The curious fate of Soviet strength:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

There is a fundamental paradox surrounding the events of 1989-1991. This paradox is that a regime which had some of its truest believers in the fanatics among its opponents collapsed and was revealed to have been a hollow shell and since its collapse has been discovered to have been a hollow shell for at least the decade before it finally disintegrated.

The paradox, however, is this one: until 1989 the USSR was considered to be reaching a peak of power and influence relative to democracy, and it was certainly doing this from a territorial sense. It is now fully understood just how hollow a great deal of the fearmongering about the Soviet war machine of the 1950s and 1960s was. It is less well understood that in the 1970s-1980s the USSR was attempting to build a capability to wage and win a nuclear war and had at least on paper all that it required to do so.

So then we are left with the problem of why it is that all observers outside this system mistook what was in fact a hollow shell of a state that was starting to corrode and disintegrate at long last under a set of contradictions for an unstoppable juggernaut crushing everything in its path.

The question is, why was democracy, that supposedly most confident, most unstoppable, most progress-creating and uplifting of all ideals that raises valleys and flattens mountains, that changes old men into new men by magic slogans and magic words, so intent on viewing its own destruction as inevitable?

The reasons, IMHO, are at least threefold.

First, there is a tendency to creduility and gullibility that while people monomaniacally, even, refuse to credit it is always there. People, as Nietzsche said, believe in the truth of all that is seen to be strongly believed. Whether this is actually what is or whether this strong belief measures up to objective reality is purely academic. If an evil regime claims to have made enormous progress on things, its claims are believed no matter what reality dictates, no matter any prospect that a regime run by evil people may in fact be engaging in bluff and outright lies. If, say, a regime claims it has certain categories of weapons, the claim will be believed just because it is said. Does the regime have them? Often it may have one or two extremely high-priced ones and an inability to make many of them, or enough to do what it actually says it can do.

Second, there is the crude pattern that a dictatorship spends almost invariably a great deal on its military brute force. This illustrates a certain political law I hold to be the actual arbiter of politics and morality both, namely that it invariably goes to them which make the best use of the coercive, blunt, crude aspect of society. That aspect being the parades of giant Freudian objects every May Day, and a great deal of bluff intermixed with reality, and by careful selective editing of it. Humans are a violent, brutish species at heart. Our instincts are to mistake the open avowal of force for superiority in using it. In practice the USSR was anything but good in its employment of force, and that it rose to power in a war reflected more the actual real-world nature of its enemies in both go-rounds than necessarily Soviet strengths, as Soviet weaknesses mattered less than did those of their enemies.

Finally, there is also a misperception that the territorial expanse of a state equals the strength of that state. In reality sheer size of a state is more of a weakness than it is a strength. Boundless expanses can easily and do easily contribute to bureaucratic inefficiency and ossified institutions, as opposed to what one would think. Oftentimes actual territory in such states is primarily empty space, not all by any means inhabited. At a certain level the misperception existed that because the USSR was big, that it and the system it represented was strong. This was never entirely the case so much as all its opponents were even weaker, and that its opponents only gained in "strength" by virtue of that accident of its sudden collapse.


As to why this matters? In this age of a North Korea among the nuclear states and an Iran clearly angling to be one, the cautionary nature of assuming that a totalitarian state's impression of strength is actual strength should be pretty glaringly obvious. We should not assume simply because a regime has enough grapeshot to suppress opposition that this makes it somehow strong or in actual practice a threat. The reality of such claims to power rooted solely in the ability to bring force to bear is that the regimes that use them tend to be simultaneously very weak and very inflexible. We tend to make them into what they're not, and then have only ourselves to blame for underrating our own concepts and systems when they prove not to be what we had made them to be from fear and loathing. The fault lies not with the stars or with machine minds and machine hearts but instead with our own cowardice and our own gullibility.

Comments

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

I took a class on Soviet history about a year before the collapse. Our professor who was, at that time, the kind of person who routinely got phone calls from Washington asking him to come down to help prepare a briefing for the President and Joint Chiefs, told us the following joke that he and his colleagues shared:

"The Soviet economy is often likened to a train. And every now and then, the train stops moving. Well, Comrade Stalin was in charge of the train and it stopped moving. And Comrade Stalin shouted 'Shoot the engineer! Shoot the people up front!' and after a quick round of shootings, some very nervous and less experienced engineers managed to get the train moving.

