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The Collapse of the Soviet Military
In this important book, a distinguished United States Army officer and scholar traces the rise and fall of the Soviet military, arguing that it had a far greater impact on Soviet politics and economic development than was perceived in the West. General Odom asserts that Gorbachev saw that dramatically shrinking the military and the military-industrial sector of the economy was essential for fully implementing perestroika and that his efforts to do this led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
523 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
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About the author
William E. Odom
15 books7 followersWilliam E. Odom was a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a professor (adjunct) at Yale University, and the author of The Collapse of the Soviet Military. General Odom’s former positions include director of the National Security Agency and assistant chief of staff for intelligence in the U.S. Army.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 5, 2012
William Odom provides a well thought out analysis of why the Soviet Military dissolved during the end of the Soviet Union and what precipitated the destruction of one of the largest military forces in the world. Odom starts by analyzing Soviet military structure from command and control models to the force divisions and how they were allocated. He includes nuclear related assets and talks about the wholesale corruption occurring in the Soviet Military industrial complex. The main factors cited for this quick fall are the rise of Gorbachev and the attempted 1991 coup which showed a divided military and a diametrically opposed army to the will of the people in Russia. This book is a lucid, concise and well delivered survey of the fall of the Soviet military forces. For those looking for a summary with lots of detail you cannot go wrong here.
November 16, 2017
This is probably the most thoughtful book ever written by a US Army general. General Odom was that rare thing: a soldier who while wearing the uniform did not just earn advanced degrees, but also became a formidable scholar. He taught on Sosh, served at the NSC and as DIRNSA, and smuggled Alexander Solzhenitsyn's private papers out of Russia under the nose of the KGB.
My key takeaway was that the Soviet Union was far mightier than we realized. So what caused the collapse of its armed forces? Odom says the "simple answer is that Gorbachev made it collapse" (p. 392) but that the collapse was also inextricable from perestroika, glasnost, the general collapse of the Soviet economy, nationalist separatism, and intra-Party political squabbles.
Odom also provides the best short explanation of how Marxist materialism accounts for the non-materialist nature of war I have yet encountered.
(Started in Korea, then finally finished at Meade.)
My key takeaway was that the Soviet Union was far mightier than we realized. So what caused the collapse of its armed forces? Odom says the "simple answer is that Gorbachev made it collapse" (p. 392) but that the collapse was also inextricable from perestroika, glasnost, the general collapse of the Soviet economy, nationalist separatism, and intra-Party political squabbles.
Odom also provides the best short explanation of how Marxist materialism accounts for the non-materialist nature of war I have yet encountered.
(Started in Korea, then finally finished at Meade.)
March 28, 2015
I read this book when it first came out for professional purposes. I just read it again. Speaking both professionally and as a reader, it is a well-written, thoughtful, and thorough analysis of the last stage of the Cold War. This is a must-read for anyone interested in what happened then and why, how much of the current narrative is distorted, and how the Soviets actually thought and behaved.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
October 26, 2025
”’How the Soviet military collapsed needs no further explanation…but “why” is another matter. The simple answer is that Gorbachev made it collapse. He undermined it with his policies, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unwittingly.”
The Collapse of the Soviet Military (1998) is an authoritative and scholarly investigation into the forces behind the disintegration of the Soviet Armed Forces in the years preceding the fall of the Soviet Union. In this work, the late General William E. Odom—an eminent scholar of Soviet international relations and former Director of the National Security Agency during the 1980s—draws upon interviews with former Soviet officers, party leaders, and government officials to reveal how Soviet military power was inextricably bound to the political and economic conditions that ultimately hastened its demise. Odom also examines how Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization reforms, his detachment from the ideological motivations of the Soviet military, and his poor grasp of the organizational changes required to empower the presidency transformed the once-formidable Soviet military into a house of cards.
