Carving a Peacetime Force from a Mobilization Military: The Overlooked Pillar of Post-Soviet Russian Defense Reforms

Abstract

ABSTRACT The 1990s are widely seen as a period of Russian military degeneration during which there were no meaningful reforms to the Russian Armed Forces. Although certainly Russian military power reached its post-Soviet nadir by the end of that decade because of drastic underfunding and inattentive national leadership, Moscow was also able to make some hard choices that finally began a fundamental shift away from the Soviet military model based on mass mobilization. This effort paid immediate dividends during the second military campaign in Chechnya and laid the foundation for more significant and lasting reforms carried out under President Vladimir Putin.