Air University Review, November-December 1986
In an era of rapidly moving events and journalistic sensationalism, the furor roused by the downing of Korean Air Lines (KAL) Flight 007 on 1 September 1983 has largely dissipated. Many questions remain without definitive answers. Perhaps the most obvious is how the Korean airliner wandered so far off course. This question is particularly perplexing when one recalls that the same airline had already violated Soviet airspace in 1978 over the Kola Peninsula—again with disastrous results—and that the region over which Korean Air Lines 007 now had strayed is marked clearly on navigation charts with the warning: "Aircraft infringing upon nonfree flying territory may be fired on without warning." Nonetheless, the Soviet air defense (PVO) authorities' response—all 269 aboard perished—struck non-Soviet observers as grossly brutal.
Some, of course, see this incident—dubbed "the Korean airline massacre" by an angry President Reagan—as fitting well into the pattern of behavior expected from the "empire of evil." For them the PVO's behavior—like the Soviets' invasion of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan—was a typical act of "a dispassionate, pragmatic, and cold-blooded superpower that does not shrink at any action that would serve its political goals," regardless of cost or adverse publicity.' Even so, a number of considerations make this judgement less than compelling.
In particular, the furor over KAL 007 dealt a disastrous blow to Moscow’s "peace offensive" and badly damaged efforts to forestall the deployment of new American missiles in Europe by influencing Western European opinion. Further, the Kremlin’s initial confusion about both the details of the action and the proper response to Western charges suggested that the action did not result from any well-thought-out, cold-blooded decision on the part of political decisionmakers. There were other signs indicating that the Soviet leadership was less than happy with the way their military had handled the unarmed Korean intruder. These included rumors of a shake-up of the Far Eastern PVO command, the admission by Soviet delegates to a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, that the decision had been an error, and in January 1984, a veiled criticism of the procedures that followed on the previous 1 September appeared in the official journal Aviatsiia i Kosmonavtika.2
If many could not accept the extreme view of Soviet wickedness, they found Moscow’s "explanations" and countercharges even less convincing. Having reluctantly admitted downing the airliner, the Soviet authorities at first denounced its intrusion as a deliberate American provocation, and then labeled it as part of an elaborate spy mission. These themes emerged in the statements of such senior Soviet military figures as the Chief of the PVO's Main Staff, the late Colonel General S. F. Romanov, Marshal of Aviation P. Kirsanov and, most notably, the then-Chief of the Armed Forces General Staff Marshal N. V. Ogarkov.3 But despite considerable technical elaboration, the Soviet soldiers' arguments won few converts. Indeed, the very expenditure of so much technical competence in support of an apparent fabrication only further damaged Soviet credibility.
In retrospect, it seems clear that the PVO controllers did believe that they were tracking an American reconnaissance aircraft, and that the downing of Flight 007 resulted from their strict adherence to operational procedures introduced after that 1978 incident. Although the local command undoubtedly kept the PVO's central headquarters in Moscow informed of their activities, it is almost certain that Ogarkov was truthful in ascribing the decision to "stop" the flight to that local authority, presumably the PVO headquarters of the recently reestablished (1978) Far Eastern Command. Apart from the standing procedures, the willingness of the local authorities to act decisively probably was heightened by the unfortunate coincidence of KAL 007's intrusion with a Soviet ICBM test, and the fact that it took place over the strategically sensitive Sea of Okhotsk, the intended wartime sanctuary for the Pacific Fleet’s ballistic missile submarines. As a result, the unwillingness of the Soviets to abandon their version of events in part may have reflected an attempt to protect the PVO's morale and effective "combat readiness."4
To most Western readers, who until recently paid little attention to the problems of an active air defense, this last consideration may seem somewhat unlikely. Yet such a conclusion would ignore the Soviets' frequent and repeated public exhortations that the Armed Forces in general and the Air Defense Troops in particular must be ever ready to repel an aggressor. Writing in 1978, Marshal P. F. Batitskii—then the PVO Commander-in-Chief—boasted that "in peacetime the National Air Defense Troops vigilantly and reliably preserve the security (bezopasnost') of the homeland of October and of the peaceful labor of the Soviet people." He closed by insisting that his service "demonstrates the steady fidelity" to the "sacred duty" allocated the Armed Forces by the Breznev Constitution; that is, the duty "to provide a reliable defense of the socialist Fatherland, and to be in a continuous state of combat readiness that guarantees the immediate repulse of any aggressor."5
Behind these vague exhortations for "combat readiness" lies a mentality that is even less understood by most non-Soviets. It emerges clearly from a story by Ivan Chernykh, which appeared in 1973—the era of growing détente—in the "Biblioteka yunogo patriota,"a series devoted to stories "on the Homeland, on deeds, and on honor." Published by the Ministry of Defense in a printing of 65,000 copies, Chernykh’s book described "our military flyers and their heroic and completely romantic profession." But his was not another tale of the years of the Great Patriotic War (1941-45). Rather, as the publisher's note stressed, it dealt with events of the 1960s. Then the hero in the story, "the young officer Boris Vegin," developed his skills in "the friendly combat family of an aviation regiment." The high point of his career comes when he then tests these skills at "the decisive moment, when a foreign aircraft violates our frontiers" and Vegin "demonstrates in practice his readiness to defend the Homeland."6
