To the officers of the USSR Armed Forces, the defense of the Soviet Union was, in the words of a Soviet general, a "sacred cause." What was the nature of Soviet civil-military relations, and what have the new militaries inherited from the Soviet experience? In this book Thomas M. Nichols e...

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1. Verfasser:	Nichols, Thomas M. (VerfasserIn)
Format:	Elektronisch E-Book
Sprache:	English
Veröffentlicht:	Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press [2019]
Schriftenreihe:	Cornell Studies in Security Affairs
Schlagworte:	International Studies Security Studies POLITICAL SCIENCE / Security (National & International) Geschichte Militär Staat Sowjetunion
Online-Zugang:	FAW01 FHA01 FKE01 FLA01 UPA01 UBG01 FAB01 FCO01 Volltext
Zusammenfassung:	To the officers of the USSR Armed Forces, the defense of the Soviet Union was, in the words of a Soviet general, a "sacred cause." What was the nature of Soviet civil-military relations, and what have the new militaries inherited from the Soviet experience? In this book Thomas M. Nichols examines the struggles over national security policy between military officers and political leaders in the USSR, and shows that the Soviet civil-military relationship has a long history of conflict rather than cooperation.Nichols disputes the longstanding Wes tern belief in Party-Army amity. He argues that Party control over the Soviet armed forces has been tenuous since Stalin's death; the relationship was inherently unstable and conflictual, growing in intensity because of Gorbachev and his approach to domestic and foreign policy reforms.The source of this instability lay in the creation of the Soviet Armed Forces as a Marxist military, and Nichols maintains that this privileged and highly ideological institution found itself in frequent conflict with a Party that had of necessity to take an increasingly pragmatic approach to international politics. Movement toward a politically isolated and professionalized military, he shows, was continuously subverted by civilian leaders who sought to control military issues through political intrusions into doctrine and strategy.He concludes that the new leaders of the post-Soviet republics have inherited a group of military organizations that continue to resist the abandonment both of their ideological foundations and of their cohesion as a multinational military-a situation he believes may prove to be one of the greatest threats to the emerging post-Soviet democracies
Beschreibung:	Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Feb 2020)
Beschreibung:	1 online resource (304 pages)
ISBN:	9781501737312
DOI:	10.7591/9781501737312