We were a military nation, 70 or so percent of the economy was, in one way or another, tied to the military. Our best minds worked for it…physicists, mathematicians…All of them helped develop tanks and bombs. And our ideology was also militarized. But Gorbachev was profoundly civilian. Previous general secretaries had all seen combat, while his background was the Philosophy Department of Moscow State University. “Are you preparing to fight?” he would ask the top brass. “I’m not. And there are more generals and admirals in Moscow alone than there are in the whole world combined.”