Equally unfamiliar to Western readers is the world inhabited by Vegin and presumably by the pilot who downed KAL 007. It is one in which, allegedly,"unidentified reconnaissance aircraft cruise almost daily in the neutral zones over international waters along our frontiers." Equipped with the latest electronic equipment, they "keep our military installations under observation from the frontier." But if they make especially close approaches to the Soviet border, Chernykh’s hero tells the reader, "they are met in the air by our interceptors." On such occasions, the spy plane usually takes evasive action and flies off. And then, he notes "we are forbidden to approach them to a distance in which on-board weapons can operate." The reason, our hero tells us, is that "on one occasion, when an interceptor from a neighboring airdrome approached a spy plane, it fell into the ocean. It was never recovered and the cause of the pilot’s disaster remains unexplained. Possibly the spy plane hit him, perhaps something else happened."7
There is no need to discuss at length the debates between Vegin’s fellows on how to deal with intruders or to recount the story of his own successful destruction of one such spy. However, it should be pointed out that this tale, along with the more theoretical justifications for the need for readiness, highlights another theme of the Soviets’ response to Western charges during the KAL affair. In discussions with Secretary of State George P. Shultz in Madrid on 8 September 1983, Foreign Minister Gromyko also underlined the "sacred duty" of defending the U.S.S.R.'s frontiers. And Ogarkov, when asked if such protection was worth 269 deaths, answered similarly. "Protection of the sacred, inviolable border of our country, and of our political system," the marshal said, "was worth to us many, many millions of lives,"8 Although some dismissed such statements as meaningless rhetoric, this is precisely the language used in the "Law on the Border of the USSR" of 24 November 1982. "The protection of the USSR state border," reads the preamble "is a very important, inalienable part of the defense of the socialist fatherland. The USSR state border is inviolable. Any attempts to violate it are resolutely suppressed." Article 27 gives responsibility for such suppression to the Border Troops and PVO, while Article 36 permits the "use of weapons and combat hardware … against violators of the USSR state border on land and water or in the air . . . when the violation cannot be stopped or the violators detained by other means."9
That these grim words are not mere rhetoric is clear from the fate of KAL 007 and its passengers. However, the motives behind both the law and the act are open to debate. In this regard, much has been said of the Soviet's alleged paranoia. Such an explanation naturally outrages extreme anti-Communists. They reject the idea that the Soviets are particularly suspicions or paranoid. Instead they argue that the Soviet Union is a tyranny, that tyrannies are held together by fear, and that the Soviets shot down the Korean airliner "to make other people afraid of them."10 Proponents of this view insist that such paranoia exists only in the minds of Western liberals who are unwilling to face the reality of the Soviet Union. Such ideological flourishes need not detain us, but we should note that the paranoia theory is not solely the property of liberals. The Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Lawrence Eagleburger, who is hardly known for his lenient views of Soviet misbehavior, has advanced it as well when he said: "There is this massive concern for security, there is massive paranoia, and I think this act was simply an expression of those concerns, that excessive concern for security."11
In arguing that "the character of the Soviet Union" partly explains the KAL incident, Eagleburger was merely reflecting one recent trend in Western strategic thought. A number of scholars have stressed the importance of escaping from ethnocentric constraints in our assessments of other nations. They suggest that different countries have developed different "strategic cultures" to meet unique security problems, and that in dealing with these countries, it is as vital to appreciate their perceptions of their own needs as it is to define our own.12 Therefore, an examination of the Soviets' conception of security should provide a context for better evaluating both the tragic end of Flight 007 and their approaches to other issues. For example, in answering questions about the Geneva arms negotiations, the late Defense Minister D. F. Ustinov insisted that NATO wants "us to agree to a direct weakening of our security and the security of our allies."13 And even if this statement too is dismissed as posturing, it remains clear that serious negotiations will have to consider just what security means to Ustinov and his colleagues.
We should first note that bezopasnost' denotes somewhat more than the English word security. For example, it can also mean "safety," in the sense of "absence of threat"; in a technical sense it translates as "foolproof"; and the phrase v bezopasnosti means "in safety," or "out of harm’s way."14
The Russian word therefore has a sense that perhaps is better expressed in English as "absolute security." It is, of course, virtually impossible for any nation to achieve this state in the international arena, but the Russians have had a particularly difficult time in gaining even minimal levels of "security." Ironically, the same geopolitical factors that created this situation naturally have increased a Soviet thirst for true security, to escape "out of harm’s way." It is this state of affairs that explains the Russians’ oft-cited "paranoia," and unfortunately Russian geography and history have given them a good basis for such feelings.