General Odom begins by exploring the ideological foundations of the Soviet Union’s Marxist orientation, including its commitment to “international class struggle” and the fusion of military priorities with the state-command economy. This “permanent war economy,” orchestrated by the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff, functioned as both an economic and ideological engine of the Soviet state. Gorbachev’s “new thinking,” which substituted humanitarian concerns, “peaceful coexistence,” and disarmament for class struggle and mobilization, was, as Odom argues, fundamentally at odds with the Soviet military’s theory of war. It invited defensiveness and criticism among the military brass, undermining its chances of successful implementation.
Gorbachev’s program of perestroika also demanded political reform to ensure its viability. Yet these reforms weakened the Communist Party’s control over the armed forces, transferring authority to the parliament and executive branch. By subjecting military reform to legislation and exposing its operations to public scrutiny through glasnost, Gorbachev inadvertently produced paralysis and indecision. Odom offers no defense of Gorbachev’s political judgment, writing that the Soviet leader had “no deep convictions” and “no deep understanding of all the organizational changes necessary to give the presidency the capacity to govern.” His vacillation fractured military unity and eroded its public standing. When Boris Yeltsin emerged as a rival reformer backed by liberal democrats, Gorbachev’s support among the reform-minded intelligentsia collapsed.
Odom concludes that by weakening the military through force reductions and by provoking backlash across the Soviet republics, Gorbachev precipitated the military’s—and ultimately the state’s—collapse. With his “fatally flawed understanding of the Soviet system” and persistent political missteps, Gorbachev undermined his own authority and destroyed the very system he sought to reform. By overplaying his hand, eroding both the ideological foundations of the Soviet military and the influence of the Communist Party, he dismantled the “stabilizing interactions” that had long sustained the Soviet Union. By the early 1990s, centrifugal forces of dissolution overwhelmed the remnants of central authority, leaving Gorbachev powerless to reverse the disintegration.
General Odom’s The Collapse of the Soviet Military stands as the definitive study of this process, offering an incisive account of how the unraveling of the Soviet Union’s stabilizing mechanisms—political, ideological, and institutional—accelerated its final collapse.
The Collapse of the Soviet Military (1998) is an authoritative and scholarly investigation into the forces behind the disintegration of the Soviet Armed Forces in the years preceding the fall of the Soviet Union. In this work, the late General William E. Odom—an eminent scholar of Soviet international relations and former Director of the National Security Agency during the 1980s—draws upon interviews with former Soviet officers, party leaders, and government officials to reveal how Soviet military power was inextricably bound to the political and economic conditions that ultimately hastened its demise. Odom also examines how Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization reforms, his detachment from the ideological motivations of the Soviet military, and his poor grasp of the organizational changes required to empower the presidency transformed the once-formidable Soviet military into a house of cards.
General Odom begins by exploring the ideological foundations of the Soviet Union’s Marxist orientation, including its commitment to “international class struggle” and the fusion of military priorities with the state-command economy. This “permanent war economy,” orchestrated by the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff, functioned as both an economic and ideological engine of the Soviet state. Gorbachev’s “new thinking,” which substituted humanitarian concerns, “peaceful coexistence,” and disarmament for class struggle and mobilization, was, as Odom argues, fundamentally at odds with the Soviet military’s theory of war. It invited defensiveness and criticism among the military brass, undermining its chances of successful implementation.
Gorbachev’s program of perestroika also demanded political reform to ensure its viability. Yet these reforms weakened the Communist Party’s control over the armed forces, transferring authority to the parliament and executive branch. By subjecting military reform to legislation and exposing its operations to public scrutiny through glasnost, Gorbachev inadvertently produced paralysis and indecision. Odom offers no defense of Gorbachev’s political judgment, writing that the Soviet leader had “no deep convictions” and “no deep understanding of all the organizational changes necessary to give the presidency the capacity to govern.” His vacillation fractured military unity and eroded its public standing. When Boris Yeltsin emerged as a rival reformer backed by liberal democrats, Gorbachev’s support among the reform-minded intelligentsia collapsed.
