Politics and the Russian Army : Civil-Military Relations, 1689-2000

Rating:
Summary: An interesting thesis
Review: Taylor contends that that since the failed uprising in 1825, the Russian military has become an apolitical organization. Tsar Nicholas I made the Russian miltitary into a apolitical organization by constant drill and using the secret police to spy on suspicious officers. Officers were driven away from politics in the late nineteenth century by concentrating on military reform and external threats such as Germany and Japan. Taylor believes that the Kornilov coup attempt was exageratted by Kerensky for his own political purposes and that most officers sided with the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War not out of ideology but to mantain order in the army. The Russian officer corps kept this apolitical tradtion alive during the thirties when they failed to respond to Stalin's purges but gave their attention to defense issues and the emerging military threats of Germany and Japan. In the 1990s the Russian military was relunctant to get invovled in domestic affairs and only intervened in 1993 because Yeltsin's foes set up a rival defense ministry that threatened the internal stability of the Russian army. The only weaknesses of Taylor's book is that he fails to mention the main reform intiated by Tsar Nicholas I which subordinated the Russian high command to the war ministry as writen about by Frederick Kagan in his book on the military reforms of Tsar Nicholas I. Nor does Taylor write about the role of the Russian military in the expulsion of Poles, Jews, and Germans in the First World War that historians Eric Lohr and Peter Gatrell stated were done on the army's own intiative and were outside of civilian control. Despite these weaknesses Taylor makes a strong case as to why Russia has not experienced a successful military coup in two hundred years.