This view also assumes an essential continuity that bridges 1917 to make the Soviet Union the direct heir of the czarist empire. Many, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, have rejected this notion and insisted that today’s expansionist, despotic Communist state has little if any relationship to imperial Russia.15 In their opinion, the Soviet Union is more Marxist-Leninist than it is Russian. In the security sphere, however, Peter Vigor is quite correct in maintaining that most initiatives and policies will not be adopted unless they please both the "Soviet nationalists" and any "Marxist zealots" who may remain on the Politburo.16 And, in retrospect, it seems inevitable that the Bolsheviks’ initial "zealotry" would have been transformed into a new nationalism with deep roots in Russia's past. After all, the Soviet state that emerged in the early 1920s was merely a truncated version of the empire Nicholas II had led into war in 1914, a fact that Stalin tacitly acknowledged when he adopted the slogan Socialism in One Country. As such, the young Soviet republic also inherited its predecessor’s geographical vulnerabilities, perceptions of security or insecurity, and many of the policies adopted to deal with them.17
My discussion here does not give a full examination of the geopolitical challenge that historically has faced Russian rulers. Suffice to say, they have had to overcome the problems posed by poor communications and the vast expanses of the steppe, and the lack of any easily defensible frontiers. In addition, the military advantages granted to the steppe nomads by the "cavalry revolution" of the seventh century B.C. meant that until the mid-1700s, Russia faced a significant threat from the Pontic Steppe in the form of the Crimean Tatars. Meanwhile the state was constantly threatened from the west by the Poles and Lithuanians, its rivals for control of the steppe frontier, as well as by Teutonic Knights, the Swedes, and others. As a result, Russian history has been one of almost continual conflict, often in conditions of a technological blockade imposed by its more advanced Western neighbors. Thus most Western scholars incline to Richard Hellie’s judgment that the "basic continuous elements of Russian history are the people, the Great Russians, surrounded by real or imagined enemies in a country without suitable natural frontiers and without adequate resources—material and human—for their own defense."18
In this situation, it is hardly surprising to find that often Russia has taken on the aspect of a garrison state. Further, many of its wars not only have involved the majority of Russian subjects, they have been particularly brutal as well and have demanded sacrifices and casualties unknown to most other European states that have managed to survive the vicissitudes of history. This reality most recently was evident in the some 20,000,000 casualties of the Great Patriotic War, 1941-45. More striking still is that in this struggle, the defense of the city of Leningrad alone the cost an estimated 1,650,000 soldiers and civilians, a figure that hardly bears comparison with the 292,100 American military dead of that same period. 19
Those arguing for the defensive nature of Russia's wars and the reality of Russian paranoia quite rightly stress these factors. However, others continue to insist that a "picture of the USSR dominated by anxieties of encirclement ... would appear to be of our own making."20 Many of those accepting this latter conclusion also maintain that Russia’s wars have been mainly offensive, expansionist, or imperialist in nature. Prominent among scholars making this case have been the great Polish historian Oscar Halecki and, more recently, Richard Pipes. Halecki rejected any "claim that Russia’s expansion was nothing but a quest for security." Rather, he saw it as being motivated by its rulers’ age-old belief that they were "destined to rule the world as an universal empire."21 For his part, Pipes dismisses theories based on "collective paranoia," or on some alleged "national" task of completing Russian unification with the caustic reminder that one does not become the world’s largest state simply "by absorbing and repelling invasions." Rather, he points to a "relentless movement outwards" driven by Russia’s scarce resources, economic poverty, and rulers' ambitions.22
Since few every happily accuse their own nation of outright aggression, Russian scholars—be they imperial or Soviet—naturally have inclined toward a more defensive interpretation of their history. Equally significant, apart from Marxist-influenced revolutionaries before 1917, there has been surprisingly little diversity among these civilians or military writers. And since for our purposes, what is important is Russian perceptions of the military past that have shaped their conceptions of security as well as military culture developed to ensure it, a brief review of these views is in order.
With regard to the nature and place of wars in Russia's history, the presentation of S. M. Solov'ev is typical. Writing of the medieval period, he estimated that between 1055 and 1462 his nation suffered 245 "attacks," 200 of which took place between 1240 and 1426; that is, hardly a year passed without an invasion or major raid of some kind.23 Or as another historian of this period put it: "Each year one waited for an attack, spoke of war."24 Taking a longer view, imperial writers maintained that from 1365 to 1893, their nation waged war a total of 305 years, which includes the Time of Troubles (1604-1613) when Muscovy nearly disintegrated.25 If one recalls the intervention in China in 1900, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, the years of World War I, Civil War and "foreign intervention" (1914-21), tire Manchurian-Soviet border incidents of 1929-39, the Finnish-Russian War (1939-40), and the Great Patriotic War (1941-45), the record since then is hardly more inspiring.