Odom concludes that by weakening the military through force reductions and by provoking backlash across the Soviet republics, Gorbachev precipitated the military’s—and ultimately the state’s—collapse. With his “fatally flawed understanding of the Soviet system” and persistent political missteps, Gorbachev undermined his own authority and destroyed the very system he sought to reform. By overplaying his hand, eroding both the ideological foundations of the Soviet military and the influence of the Communist Party, he dismantled the “stabilizing interactions” that had long sustained the Soviet Union. By the early 1990s, centrifugal forces of dissolution overwhelmed the remnants of central authority, leaving Gorbachev powerless to reverse the disintegration.
General Odom’s The Collapse of the Soviet Military stands as the definitive study of this process, offering an incisive account of how the unraveling of the Soviet Union’s stabilizing mechanisms—political, ideological, and institutional—accelerated its final collapse.
February 27, 2023
This book was satisfying to read as military theory. It is arranged as follows with a conclusion summarizing the main points:
Chapter 1 is Odom’s view of Marxism-Leninism and it's relationship to Soviet military theory, and chapters 2-4 summarize the history of the Soviet military with respect to the party, state, and economy of the USSR. Chapter 5 digresses from the purpose of the book; it is a fascinating view of Soviet nuclear strategy, but the details are not essential to the story of the collapse of the Soviet military.
Chapters 6-9 are the history of Gorbachev’s reforms, while chapters 10-12 describe the party/military and the military/industrial barriers to Gorbachev’s reforms as well as Gorbachev’s missteps in quelling national uprisings. Chapter 13 describes the process of military collapse through officers selling materiel and arms, nationalist takeovers of supply depots, and mass desertion.
Chapter 14 is an indispensable narrative of the August 1991 crisis, and could stand separate from this larger work. The denouement in chapter 15 is the military aftermath, including negotiations like the 1997 20-year Russian lease on Sevastopol.
The conclusion in chapter 16 summarizes these ideas: The United States made a mistake in seeing USSR in terms of Western European socialist democracies. Soviet socialism retained a revolutionary-military formulation which dictated its approach to nuclear warfare. According to Odom, deterrence didn’t fit with the ideological foundation of Marxism-Leninism, and the Soviet military believed that nuclear war, although extremely destructive, was ultimately winnable. Furthermore, the West misunderstood that the Soviet military was integral to the party, not separate or in conflict with it. Odom also states in the conclusion that the Soviet military was not a paper tiger; however, this assessment is not covered well in the book. Odom’s final point is that Gorbachev made the USSR collapse. In light of these conclusions, Odom leaves questions unanswered regarding the different paths China and Vietnam have followed.
In addition to the topics above, the book benefits from a density of other intriguing subjects such as the details of the Soviet system of conscription and military deferments, dedovshchina culture and ethnic strife within the Soviet military, ratios of Soviet to NATO materiel versus training, the 1990 Lopatin reform recommendations, and the interplay of reform and reactionary veterans’, mothers’, and other military-social organizations.
The book’s maps and diagrams are inscrutable or of limited use, but like a quality edition of a Russian novel, the biographical list is very helpful. The list of abbreviations and the table of chronology are similarly useful. Most of all, the book is fascinating, and forms a foundation for analyzing the second half of the 20th century and understanding the current war in Ukraine.
Chapter 1 is Odom’s view of Marxism-Leninism and it's relationship to Soviet military theory, and chapters 2-4 summarize the history of the Soviet military with respect to the party, state, and economy of the USSR. Chapter 5 digresses from the purpose of the book; it is a fascinating view of Soviet nuclear strategy, but the details are not essential to the story of the collapse of the Soviet military.
