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Russia Military Doctrine
In Russia military doctrine is the official formulation of concepts on the nature of present and future war and the nation's potential role, given existing or anticipated geopolitical conditions. In the late 1980s, the military doctrine of the Soviet U
nion underwent a dramatic change toward defensive readiness before the dissolution of the union. After inheriting the unfinished transition of that period, Russia struggled to develop a suitable new set of concepts in the 1990s. The first step, the doctri
ne of 1993, was considered a temporary document leading to a full statement of goals and circumstances to be formulated around 2000.
Soviet Doctrine
The Soviet Union's first military doctrine was based on the teachings of Vladimir I. Lenin about defense of the socialist homeland and on the military theories of Civil War general Mikhail Frunze. Starting in the early 1920s, doctrine underwent a serie
s of changes in response to geopolitical and economic conditions. After World War II, Stalin introduced the concept of two mutually irreconcilable international coalitions--the capitalist and the socialist--that inevitably would come into armed conflict.
In the 1950s, the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons added a new dimension to Stalin's postwar concept of a massive, combined-arms struggle on the fields of Europe. Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev (in office 1953-64) saw adequate nuclear deterrence
as a guarantee that socialism would be able to advance in peace toward its inevitable triumph. Based on that theory, he shifted support from conventional forces to a new military group, the nuclear-armed strategic rocket forces. However, in this period th
e Soviet military establishment argued for the use of nuclear weapons in fighting, rather than preventing, a war--including the initiation of nuclear attack. In the 1960s, that idea was refined with the addition of small-scale nuclear strikes and a renewe
d emphasis on conventional warfare. By 1970 the doctrine envisioned two major possibilities: an entirely conventional war or a nuclear war fought between the Soviet Union and the United States solely in Western and Central Europe.
In the 1970s and the 1980s, military thinkers continued to question the military efficacy of nuclear weapons, although official doctrine assumed that the Soviet Union could win a nuclear war. In this period, the concept of a nonnuclear, high-technology
global war, advanced by Chief of the General Staff Marshal Nikolay Ogarkov, attracted substantial support. By the late 1980s, military doctrine had begun to evolve toward a defensive concept of "reasonable sufficiency" of military force to ensure nationa
l security but not to initiate offensive operations. At the behest of the Soviet Union, in 1987 the Warsaw Pact officially adopted a defense-oriented military doctrine and called for reductions in conventional arms in Europe.
Data as of July 1996
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