In dealing with their conflicts, many imperial writers, particularly those in the military, tended to cast their interpretations in a heroic mold. Even when expansion was admitted beyond the borders of the Great Russian heartland, it was justified in the best traditions of Victorian Europe. The leading military theorist, G.A. Leer, for example, spoke of his nation’s dual "historic" political mission. This consisted of defending the rest of Europe from Asiatic barbarism while simultaneously transmitting European civilization to the less-developed Asiatics, tasks his nation undertook despite the hostility Russia so often encountered from its western neighbors. This mission, in Leer's view, explained why Russia, since the days of Peter the Great, had adopted a defensive stance in the west and an offensive one in the east.26 Further, while the Russians' expansion in the latter direction was justified by their "civilizing" role, even their seemingly offensive struggles in Europe were waged because "Russia's mission is to be liberator of peoples,"27 and especially Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman rule. In this same vein, the Field Service Regulations of 27 April 1912, reminded the czar's troops that "a soldier is a warrior of Christ and the Emperor, and that he therefore must conduct himself as a Christ-loving warrior."28 And while such sentiments were to be expected from nationalists and military men, their echo in a Socialist Revolutionary Party's "people's history," published in 1905, is more astonishing. Yet in spite of its pronounced distaste for princes and czars, this pamphlet chronicles Russia's defensive wars in a manner not unlike the respectable and patriotic Solov’ev.29
Since 1917 many émigré historians, both civilian and military, have continued the tradition of regarding old Russia as essentially a defensive power.30 More surprising is the fact that most Soviet writers have followed suit, both in works aimed at mass audiences and in more scholarly studies. "Over the course of many centuries," wrote one local historian of Russia's north, "the Russian people have maintained the integrity and independence of their homeland in a desperate struggle with foreign invaders."31 Or as a publication of the Ministry of Defense recently put it: "The process of putting the Russian state together went on in difficult circumstances. The popular masses of Rus had to wage constant battle with foreign invaders, and with weapons in hand defend the independence of their native land."32 As for the record since 1917, Defense Minister Ustinov himself updated the Russians' view of their historical record in 1983 with the simple statement:
The Soviet Union has never threatened and does not threaten anyone. By speculating on the "Soviet threat" myth, certain groups in the West are trying to distract people’s attention away from the real military threat which is created by the U.S. administration and a number of its NATO allies.33
While such statements could be discounted as being intended for the general Soviet public, the views of recognized Soviet scholars deserve more serious consideration. Thanks to their Marxist-Leninist ideological training, they cannot remain satisfied with such simplistic expressions of patriotism. In analyzing imperial Russian military policies at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, P. A. Zaionchkovskii is careful to present a mosaic of motives. To this end, he takes "into account absolutism's foreign policy goals, which were not always in their nature purely defensive," and he admits that Russia's preparations for war cannot be explained solely by those of Europe’s other great powers.34 Even so, such admissions come only after he has outlined the mounting armaments programs of his country’s possible opponents, particularly that of Germany. A few years earlier L.G. Beskrovnyi, another eminent Soviet military historian, had attempted to confront more directly any apparent internal contradiction between the Marxist-Leninist view of old armies and a patriotic interpretation of Russia's military heritage. He first agreed with Lenin in seeing such an army of an "exploiting" state as having as its first function the repression of the exploited, and only as its second aim "the defense of this state from outside attacks or its own expansion at the expense of neighboring lands." But when he turns to Russia per se, his tone changes sharply. While he accepts that his nation's forces of necessity reflected its general class structure, he nonetheless maintains that it waged war solely to repulse invaders who threatened Russia's political independence and national existence.35
In some ways Beskrovnyi and other Soviet scholars have brought the tradition of Russia’s "defensive" conflicts to a new high. He, for instance, tells readers that the "peoples of our country always have tried to live in peace with other peoples." That they have often failed to do so, of course, is thanks to the aggression of "foreign conquerors." Like his imperial predecessors, he also maintains that Russia frequently "saved the world [or Europe] from barbarism and enslavement," to which he adds a claim that his country never "entered battle with pretentions to world dominance (gospodstvo)."36 Although
these last statements are intended for a mass, domestic audience, similar claims have appeared in the more narrow studies of other scholars. Indeed, the historian G. A. Nekrasov even denies czarist imperialism when he attacked the continuity thesis of Russian expansionism. "As is well known," he wrote, "a basic position of foreign, reactionary historiography is the false thesis of Russia's age-old 'aggressiveness,' of its economic and political ‘expansionism,' and of a 'continuity' between Soviet foreign policy and czarist Russia’s ‘old expansionist endeavors.’" But he insists that the wars of Peter I, Elizabeth, and Catherine II have been "characterized by most bourgeois historians solely as predatory and aggressive," only because these scholars "do not make the slightest effort to carry through a dialectical analysis of these wars' social-political nature which would reveal their class essence and significance."37 In other words, even Marxism-Leninism can be a tool used to support a view of Russia’s military past that in its essentials differs little from that of Leer.