Chapters 6-9 are the history of Gorbachev’s reforms, while chapters 10-12 describe the party/military and the military/industrial barriers to Gorbachev’s reforms as well as Gorbachev’s missteps in quelling national uprisings. Chapter 13 describes the process of military collapse through officers selling materiel and arms, nationalist takeovers of supply depots, and mass desertion.
Chapter 14 is an indispensable narrative of the August 1991 crisis, and could stand separate from this larger work. The denouement in chapter 15 is the military aftermath, including negotiations like the 1997 20-year Russian lease on Sevastopol.
The conclusion in chapter 16 summarizes these ideas: The United States made a mistake in seeing USSR in terms of Western European socialist democracies. Soviet socialism retained a revolutionary-military formulation which dictated its approach to nuclear warfare. According to Odom, deterrence didn’t fit with the ideological foundation of Marxism-Leninism, and the Soviet military believed that nuclear war, although extremely destructive, was ultimately winnable. Furthermore, the West misunderstood that the Soviet military was integral to the party, not separate or in conflict with it. Odom also states in the conclusion that the Soviet military was not a paper tiger; however, this assessment is not covered well in the book. Odom’s final point is that Gorbachev made the USSR collapse. In light of these conclusions, Odom leaves questions unanswered regarding the different paths China and Vietnam have followed.
In addition to the topics above, the book benefits from a density of other intriguing subjects such as the details of the Soviet system of conscription and military deferments, dedovshchina culture and ethnic strife within the Soviet military, ratios of Soviet to NATO materiel versus training, the 1990 Lopatin reform recommendations, and the interplay of reform and reactionary veterans’, mothers’, and other military-social organizations.
The book’s maps and diagrams are inscrutable or of limited use, but like a quality edition of a Russian novel, the biographical list is very helpful. The list of abbreviations and the table of chronology are similarly useful. Most of all, the book is fascinating, and forms a foundation for analyzing the second half of the 20th century and understanding the current war in Ukraine.
July 16, 2025
“The Collapse of the Soviet Military” is a comprehensive book covering Soviet military culture, organization, and doctrine before providing a detailed account of the fall of the Soviet Union more broadly under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Odom uses his military background to provide the reader with a detailed overview of Soviet military organization, force structure, and combat doctrine, aided by a series of diagrams and charts to better illustrate the situation Gorbachev found himself in when he came to power. He also stresses the inseparable link between the Soviet Union’s Marxist-Leninist ideology and the military-industrial complex needed to maintain the “war economy” associated with international class struggle. After establishing the industrial and manpower basis of the Soviet military, Odom explains the dual forces of perestroika and glasnost and how they undermined the ideological and structural basis of the Soviet military and Soviet society at large. These initiatives from within, when combined with the consequences of the disastrous failed invasion of Afghanistan, sapped the Soviet military’s discipline, public reputation, and manpower while killing any attempts at actual reform. He also covers the Soviet military’s failure at justifying its own existence in the face of emerging nationalist movements and the renunciation of international class struggle by Gorbachev and his government, as the entire basis of Soviet society was the idea of international revolution. With these heightened tensions between the party, military, and the economy, Odom concludes with an extremely detailed account of the August 1991 coup, its subsequent reorganization of post-Soviet forces, and his overarching opinion as to why the Soviet Union fell. In conclusion, this book is a fantastic resource for Soviet military doctrine and organization while providing a compelling and detailed argument for why the Soviet Union fell more broadly.
This book does suffer from a bit of mission creep as it goes from explaining the collapse of the Soviet military to a detailed account of 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union more broadly, but I'm not mad at that, considering how well-researched and well-written it ends up being. It can be a chore to get through, but I learned a lot and felt that it treated the subject with respect and without an ideology/narrative in mind.
This book does suffer from a bit of mission creep as it goes from explaining the collapse of the Soviet military to a detailed account of 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union more broadly, but I'm not mad at that, considering how well-researched and well-written it ends up being. It can be a chore to get through, but I learned a lot and felt that it treated the subject with respect and without an ideology/narrative in mind.