"Then Comrade Khrushchev was in charge of the train, and the train stopped moving. And Comrade Khrushchev said, 'Let's offer the engineer a....refridgerator.' And after some intense negotiations with the front of the train, the train managed to get moving again.

"Well, Comrade Brezhnev was in charge of the train. And, again, the train stopped moving. So Comrade Brezhnev said, 'Is anyone paying attention? Well, then let's close all the window drapes, sit back and PRETEND the train is moving!'

"Today, of course, Comrade Gorbachev is in charge of the train and the train STILL is not moving. So Comrade Gorbachev, after carefully considering all of his option said, 'The train is not moving? Very well, let's open the drapes, open all the windows so we can all stick our heads out of them and say how much this railroad SUCKS!'"

That, in a nutshell, was Glasnost.

He also noted that he frequently reminded the Joint Chiefs that in the event of Soviet invasion of Western Europe, we'd have to remember that not all of their tank divisions would be racing for the Rhine. After all, if you were a Soviet Commander, would you leave all of Poland BEHIND you?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That professor sounds awesome. XP

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Not sure if sarcastic.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It's not sarcastic at all. He reminds me of my mentor at my school.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Cool -- I'm fairly amazed that I still remember that story so vividly. Not to put it personally, but it was most of your life ago!

[geezer-also.livejournal.com]

Totally OT but it is peculiar some of the things we remember:

I remember my biology teacher in HS who using all the dynamics of life (which I don't remember) had us try to prove fire wasn't alive, used this: "Life is a dynamic, electro-chemical process that maintains a steady state under continuely changing environmental stress".....and that was most of YOUR life ago ;)

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

I agree with you, a lot of dictatorships have a military that is not what they claim it is, whether because they are lying, or because it has hollowed-out from the inside.

Totalitarian states often seem to have an overinflated military presence and an underperformant military. You can see this in a lot of third-world dictatorships and corrupt democracies, an army whose balance sheet is high, but that tends to collapse when people start shooting at it. Often it's because those same forces are either untrained, or trained to fight against unarmed protesters, and fail once the fur starts flying. Since position in the army's officer hierarchy becomes intertwined with position in the state, you also see a lot of people in higher positions because they were good at political instead of military maneuvering. And with all that manpower there idle (after all, most dictatorships don't have wars to fight all the time), there becomes a temptation to turn the army into an unskilled labor pool. Certainly the USSR did this, and it's not uncommon in the rest of the world - or so I hear.

The great failure of totalitarian militaries seems to be in using military force to achieve domestic peace. It's using the wrong tool for the wrong job - because of its nature the military is an inefficient tool to do police work, and spending all its time doing police work tends to blunt the military's efficiency at doing its actual job. The fact that they have to maintain this great reservoir of power that is so inefficiently applied seems to be the downfall of many. And the fact that they equate the equipment balance sheet with actual power seems to lead to a lot of ill-advised spending sprees that do nothing at the end.

(Then again, look at Mali. If your military thinks you aren't spending enough on them, they tend to get all annoyed, so huge military spending is probably mostly a bribe in certain types of more disorganized states.)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I think that the real weakness of totalitarian states' militaries is not even that they underperform relative to their expenses per proportion of the rest of the society, but rather that a totalitarian state is designed at the crudest level as a mishmash of jostling and brawling special interests. This tends to rely more on the appearance of strength than the reality. There was only one real point where the USSR had any advantage at all over its neighbors and this was limited to the military sphere where a command economy actually *can* produce some results.

Totalitarian militaries tend to fail in practice because the proper purpose of an army is to fight and kill, but totalitarian structures tend to punish the kind of initiative/risk-taking that makes this work best. This, however, doesn't explain why democracy was so hell-bent on taking what was primarily the appearance of strength for the reality.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Inexpert aside -- don't totalitarian militaries also suffer from the fact that any popular enough general thinks of himself as the NEXT dictator?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, yes. This tends in practice to lead to shooting most of the competent generals and promoting the ones most intent on working with the dictator to forestall this, however. Totalitarian systems are structured to preserve the interest group in power at the expense of the others. Very seldom does this lead to efficient military performance. The classic modern example is Saddam Hussein and his relationship with his own army, leading him to repeatedly purge it and devote most of his lavish spending to the Republican Guard because he felt he could guarantee its loyalty.