The persistence of this tradition in the Soviet Union, as well as the wide circulation given it in both the scholarly and popular press, attests to its deep roots in the Russians' national psyche. In addition, that discussion raises other points touching on their perceptions of national security. In spite of Nekrasov's anger, many Western scholars obviously are willing to accept the validity of seeing, at least in part, a large defensive element in Russian and Soviet policy. In this context, Tibor Szamuely once pointed to the difficulties raised by the fact that Russia’s conflicts "do not come within the familiar categories of aggressive and defensive wars, or fall into the snug pigeonholes of just and unjust wars. They can be called neither wars of territorial aggrandizement nor resistance to aggression; neither colonial nor national liberation wars; neither civil nor foreign wars; aimed neither at achieving unification nor at attaining natural frontiers."38 Apart from this, almost all serious students of Russia admit that its history of continuous conflicts has left some mark on its society, and some have even gone so far as to clear Russia, or at least Muscovy, of many charges of "imperialist" aggression.39 In the conditions in which the latter emerged, a "natural reaction to the threats on all sides was to push the enemy farther and farther away" in the search for elusive security.40 Others have seen that state's expansion as being largely the result of a slow, gradual, and spontaneous process of peasant colonization, rather than of official policy.41 With regard to the later Russian "threat" and westward political expansion, one British scholar has argued that it is "evident how very little outright combat with the Western powers had to do with Russia’s territorial gains in the 1700s. Noting that "Catherine’s realm pushed westwards without resistance," he believes that many feared her empire "more for what it might do than for what it did"—a comment not inapplicable to later periods as well. 42
In any case, even if one accepts that Russia's expansion occurred largely through the assimilation and military subjugation of often unstable frontier regions, one can still accept that the frequent invasions launched by others left the Great Russians with deep-seated feelings of suspicion and lack of security. On this basis, for example, a British analyst recently concluded that "insecurity and expansion were not mutually exclusive, but mutually reinforcing."43 Another notes correctly that it "is very obvious, but often forgotten, that Russian fears of the West ... are far older and more deep-seated than are Western fears of Russia. Russians are more conscious of their own weaknesses than we are."44 More often than not, this consciousness (frequently allied to technological backwardness) has been combined with an acute sense of hostile encirclement. In the 1200s, the culprits were the Mongols, Teutonic Knights, and Swedes; in the 1600s, the Poles and Turkish-supported Crimean Tatars; and in the 1920s, the Poles, British, French, and Japanese, who in the late 1930s were replaced by a new coalition of Nazi Germany and Japan. And while the young Soviet state continually worried about a "capitalist encirclement" that sought to strangle the "Socialist Motherland," Stalin as its leader warned that "those who fall behind get beaten. . . . Old Russia’s history is one unbroken record of the beatings she suffered for falling behind, for her backwardness."45
Russia’s almost continuous record of conflict, combined with its "relative weakness and vulnerability," has convinced George Kennan that from the beginning, its rulers have been concerned primarily with the "protection of their own rule within Russia and also the security of the Russian heartland."46 According to Dimitri K. Simes, the same factors explain as well both a "preoccupation with security that seems excessive to most foreigners,"47 and many aspects of military and political cultures developed to gain their aims. With regard to ensuring bezopasnost’ in their sense, Russian rulers naturally would prefer an "absence of threat" all along their far-flung frontiers. For this reason, the Russian and Soviet leaders have assumed "a need to remove from their immediate periphery any opposition that appears to be getting too strong."48 More often than not, however, such a solution is attended by unconscionable risks. The obvious alternative is to have on hand forces that are capable of dealing with all probable foes simultaneously along the state's extensive borders. While this too usually remains the "impossible dream" of Russian defense planners, it still explains their success in obtaining large budgetary allocations. From 1815 to 1850, for example, an average of 37 to 47 percent of the state's annual expenditures went on the military and defense-related items. Between 1862 and 1875, the figure was at 30 percent and although it subsequently fell to just over 20 percent, in 1909-10 it rose again to a whopping 43 percent of both regular and supplementary credits. In this light, the 28 to 32 percent spent by the Soviets (according to the CIA) seems hardly as "unprecedented" as some have claimed.49
In calculating the balance of power, the Soviets, like their czarist forebears, have sought parity with other great or superpowers while simultaneously endeavoring to preserve a number of interrelated regional balances. It is within this context, for example, that we should view the deployment of SS-20s as replacements for the aging SS-4s and SS-5s. While strategic intercontinental ballistic missiles counter the strategic threat, the SS-20 in-
