As to the Russian military command, it seems most unlikely after the
Chechen experience that it will seek or agree to any more military
adventures in the foreseeable future. The evidence--especially the
complete lack of planning--suggests very strongly that it was not the
generals who sought military intervention in Chechnya. Indeed, my
information in August 1994--three months before the invasion--was
that the General Staff, the commanders of the North Caucasus Military
District, and Military Intelligence (GRU) were all advising strongly
against it. This was essentially a politicians' war, if among the
politicians we include Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, for whom
personal political survival has long since become the overriding
concern.

Old Fears and Current Realities

This reiteration of Russian military weaknesses may strike some as
redundant. After all, it has been the stuff of literally tens of
thousands of reports by Western journalists on the ground. Yet as is
so often the case, the message of the news pages has failed to get
through to many of the op-ed writers, who still write as if a Russian
army which has so utterly failed in Chechnya poses a major threat to
Ukraine, the Baltic States, or even Central Europe; or could be made
to do so in a few months or years.

For example, a supposedly "expert" briefing paper compares the
position of the Baltic states today to that of South Korea in
1950--the argument being that if NATO does not give them an explicit
security guarantee, Russia may take this as an invitation to attack,
on the analogy of Dean Acheson's failure explicitly to include Seoul
under the American security umbrella. Now, if pressed, no doubt the
authors of this analysis would qualify their remarks and point out
that there may be other means of pressure short of outright
invasion--which is quite true. Nonetheless, you don't have to be a
deconstructionist literary critic to figure out that the mental image
at the heart of the Korean parallel is that of hundreds of thousands
of infantry pouring across the border, driven by a fanatical ideology
and iron-willed leaders; cut down in their thousands, they continue
to advance, charging with the bayonet, climbing over the bodies of
their fallen comrades.

This is a powerful image, with deep roots in traditional Western
fears of the Russians ("with snow on their boots") and the "East" in
general. It is also grotesquely, fantastically far from the reality
not just of the Russian army today but of any army that could
conceivably be created on the basis of contemporary Russian
society--unless Russia herself were to be invaded. On the basis of
what I've seen over the past few years, I firmly believe that one
Estonian volunteer fighting for his home and his homeland could see
off ten or more unwilling Russian conscripts--and there are tens of
thousands of volunteer militia in the Baltic States.

This is not the eighteenth century, and successful modern armies
cannot be constructed on the lines of Catherine the Great's armies,
of conscript masses driven into battle by fear of their own officers
and NCOs. For one thing, highly educated technical specialists are
far too important; for another, the ordinary soldiers fight not in
large, easily controlled columns, but in small, dispersed groups. In
these circumstances, men lacking a real will to fight will not
advance into serious enemy fire. Why on earth should they?

The failure of many Western analysts to fully acknowledge Russian
military weakness is due partly to a tendency among "military
analysts" (too many of whom have never commanded troops or seen a
battlefield) to add up numbers rather than to look at the human
material and the human realities of combat; and partly to the
currently fashionable emphasis in Western commentaries on the
continuity of themes in Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history.
Even in the hands of real experts, this emphasis is liable to beg as
many questions as it answers. In the hands of non-experts or the
simply bigoted, it becomes an excuse to indulge in shallow
generalizations and to avoid any necessity of living in Russia,
studying the real situation on the ground--or even for that matter
learning the Russian language. While certain ideological patterns may
have continued, Russian society today, especially among Russian
youth, is very different from any that has previously existed on
Russian soil. Above all, it is profoundly unideological. Western
scholars may attach great importance to ideological traditions, but
they are not high among the priorities of most Russian students, as
Taylor Dark made clear in the last issue of The National Interest.

From Hypocrisy to Cynicism

The conviction that their country is a great power and should behave
as such is nonetheless probably eternally rooted in the Russian mind
(as it is to a lesser, and less menacing, degree in that of the
French, for example) and this will intermittently make Russia an
uncomfortable presence. Russia will also do its best to maintain some
form of sphere of influence over its immediate neighbors. The
question is, however, what price would Russians be willing to pay for
the restoration of great power status in the sense of a new
territorial empire--and here the evidence is largely of a deep
unreadiness for personal and national sacrifice, whether in lives or
money. This has been apparent for years now, and can only have been
strengthened by the bloody shambles of Chechnya. The great majority
of Russians are "cheap hawks"; and whatever may be possible in
Central Asia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States--in other words, the
areas that matter most to the West--is not possible on the cheap.

It is important, therefore, not to take what either Russian
politicians or ordinary people say too seriously. Not every American
reader of Soldier of Fortune magazine would have made a good U.S.
Marine on Tarawa; and not all the Russians who roar about how Ukraine
is really part of Russia would be willing to go there to kill and
perhaps die--or send their sons to do so--to back up their claims.

A very representative figure in Russia today is the woman who, after
expressing a range of aggressively chauvinist opinions, admits that
she would do anything to save her son from serving in the army, both
because of the risk from the Chechens and, more importantly, because
the army itself is such a notoriously brutal, brutalizing, and
dangerous institution for its conscripts. An enterprise on the scale
of the restoration of the Soviet Union would require a people with a
steely sense of national solidarity and of commitment to national
goals--and you do not find many such people in Russia today.

The gap between rhetoric and real feelings is greater in Russia than
elsewhere, for obvious reasons. The whole Brezhnev era was one long
education in the meaninglessness of public statements, as made by
everybody from the general secretary to the humblest "citizen." Only
such a past could have produced a figure like Vladimir Zhirinovsky,
for whom public rhetoric is everything--but also exactly nothing.
Even in his own mind, it probably has little connection to reality,
and his ordinary followers vote for him not because of his "program",
but because the noises he makes cheer them up. It is all in the
strictest sense a political circus.

It must also be stressed of course that Zhirinovsky's "party", with
its grotesque greed, hypocrisy, and corruption, could not conceivably
act as a base for restoring Russian economic strength, social morale,
or military might--even if Zhirinovsky himself were really interested
in taking power rather than in making money. Nor could any other
party currently present in Russia provide such a basis. The
Communists are essentially a party of nostalgia, with correspondingly
high support among the elderly, and nostalgia for a past of
security--economic, moral, and physical. With a few exceptions, the
Communists are not a force for marching against the rest of the world
"bis alles in scherben fällt" ("until everything falls to pieces"),
as the Horst Wessel song had it. They don't have the fire in their
bellies to carry out a new grand social and cultural
transformation--and if they tried, the effort would soon collapse.
And because the Russian armed forces share--often in exaggerated
form--all the ills of Russian society, a general political and
ideological transformation is also very unlikely to come from within
the army itself.

To understand this, you have to listen to what Russian youths are
saying in discos, cinemas, and workplaces. What most of them are
definitely not expressing is a desire to go and die for the
Motherland. Today, Russian youth culture is overwhelmingly
non-militarist and indifferent or hostile to the idea of
self-sacrifice and military discipline. The admired figures among
Russian youth today are some version or other of the "New
Russians"--bankers or mafia-type "businessmen", with their luxury
cars, ostentatious lifestyle, and strings of "girlfriends." Poor old
Captain Ivan Ivanovich doing his duty in Grozny simply doesn't get a
look in. These attitudes are not simply the result of the
transformations of the past few years; they were bred through the
last three decades of Soviet life.

Essay Types: Essay