer corps for which loyalty to both the Soviet Union and the ruling Communist party was a prerequisite to professional advancement. Although civilian control over the military was strong, the top political leadership shared with the military elite a high respect for military power and hence accorded military programs and Armed Forces' needs a high priority. The Soviet Armed Forces were, in effect, the favorite son of the command economy.

The military lost its privileged status with the advent of Gorbachev. The old, familiar bureaucratic decisionmaking process was replaced by semi-democratic institutions far less congenial to military interests. In December 1991, the Soviet Union itself disappeared and with it, the unified army. These changes led to downsizing and reduced funding for today's Russian militaryCdevelopments which have traumatized and angered the once-pampered officer corps.

This paper is an analysis of how the military has reacted to these events. In it, we examine the military's record over the past five years: its words, deeds, and attitudes in response to the political, economic, and social changes that have transformed the region. We have chosen to focus on one particular aspect of these transformations-one that has proven to be especially threatening to the military: the disintegrative trend that eventually overtook the Soviet Union, led to the demise of the unified Soviet Armed Forces, and continues to threaten the integrity of Russia as well. As part of this focus, we assess the military's actions during three critical events: the abortive August 1991 coup, the Belovezh agreement formalizing the demise of the USSR, and the fall 1993 political crisis in Moscow.

There are two major difficulties in this approach. The first is that the military (defined here as uniformed professionals in the Defense Ministry) is by no means a unitary actor; the events described below polarized both the officer corps and the top Defense Ministry leadership, leaving the military (like many other Soviet and later Russian institutions) deeply divided. Conclusions about the military's role must, therefore, be tempered with an awareness of these divisions.

The second difficulty is that of defining what is meant by "participation" in a political event or "intervention" in politics. In this paper, we make a distinction between involvement in political decisionmaking (such as the Defense Ministry's efforts to lobby for retaining a centralized union and single military in the late eighties) and direct participation by military figures in a political event (such as the August 1991 coup).

We also make a distinction between those military participants who actively planned and coordinated events (such as Defense Minister Yazov in the 1991 coup conspiracy) and those who complied with orders. A third distinction is between participation by top military leaders in a political struggle (e.g., the high command acting as power broker in a succession crisis) and the actual use of military forces.

Finally, we make a distinction between deployment of military units (such as the 19 August 1991 order sending thousands of Defense Ministry forces into Moscow) and employment (such as the 4 October assault by Defense Ministry tanks on the old parliament building). We reserve the term military "intervention" for those instances when one or more top military leaders become actively involved in planning or coordinating an illegal overthrow of legitimate political authorities or when military forces are actually employed on one side of a political struggle or to quell civil unrest consequent to a political crisis.

To anticipate an argument that will be laid out at greater length below, our conclusion is that Russia has made only limited progress toward creating an apolitical military and setting up institutional safeguards to prevent the use of coercive force by political leaders intent on gaining or maintaining power. The Russian Armed Forces remain, in essence, the old Soviet Armed ForcesCan institution traumatized by the breakup of the USSR and co-existing uneasily with the new political order.

The military, however, has proven a very unwilling and largely ineffective political player. The high command has functioned as an aggressive, but not very competent, lobby to protect its institutional interests and to promote the integrity of first the Soviet and now the Russian state, often behaving in ways that go far beyond the bounds of acceptable military activity in stable democracies. When it has come to the actual employment of military force, however, the army has intervened only when key elements in the the high command have seen a direct, immediate threat to the stability of the state.