termediate-range ballistic missiles—in Soviet eyes—undoubtedly seemed needed to ensure parity with the nuclear assets of China, France, Britain, and the forward-based theater systems of the United States. The same regional calculations explain why today’s Ground Forces are deployed close to any future Central European or Far Eastern battlegrounds. With an offensive tactical and operational doctrine, they presumably could move at a moment’s notice to meet any threat. While these massive deployments elicited fears in others, they have been traditionally Russian since the 1500s. Then, thanks to distances and poor roads, large Muscovite forces were stationed continually along the southern frontier to block Tatar inroads. In Central Europe, the same factors have led to the deployment of strong field armies along Russia’s western borders since the mid-1700s.50
There is no need here to outline the numerous other continuities that point to a distinctively Russian military culture. Enough has been said to suggest that as heirs to imperial traditions, Soviet defense planners are bound to be haunted by fears of technological inferiority, geographical vulnerability, and the specter of encirclement, fears that may well be fed by their own suspicious intelligence network. 51 Some argue that since 1978-79, these traditional fears or paranoia have been heightened by the Soviets' perception that they may be facing a new quadruple alliance of the United States, NATO, China, and Japan, and by the fact that the situation along their old southern tier—Iran and Afghanistan—was dangerously unstable. In this situation, NATO’s program of tactical nuclear forces modernization and the Reagan administration’s subsequent rhetoric and policies must have seemed especially unsettling to the Kremlin’s leaders. Similarly, the failure to restore stability in Afghanistan must also trouble them. So paradoxically, just when the Soviet Union at last seemed to be growing in economic strength, and achieving military "parity" with its possible opponents, new grounds for insecurity arose to rob these gains of much of their value.52
This analysis is not meant to justify Moscow’s paranoia or Soviet policies. Rather, it argues that such paranoia is real, that it is based on a particular conception of security and history, and that the resulting "military culture" makes certain responses to certain Western policies probable. Some Soviet analysts—including Viktor Girshfeld—may be arguing for a system of "sufficient defense" that would reduce the military burden on the Soviet Union’s lagging economy. But as Girshfeld admits, the Soviet "generals are bound to insist that a certain offensive capacity for counterattack be retained,"53 a capability which undoubtedly would still be threatening to neighbors and permit border "interventions" in the sacred name of security and stability. But even such limitations as he suggests seem unlikely in the near-term. Given their history and military culture and the threat they perceive in the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), we should expect the Soviets to meet new Western programs with continued high, if not increased, military expenditures in an effort to close the technology gap, maintain high levels of improved conventional forces, and preserve the perceived parity of nuclear forces. In this process, efforts to upgrade "combat readiness" and the institution of strict procedures to ensure the inviolability of Soviet frontiers—the very factors that doomed KAL Flight 007—will probably continue. For the short-term, Western policymakers must accept that they cannot "reeducate" their Soviet counterparts in a new "military culture." Even so, they can take greater care to formulate and present their own requirements and policies in such a way as not to increase Moscow's insecurity and paranoia. Otherwise, they only risk further confirming the Soviets in their habit of translating the harsh reality of the Russian past, as they perceive it, into their conception of the present. And if the Soviets' sense of security admittedly depends at a minimum on a corresponding insecurity among its opponents, 54 then the reverse of this axiom is equally true.
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Notes
1. William C. Green and David B. Rivkin, Jr., "Soviet Priorities and KAL Flight 7," Journal of Defense and Diplomacy, October 1983, p. 45. The syndicated columnist Charley Reese put this position even more bluntly in "Liberals Never Seem to Learn," Pensacola Journal, 5 October 1985, p. 6A.
2. On rumors about and analyses of the PVO's performance, see John F. Burns, "Jet Incident Gives Clues about Russian Military," New York Times, 18 September 1983, p. 8, and "The Soviet Military Year in Review 1982-1983," David R. Jones, editor, Soviet Armed Forces Review Annual 7:1982-1983 (Gulf Breeze, Florida 1984), pp. 26-28. For the comments of the delegates in Edinburgh, see Colonel General S. V. Golubev, Air Forces' Deputy Commander-in-Chief for Combat Training, "Soviet Delegate Admits Error in Plane Incident," New York Times, 22 September 1983, p. 1E; see John F. Burns, "Soviet Seems to Fault Pilot Who Downed Jet," New York Times, 8 January 1984, pp. 1, 6.
3. See John F. Burns, "A Soviet General Implies Airliner Could Be Taken For a Spy Plane," New York Times, 5 September 1983, pp. 1, 4; John F. Burns, "Soviet Says Order to Down Jet Came at a Local Level," ibid., 10 September 1983, pp. 1, 4; the transcript of Ogarkov’s statement in ibid., pp. 4-5; Serge Schmemann, "Reaction of Kremlin," ibid., 14 September 1983, p. 4; and P. Kirsanov, "Fakty izoblichaiut Vashington," Pravda, 20 September 1983, p. 4. Recently, some Western analysts have been more sympathetic to Moscow's identification of KAL 007's mission as one of espionage; see David Pearson, "KAL 007: What the U.S. Knew and When We Knew It," The Nation, 18-25 August 1984, pp. 105-24.
4. Richard Halloran, "U.S. General Calls Soviet's Air Defense Inflexible," New York Times, 18 September 1983, p. 7; Burns, "Jet Incident Gives Clues about Russian Military, " p. 8; Jones, op. cit., pp. 26-28; and John F. Burns, "Soviet Army in Limelight," New York Times, 11 September 1983, pp. 1, 7.