From a military POV this is a redundant waste of resources, from a totalitarian dictator's POV, this is common sense preservation of life stuff.

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

> why was democracy ... so intent on viewing its own destruction as inevitable?

Because talking that fear up served the political interests of various elites within the democracies.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

In practice it really didn't in the long term, it just perpetuated the credibility gap problem.

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

> In practice it really didn't in the long term

If I can put a huge lasso around Democracy's issues, in general, it is the accumulated damage of decisions which were useful in the short term (and thus politically necessary to the agents making them) but detrimental in the long term. It's hard not to draw the analogy between the operating code of the body politic and the genetic idea of "late acting lethals"

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That makes a good amount of sense.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

What I find fascinating about that era is the tension within the US military establishment over conflicting intelligence estimates. The DoD tended to inflate the Soviet threat and the CIA countered that with more moderation. Andrew Cockburn published an exposee (http://books.google.com/books?id=5vjyAAAAMAAJ&q=cockburn+the+threat&dq=cockburn+the+threat&hl=en&sa=X&ei=RbZ9T9veNMSriALeiIC4DQ&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA) on threat assessment in the early '80s that brought out some of the waste involved in the US intelligence establishment.

A former Soviet official saw the futility of waging war with the West given the advances in military technology on display during the Gulf War. There was also a rift within Soviet intelligence that showed up in Afghanistan where the GRU supported one of the communist factions and the KGB supported the other.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

This was always a factor, yes. Things like the Missile/Bomber Gap were a stock in trade of Cold War rhetoric, but there was slim to no truth in it. The irony is that by the time there actually was such a gap, the first credibility gap meant nobody ever believed it.

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

Very nice post!

I tend to look at things through the lens of a naval history buff. One thing I think is sometimes overlooked is that a big part of the Soviet economy's military overreach was the naval buildup of the 1970s and early 80s. By the end of the 80s the Soviet Navy had been built up to very good worldwide blue-water capability that could have seriously challenged NATO (though not, in the end, beaten it).

In the process, it greatly helped contribute to the collapse of the economy. The Navy (unlike, say, the Strategic Rocket Forces, at least half of whose ICBM's probably couldn't have launched anyway, or the Army, which consisted mostly of poorly-trained conscripts with questionably-qualified leaders) could actually have given the West a huge black eye if a real war had happened. But all those excellently-equipped and uber-expensive attack submarines, missile cruisers, ASW hulls, and fleets of anti-ship bombers were pretty much a huge waste of money, materiel, and time. Which is why, twenty years later, the Russian Navy has scrapped, sold, or let fall to rust most of the former Soviet fleet.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Exactly. The Soviets did have a military that for a certain variety of efficiency worked well, but it was the only part of their economy that did, and this only because the sheer quantity of production made by it was suited for the excess and waste of a wartime situation, as opposed to a peacetime one.

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

Someone, I don't recall who, once said that if you stripped out the nuclear weapons and the huge conventional military, the Soviet Union was a third-world country with a monumentally corrupt government and failed economy.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's a fairly accurate description. It's also why systemic reform was in the end impossible as reform would have meant actually breaking up those special interests, which is extremely difficult to do in a Third World state. Ironically the USSR had by its last days developed an urban middle class, but it was its success in building the classical Marxist idea of the classes most attracted to the ideology that created the final conditions of the collapse during Glasnost. Life can have its karmic irony moments.

[terminator44.livejournal.com]

Red Storm Rising showed how the tactical side of the conflict might have gone.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Good context, informative, discursive.

Thank you.
[Tips hat.]

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Can't help but add the relevant tag, then.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this, as I mentioned before I'm ever weary of the actual strength of some of the United State's appointed enemies. The military might is so exaggerated and we buy into it creating this culture of fear.