Soviet military manpower policy in the Brezhnev era: Regime goals, social origins and ‘working the system’

Abstract

IT WAS A COMMONPLACE as the 1990s began that service avoidance had become widespread in the Soviet Union in the Gorbachev era.' The burgeoning national self-awareness that had become a central element in the systemic crisis facing the USSR in the Gorbachev era resulted in broad efforts, especially in the now independent Baltic states and Georgia, to avoid military service in what became increasingly characterised as an army of occupation.2 Even before the upsurge in nationality-based resistance to conscription, moreover, there had been a substantial growth in service avoidance, or at least in efforts to avoid service, in the 1980s in the aftermath of the