5. P. F. Batitskii, Voiska Protivovozdushnoi oborony strany (Moscow, 1977), pp. 62-63.
6. Ivan Chernykh, Idu na perekhvat (Moscow, 1973), end paper.
7. Ibid.
8. Bernard Gwertzman, "Shultz Confronts Gromyko Directly on Plane Incident," New York Times, 9 September 1983, pp. 1,8; John F. Burns, "Soviet Confident Furor Will Pass," ibid., 12 September 1983, p. 4; and the transcript of Ogarkov's comments in ibid., 10 September 1983, pp. 4-5. The Soviet press response is chronicled in Larry Black, "KAL Disaster and the Soviet Press," International Perspectives, January/February 1984, pp. 11 - 14.
9. Published in Izvestiia, 26 November 1982, and in English in John L. Scherer, editor, USSR Facts and Figures Annual 7: 1983 (Gulf Breeze, Florida, 1983), pp. 20-30.
10. Charley Reese in the Pensacola Journal, 5 October 1983, p. 6A. Also Green and Rivkin, pp. 44-46.
11. "State Department Official Cites Soviet 'Massive Paranoia'," Pensacola Journal, 5 September 1985, p. 11A. Also see Leslie H. Gelb, "Outrage at Soviet Comes Easier Than Action," New York Times, 4 September 1984, p. 1E.
12. Most notably Kenneth Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism (New York, 1979). For attempts to define the Russian/Soviet "military culture," see Jack L. Synder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Options, Rand R-2154-AF (Santa Monica, California, September 1977); Robert Legvold, "Strategic Doctrine and SALT: Soviet and American Views," Survival, January-February 1979, pp. 8-13; and David R. Jones, "Russian Tradition and Soviet Military Policy," Current History, May 1983, pp. 197-200, 230-32, and "Russian Military Traditions and the Soviet Military Establishment," in The Soviet Union: What Lies Ahead? Military Political Affairs in the 1980s edited by K. M. Currie and G. Varhall (Washington, 1985), pp. 21-47.
13. "Otvety Ministra oborony SSR Marshala Sovetskogo Soiuze D. F. Ustinova na voprosy korrespondenta TASS," Pravda, 31 July 1983, p. 4.
14. These basic meanings are taken from standard dictionaries such as A. I. Smirnitskii, editor, Russko-Angliiskii slovar, fourth edition (Moscow 1959), p. 52.
15. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "Misconceptions about Russia Are a Threat to America," Foreign Affairs, Spring 1980, pp. 797-98.
16. P. H. Vigor, The Soviet View of Way, Peace and Neutrality (London and Boston, 1975), pp. 131-33. 17. I have outlined this process in "Continuity and Change in the Russian Military Tradition," RUSI Journal, June 1975, pp. 31-32.
18. Richard Hellie, "The Structure of Modern Russian History," Russian History (1977), no. 1, p. 11. For an evaluation of the steppe nomad's power, see William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power, Technology, Armed Force. and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago. 1982). pp. 15-18, 48-61.
19. On casualty figures, See R. E. and T. N. Dupuy, The Encyclopedia of Military History from 3500 B.C. to the Present (New York, 1970), p.1198.
20. Uri Ra'anan, "The USSR and 'Encirclement' Fear: Soviet Logic or Western Legend," Strategic Review, Winter 1980, p. 50.
21. Oscar Halecki, "Imperialism in Slavic and East European History," Slavic and East European Review (1952), pp. 1-13.
22. Richard E. Pipes, "Militarism and the Soviet State," Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fall 1980, p. 2; Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (London, 1974), p. 118.
23. S. M. Solov’ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevnieishikh vremen, 23 books in 15 volumes (Moscow, 1959-66), vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 514-15.
24. N. Khlebnikov, O vliiani obshchestva na organizatsiiu gosudarstva v tsarskii period russkoi istorii (St. Petersburg, Russia, 1869), p. 5.
25. Figures cited in V. I. Shaiditzkii, editor, Na sluzhbe Otechestva (San Francisco, California, 1963), pp. 516-17.
26. G. A. Leer, Opty' kritiko-istoricheskogo issledovaniia zakonov iskusstva vedeniia voiny: Polozhitel’naia strategiia (St.Petersburg, Russia,1869), p. 472.
27. Prince Evgenii Trubetskoi, Smysl'voiny(Moscow, 1914), p. 9.
28. This had appeared earlier in General Dragomirov's famous collections of axioms for soldiers; see his Memento du Soldat (Paris,1889), p. 9, and the associated proverbs on pp. 10 and 14.
29. Razskazy iz russkoi istorii (chast vtoraia), (n.p., 1905), passim, but especially pp. 4-10, 29-34, 112-14.
30. A. A. Kersnovskii, Istoriia russkoi armii, 4 volumes (Belgrade, 1933-39). vol. I, p.3-8 is typical. Both he and Shaiditzkii, pp. 516-17, stress the Orthodox mission of the imperial armed forces. Another émigré author who celebrates the defense of Russia’s sacred borders is Pavel Shaposhnikov, "Okhrana granits Rossiiskikh," Voennnaia byl’, May 1966, pp. 34-38.
