This straitjacket is one of the lingering remnants of the Stalin era. World War II was horribly costly to the Soviet Union. More than twenty million Soviet citizens died, probably more than the combined total of all the other European and American victims of the war. Defense and military power had always been a preoccupation with the Soviets; after the war it became an obsession. To Americans and Western Europeans, the massive peacetime Soviet Army was seen primarily as a means to impose Soviet control over its Eastern European satellites and to intimidate NATO. From the Soviet perspective, size meant security.
A maxim attributed to Lenin sums up the Soviet view of military strength: "Quantity has a quality all its own." The size of the Soviet Army hides the country's insecurity about its capabilities facing European or American adversaries. The Red Army of 1941 was trounced by a German army many times smaller than itself. It took the Soviets four years of savage fighting to defeat the German armed forces. Throughout the war, the German armed forces were smaller than their Soviet adversary. And Soviet victory didn't come until after the British and American forces began tying down large elements of the German armed forces by their bombing campaign and their belated invasion of the European continent. The Red Army was never able to deal with the Wehrmacht on an even footing; it always needed numerically superior forces to prevail. In 1946, they faced a combination of opponents, including the United States, with far greater military mobilization potential than Germany's. Stalin's paranoid fear of hostile conspiracies, combined with deep-rooted Russian sentiment to avoid a repeat of 1941, led to an enormous peacetime army.
To Stalin, and to the generals of Stalin's generation, numbers meant strength. Lacking confidence in their ability to equal or surpass the Western armies in tactical skill and military technology, the Soviet Army embraced numerical superiority. If one Soviet tank wasn't as good as one German tank, well, three Soviet tanks were surely as good as one NATO tank. Eight Soviet howitzers were surely as good as one NATO howitzer. Numerical superiority was the Soviet shield to dissuade NATO action against the USSR, and to calm their own fears.
This viewpoint backfired on the Soviets. To NATO, the massive Soviet numbers meant hostile intent, not defensive cautiousness. In trying to ensure their own security, the Soviets provoked NATO into continuous force modernization. The NATO commanders realized that their governments would never consent to matching the Soviets man for man, tank for tank, so they attempted to exploit NATO's industrial and technological advantages, and Soviet disadvantages. In turn these NATO efforts undermined Soviet confidence in their security and reinforced their conviction of the need to maintain a large and powerful army.
In the early 1960s, Khrushchev tried to break out of this vicious circle. He appreciated that the large armed forces were an excessive drain on the weak Soviet economy. He attempted to cut back on the conventional armed forces, especially the army, and reorient Soviet doctrine by placing more emphasis on the small and potent strategic missile force. But he made crucial mistakes. The Soviet Union in the early 1960s wasn't yet ready to challenge the United States' technological edge in strategic weapons.
Impatience and rash decisions led Khrushchev to try to overcome the technological problems by sly tactics. If sufficient Soviet missiles couldn't threaten the U.S. from Soviet soil, they could from Cuban soil. Khrushchev deployed medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, leading to a prompt American reaction. The result was a humiliating defeat when the U.S. forced the Soviets to remove the missiles from Cuba in the face of military threats. Tb make matters worse, Khrushchev's heavy cuts in the conventional forces alienated the military leadership. Khrushchev was finally ousted from power, his reforms evaporating as Brezhnev coddled the military.
Gorbachev inherits Khrushchev's problems, but also inherits his lessons. The average Soviet citizen is growing weary of nearly sixty years of "skoro budyetEverything will be wonderful tomorrow. Economic progress is not possible when the weak economy is saddled with constant, heavy levels of military expenditures. Gorbachev is the first Soviet leader of the postwar generation. He was too young to have served in World War II. His outlook is shaped less by the insecurity and paranoia of the Stalin years than the promise of the 1960s. The Soviets put the first satellite in space, and it was a Soviet kosmonaut, not an American astronaut, who first orbited the world. The Soviet Union should be able to take pride in something beyond its military might. Seventy years of empty promises have demoralized Soviet society.
Gorbachev has learned Khrushchev's lesson and, so far, has not made any rash moves that would excessively alienate the military. Nor has he accepted their every demand, as was the case in the
Brezhnev years. The Soviet military press often carries articles by military officers complaining about the change in the popular press — the gradual disappearance of the adulation of the army in Soviet newspapers and magazines. There is undoubtedly some discontent over elements of Gorbachev's reforms, but at the same time, many of the more astute officers realize that efforts to improve the economy will ultimately aid the Soviet armed forces. Gorbachev also has forced the retirement of many of the overaged dinosaurs in the army's upper ranks, replacing them with younger leaders like himself who grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s.
The unilateral cuts in the Soviet military announced in December 1988 suggest a reassessment of the defense needs of the USSR. The Soviets appear to be turning to the belief that a "leaner and meaner" armed forces is more cost effective, and more combat effective, than the current force.
It is easy to make the armed forces leaner. The military leadership will undoubtedly keep an eye on the reforms to ensure they get the "meaner" part too. It will be Gorbachev's dilemma to transfer scarce funding from the military to the civilian sector without undermining essential elements of the Soviet armed forces.
The Gorbachev policies may lessen the likelihood of a NATO and Warsaw Pact confrontation in Europe. The Soviet Union in the late 1980s has begun to turn in on itself, shifting focus to internal reforms and away from the superpower posturing of the Brezhnev years. For Gorbachev's economic policies to succeed, Western trade and credits could prove useful, but a slackening in military tensions and competition is essential. These revolutionary changes will not be easy. Reforms in Eastern Europe are likely to lead to more instability in Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, undoubtedly causing anxiety to the military leadership. It will be a difficult balancing act to keep the lid on political ferment without using ham-fisted police repression that will alienate the West. At the same time, relaxation of police repression in the USSR and in its satellite countries, combined with force reductions and budget cuts in the military sector, will undoubtedly be very troubling to the Soviet military leadership. Russian society, whether Tsarist or Soviet, has feared the anarchy that political change may bring, especially those elements of Russian society assigned to the maintenance of state security.
It remains a question whether the Gorbachev reforms are a temporary respite in world tensions, or a harbinger of long-term change in East-West relations. Some military analysts are convinced that Gorbachev's talk of peace and harmony are nothing more than deceitful tactics meant to buy time for the Soviet economy to strengthen itself sufficiently for some future round of military competition. Others feel that it is a genuine attempt to finally calm the animosities and suspicions lingering since the end of World War II.