Karinė reforma Rusijoje: politinės trajektorijos
Russia's Military Reform: Political Trajectories

Summary/Abstract: Russia’s state and identity crisis that commenced with the end of the Cold War has inevitably touched the military of the country. Two factors are of the great importance in the trajectory of the military development: the second Chechnya War and the Kursk catastrophe. In 1999 reactivated use of the Armed Forces in Chechnya determined preconditions for the authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin and for the emergence of a hypertrophied status of the military. Eventually there was a possibility to conclude the situation with the formation of the military authoritarianism. However, in 2000 the Kursk catastrophe both brought the public attention to the disastrous deterioration of the military and put Putin into the dilemma: how to reform (modernise) the military by keeping up political leverage, that assisted in forming the authority of Putin? Therefore Kremlin’s trajectory with regard to the military reform reflects certain contradiction. The military issue implicates two scopes reflecting the above mentioned ambivalence: 1. Reshuffle of the top of the military and security establishment. 2. Cutbacks in numbers in the Armed Forces. (…) The ongoing discussion develops two tendencies. One of them illustrates the desperate attempt to increase the potential of strategic nuclear warheads, appealing to the possibilities of the mobilizational economy and ignoring the eventual consequences for the ordinary people. Another tendency represents efforts to modernize the military structure by limiting Russia’s nuclear deterrent potential to the minimal level. These tendencies correlate with the arising dilemma for Russia’s eventual political system: will there be the evolution towards the military authoritarianism (by the way, the Second Chechnya war has a huge impact on the tendency), or will Russia choose the way of modern state, though in authoritarian form.

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