Russia Profile, Russia
June 1 2007
>From the Red Army to the War on Terror
By Dmitry Babich
Russia Profile
A Brief History of Russian Defense
This year the Russian army turned 15 years old. In May 1992, Russia’s
first democratically elected president, Boris Yeltsin, signed the
decree `On the Establishment of the Armed Forces of the Russian
Federation’ and appointed Pavel Grachev minister of defense, legally
giving Russia a completely new military force, even though it
inherited its equipment and cadres from the Red Army.
Looking at the size of the military budget and the number of active
servicemen, it is possible to discern three distinct periods in this
short history: 1991-1996, defined by a slump in financing and the
first Chechen War; 1996-2000, a time of reform, featuring a
stabilization of budget figures and some success in the second
Chechen campaign; and 2000-2007, an era of increases in the military
budget, significant reforms and a greater attempt to create a
professional army through changes to the conscription policy and a
focus on training.
Lessons of the Soviet Era
The late Soviet period is often cited by Russian military experts as
a kind of golden age, but the sources of funding during this time are
hard to evaluate as the Soviet military budget remained a state
secret. Officially, between 1968 and 1988, the Soviet Union’s annual
defense spending fluctuated between 17 and 20 billion rubles a year.
Because the Soviet ruble was a non-convertible currency, it is nearly
impossible to give a comparative figure in U.S. dollars. In 1989,
before defense spending was slashed, the military budget was 20.2
billion rubles, which, according to the official exchange rate then,
was about $15 billion.
In order to retain strategic parity with the United States, which
averaged annual defense spending of $300 billion, the rubles spent on
defense in the distorted Soviet price system were worth more than
rubles spent on peaceful purposes. Academician Yury Ryzhov estimated
the real figure of Soviet defense spending at 200 billion rubles,
while some of his colleagues from the Soviet Academy of Sciences said
it may actually have reached 250 billion rubles. In a 1990 speech,
Mikhail Gorbachev said that 20 percent of Soviet GDP was spent on
defense, not 2 percent as had been claimed before perestroika.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the solution to many of Russia’s
economic problems seemed very simple: reorient the defense industry
to civilian production. In an article in the magazine Kommunist in
1989, Russia’s future liberal Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar expressed
this sentiment, saying that Russia could repeat the Japanese economic
miracle if it cut its defense spending and converted the military
industry into a civilian one. But these hopes proved to be largely
illusory.
One of the reasons Gaidar’s promises never materialized was the cost
of dismantling the Soviet mili-tary machine, which proved to be very
high. The transition from the Soviet army to the Russian one was not
a transfer in name only. During the early 1990s, the Russian army was
withdrawn from huge chunks of territory, leaving behind barracks,
apartments for the officers’ families, office space and sometimes
large caches of arms and munitions. The newly independent governments
of the former Soviet republics demanded their shares of Soviet
munitions, which were often used in the civil wars that erupted as
part of the Soviet collapse. Wars in Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and
Azerbaijan were fought with Soviet weapons seized from the retreating
Russian army. Meanwhile, Russia also had to pull its troops out of
Germany and Central and Eastern Europe and relocate nuclear weapons
from Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Nuclear missiles and warheads
needed to be stored in new locations and troops needed new housing.
The losses sustained by the army and defense industry between 1991
and 1994 are difficult to estimate because different sources give
vastly varying figures. Extreme inflation during this period also
adds to the confusion. The Russian military-industrial complex
endured greater losses than the armed forces, since the Defense
Ministry channeled most of the funding it did receive into feeding
and housing the troops rather than ordering new weapons.
The crisis reached its peak at the end of 1994 when the start of the
war in Chechnya coincided with a huge cut in defense spending. Vitaly
Shlykov, an independent military historian, estimates Russia’s real
defense budget in 1993 to be $28.7 billion, compared with $40.2
billion in 1994 and $21.1 billion in 1995.
Shlykov’s estimate cannot be accepted as fact, since others in the
military argue that sanctioned spend-ing was actually much smaller,
but certainly the military had insufficient means to fight the war in
Chechnya. Since officially there was no war or even a state of
emergency in Chechnya, no expenses for it were earmarked in the
defense budget for 1995. According to Shlykov’s estimates, in 1996,
de-fense spending fell by an additional 13 percent, to $18.2 billion.
The withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya at the end of 1996
ended this difficult period in the history of the Russian army.
The Difficulties of Reform
By the end of 1996, it became clear that the old Soviet model of
armed forces was outdated and in need of reform. Instead of a
multimillion member standing army with a nuclear arsenal equaling
that of the United States, a leaner, better trained force was needed.