November 26, 2024
This is a very well-researched book, though it is probably out of date with the release of later source materials (it's from 1998). Nonetheless, the author had access to participants in the process that later authors will not have and that gives this book great value.
It is interesting to read this today, 2024, at a time when Putin (whose name does not appear in this book from 1998) appears to be using the Russian Military for his own ends.
It is interesting to read this today, 2024, at a time when Putin (whose name does not appear in this book from 1998) appears to be using the Russian Military for his own ends.
November 19, 2018
General William Odom's instructive analysis titled "The Collapse of the Soviet Military" is perhaps the best book I've read on the topic of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The conclusions reached by Odom in this book are relevant to the dangers faced by society in the United States and the West in general. According to General Odom, the Soviet Union collapsed because Mikhail Gorbachev (General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) did not understand that the Soviet State, close to 9 million square miles in size, comprised of 15 republics, hundreds of linguistic and ethnic groups, was held together by the Soviet military. The Soviet military acted as the unifying symbol that brought the various ethno-linguistic groups together under one flag while at the same time enforcing the policies of the Communist Party.
Upon coming to power, Gorbachev feared that the military would oppose his reforms. He therefore set about weakening the structure and integrity of the military as a means of weakening opposition to his reforms. The danger here was that by weakening the military, Gorbachev was at the same time weakening the Communist Party and the entire Soviet System. Once the military was too weak to decisively prevent the disintegration of the system, it was inevitable that the entire edifice would collapse.
The lesson here is an important one for those elements in the American media and academia that constantly attack the unifying symbols of American society. Whether these symbols are patriotism, the national anthem, the American flag, or American history as embodied by the founding fathers (Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Franklin). These are all symbols (despite any inherent flaws these symbols may contain) that unify a nation of 320 million people comprised of numerous ethno-linguistic groups, religions, socio-economic background, and histories. The modern United States is comprised of far more varied elements than Soviet Union ever was. Hence why it is even more important for such an entity to have unifying symbols to bring the various parts together.
Yet we are increasingly witnessing incessant attacks on unifying national symbols in the United States (and Western society in general) using the argument that such symbols are an insult to multi-culturalism and individualism. It is only inevitable that a society as large as the US, made up of such diverse group, will collapse into tribalism and civil war without unifying symbols (such as a flag) and a unifying history (despite inherent flaws of historical figures) . The scary part is that America's collapse will be much more violent and drawn out than what happened to the Soviet Union in the early 1990's.
Upon coming to power, Gorbachev feared that the military would oppose his reforms. He therefore set about weakening the structure and integrity of the military as a means of weakening opposition to his reforms. The danger here was that by weakening the military, Gorbachev was at the same time weakening the Communist Party and the entire Soviet System. Once the military was too weak to decisively prevent the disintegration of the system, it was inevitable that the entire edifice would collapse.
The lesson here is an important one for those elements in the American media and academia that constantly attack the unifying symbols of American society. Whether these symbols are patriotism, the national anthem, the American flag, or American history as embodied by the founding fathers (Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Franklin). These are all symbols (despite any inherent flaws these symbols may contain) that unify a nation of 320 million people comprised of numerous ethno-linguistic groups, religions, socio-economic background, and histories. The modern United States is comprised of far more varied elements than Soviet Union ever was. Hence why it is even more important for such an entity to have unifying symbols to bring the various parts together.
Yet we are increasingly witnessing incessant attacks on unifying national symbols in the United States (and Western society in general) using the argument that such symbols are an insult to multi-culturalism and individualism. It is only inevitable that a society as large as the US, made up of such diverse group, will collapse into tribalism and civil war without unifying symbols (such as a flag) and a unifying history (despite inherent flaws of historical figures) . The scary part is that America's collapse will be much more violent and drawn out than what happened to the Soviet Union in the early 1990's.
August 9, 2012
Sordid end of an era and an institution.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews