About the Author

William E. Odom retired in 1988 as a lieutenant general in the United States Army and as director of the National Security Agency. He is currently director of national security studies at the Hudson Institute and an adjunct professor of political science at Yale University.

Reviews

"America's premier expert on Soviet military affairs has produced a seminal work of far-reaching political and strategic importance. Indispensable to an understanding not only of the current stage of the Russian military but also of the wider geostrategic implications of Russia's current condition." Zbigniew Brzezinski "A superb and comprehensive study that will stand as a major pillar in support of a thorough understanding of the Gorbachev period and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It also provides needed perspective for the evaluation of the problems confronting the Russian military today." Walter C. Uhler, Philadelphia Inquirer "Essential reading for everyone who wants to understand why America's Cold War rival acted the way it did and what caused that opponent to become a colossus with feet of clay." W. Bruce Lincoln, Washington Post Book World "Odom's book...opinionated and...exciting sees the dissolution of the Union as intimately linked to military collapse." John Lloyd, Financial Times

Odom, a former National Security director and currently director of national security studies at the Hudson Institute and adjunct professor of political science at Yale, uses his extensive background to clarify and chronicle the fall of the Soviet military. Whereas Robert Service, in A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (LJ 3/1/98), weaves the military into the general conditions that caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, Odom looks at the root causes of the fall of the military itself. During the Cold War, Western scholars were forced to study the Soviet military as archaeologists might study civilizations: from remnants of past expeditions. Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika were responsible for changing the foundations of the military's existence. Lenin had adapted Clauswitz's views to match Marxist theory, and Gorbachev's reorder of this position reined in the military, causing its collapse. This scholarly treatise is not for the faint-hearted. Recommended for academic libraries.‘Harry V. Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. System, Iola

Few in Western intellectual or policy circles expected the Soviet armed forces to acquiesce without a fight, not only in the collapse of their nation but in the dissolution of their own privileged system. In fact, they exited the stage of history virtually without a whisper. Odom, a former director of the National Security Agency, makes extensive use of interviews with participants to offer the most convincing analysis to date of what happened to the Soviet military in its final years. He begins by establishing the importance of Marxist/Leninist ideology to a Soviet system whose other sources of legitimacy had been eroding for decades. Central to that ideology was the postulate that politics and diplomacy were merely war by other means until the final victory of socialism. The consequences, Odom explains, were an economy based on a permanent war footing and a society based on the maintenance of a comprehensive military establishment. Gorbachev's reformulation of official ideology for internal reform broke the system's mainspring without offering an alternative legal model of party-military relations, however. His force reductions and withdrawals facilitated disintegration: conscripts refused to report, officers sold equipment, domestic order eroded, as did the military's prestige. The attempted putsch of 1991 sealed the armed forces' fate. Odom's well-written account suggests that the Russian successor state is on a new path and that the military may eventually become guardians of a constitutional order. 17 b&w photos. (Nov.)