31. K. D. Egorov, Za russkii sever—Iz istoriia osvoenniia russkogo severa i bor’ba s inozemnymi agressorami za severnye morskie puti (Murmansk, 1957), p. 7.
32. V. V. Kargalov, Narod-bogatyr (Moscow, 1971), p.3. This
theme pervades V. I. Buganov and A. I. Nazarets, editors, Stranitsy boevogo proshlogo nashei strany (IX-XII vv.), (Moscow, 1972), vol. I; I. Rostunov, "The Struggles of the Peoples of Russia against Foreign Invaders (13th-early 19th century)," Revue Internationale d'Histoire Militaire (Moscow, 1979), no. 44, pp. 248-63: and numerous other Soviet military histories.
33. "Otvety Ministra oborony . . .," p. 4.
34. P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Samoderzhavie i. russkaia armiia na rubezhe XIX-XX stoletti, 1883-1903 (Moscow, 1979). pp. 75-79.
35. L. G. Beskrovnyi, editor, Stranitsy boevogo proshlogo. Ocherki voennoi istorii Rossii (Moscow, 1968), pp. 4-6.
36. Ibid., p. 6.
37. G. A. Nekrasov, "Mezhdunarodnoe priznanie rossiiskogo velikoderzhaviia v XVIII v, "in Foedal’naia Rossiia vo vsemirno-istoricheskom protsesse: Sbornik sttei, posviashchennyi L’vu Vladimirovichu Cherepninyu, edited by V.T. Pashuto et al. (Moscow, 1972), p. 382.
38. Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, edited by Robert Conquest (London, 1974), p. 24.
39. For example, Oswald P. Backuss III, "Was Muscovite Russia Imperialistic?" Slavic and East European Review, VII (1948), no. 3, pp. 197-213.
40. Christopher D. Bellamy, "British Views of Russia: Russian Views of Britain," in Estimating Foreign Military Power, edited by Philip Towle (London. 1982), p. 44.
41. This is the thesis of the great historian V. 0. Kliuchevskii. In his influential Kurs russkoi istorii (Moscow, 1937). vol, 1, p. 20, he stated simply that the "history of Russia is the history of a country colonizing itself." This view is adopted by Pipes in "Militarism," pp. 2-3, and Russian under the Old Regime, pp. 7-8. 115-16, to provide the impulse for Russian expansionism.
42. Christopher Duffy, Russia's Military Way to the West. Origins and Nature of Russian Military Power, 1700-1800 (London, 1981), p. 233.
43. David Holloway, "Military Power and Political Purposes in Soviet Policy," Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fall 1980, pp. 14-15. Also see comments in Derek Leebaert,"The Context of Soviet Military Thinking," in Military Thinking, edited by D. Leebaert (London. 1981), p. 21.
44. Bellamy, p. 42.
45. J. V. Stalin, Problems of Leninism (Peking, 1976), p. 528. For an example of early Soviet fears of encirclement, see L. Ivanov, SSSR i imperialisticheskoe okruzhenie (Moscow, 1928).
46. George F. Kennan, The Cloud of Danger (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977), pp. 175-77. Hellie, pp. 14-15, accepts this view with reservations.
47. Dimitri K. Simes, "Militarism in Soviet Society," International Security, Winter 1981-1982, pp. 125-26.
48. Leebaert, pp. 20-21; Jones, "Soviet Military Year . . .." pp. 21-22.
49. Jones, "RussianTradition," p. 198.
50. Ibid., pp. 199, 230-32; "Soviet Military Year. . .," pp. 19-25, presents this argument at greater length.
51. See comment by Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Jr., the former Inspector General of the CIA, as quoted by Richard F. Starr in Peter Duiganan and Alvin Rabashka, editors, The United States in the 1980s (Stanford, California, 1980), p. 740.
52. Leebaert, p. 20; Helmut Sonnenfeldt, "The Soviet Challenge," in Setting National Priorities: Agenda for the Eighties, J.A. Pechman, editor (Washington, 1980); W.G. Hyland. "The Sino-Soviet Security Conflict: A Search for New Security Strategies." Strategic Review, Fall 1978.
53. Stephen Shenfield, "The USSR: Viktor Girshfeld and the Concept of 'Sufficient Defense'," ADIU Report, January-February 1984, no. 1, p.10.
54. Leebaert, p. 21.
Contributor
David R. Jones (B.A., Dalhousie University; M.A., Duke University; Ph.D., Dalhouse University) is Director of the Russian Micro-project, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He has been a lecturer in history at Memorial University (Newfoundland). Dr. Jones is editor of Soviet Armed Forces Review Annual and Military-Naval Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union. His articles have appeared in Naval War College Review, Soivet Studies, and Military Affairs.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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