In 1996, a memorandum titled The Policy of Russia’s National Security
was issued by a group of ex-perts headed by Yury Baturin, secretary
of the Council of Defense. The document encouraged Russia to `drop
the principle of military-strategic parity with the United States,
opting instead for the princi-ple of realistic dissuasion.’
This echoed Russia’s military doctrine of 1993, in which the
country’s nuclear force was given the goal of `keeping nuclear
capability at a level that would allow the inflicting of a certain
amount of damage to any aggressor.’ This was a far cry from the
parity with the world’s strongest nuclear power that the Soviet Union
professed in the 1980s. In January 1993, Boris Yeltsin and Bill
Clinton signed the START II treaty, which required both Russia and
the United States to reduce their nuclear arsenals to between
3,000-3,500 warheads each.
Despite resistance from the army’s top brass, the number of standing
soldiers shrank to less than 2 million men. In 1996, then-Defense
Minister Pavel Grachev agreed to cut the army to 1.7 million men, and
Yeltsin set the goal of making the army fully professional by 2000.
The army used this period of relative quiet to stabilize its budget
and concentrate on military reform. Also in 1996, the share of
defense spending in Russia’s GDP dropped to 3.7 percent, which is
about the average amount of defense spending in Western countries. By
2000, the share of military expenses had fallen to 2.64 percent of
GDP and stabilized at this level.
The creation of new combat units and the public reaction against the
raids of Chechen warlords in Dagestan and other southern Russian
regions, allowed the army to conduct a much more successful campaign
in Chechnya in 1999-2000. This success confirmed the concept of a
leaner army, and by 2000 the number of servicemen fell to 1.2
million.
The Revival
In 2004, new Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov declared an end to the
cuts in army personnel.
`No army in the world endured such drastic cuts in such a short
period,’ said Ivanov speaking to a group of foreign journalists in
2004. `The Soviet army was three times larger than the Russian one.
But now the time of discussion is over. It is time to implement
reform instead of talking about it.’
The plan of reform presented by Ivanov’s ministry in 2005 envisioned
a gradual transition to one year of mandatory service by 2006-2007
and a reorientation of defense expenses towards more military
training and acquisition of new weapons from domestic producers. The
ministry, however, stopped short of fulfilling Yeltsin’s promise of a
fully professional army.
`To promise people a fully professional army in the course of one
year is pure demagoguery,’ Ivanov said in 2004. `Switching to a
professional army would require big additional expenses, and we try
to keep defense spending at the level of 2.3-2.6 percent of the GDP,
as most NATO countries do.’
Instead, Ivanov suggested cutting the number of deferrals for
conscripts. Until recently, deferrals allowed 90 percent of Russia’s
young people of conscription age to postpone their service. Students,
fathers and people suffering from a wide range of diseases were
exempt from military service.
`We should end the situation in which only the poor uneducated
youngsters from the countryside go to the army,’ Ivanov said.
`Instead, former soldiers should have privileges when entering
universities. This will be more fair than what we have now, when the
chances for a poor person to enter a prestigious university are
actually nil.’
Between 2005-2006, Russia’s defense spending climbed to 800 billion
rubles ($30.8 billion). This figure, however, does not include the
non-budget funds, particularly the revenues of defense plants that
are reinvested in developing new weapons. For example, the cost of
the recently launched Federal Program for Reforming the Defense
Complex is estimated at 50 billion rubles ($1.92 billion). According
to the estimates of Sergei Ivanov, who recently left his job as
defense minister to become first deputy prime minister, 20 billion
rubles ($780 million) of that amount are supposed to come from the
defense industry.
Shifting Priorities
The war in Yugoslavia in 1999, the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and NATO’s expansion to the territory of the former
Soviet Union have brought new challenges to the idea of Russia’s
national security. After 2001, the greatest dangers facing Russia and
the world seemed to come from radical Islamic groups, and this
perception pushed Vladimir Putin into an alliance with the United
States in the `war on terror.’
Russia unofficially armed and assisted the anti-Taliban Northern
Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001-2002 and made acts of goodwill
towards the United States, abandoning bases in Cuba and Vietnam and
giving a green light to a U.S. military presence in the former Soviet
republics of Central Asia. However, a series of conflicts and
misunderstandings over the past three years, particularly the U.S.
desire to see Ukraine and Georgia join NATO in the near future,
coupled with the war in Iraq, led to increasing strain between Russia
and its Western partners.
Today, no serious politician in Russia can say that the country has
no enemies and thus needs no army, as was the mantra of the radical
reformers of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Even liberal leader Grigory Yavlinsky said: `Our country borders on
the most unstable regions of the world, where violent conflicts are
rife, so we need a strong defense force.’
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