Defense Industries in Russia and the Other Post-Soviet States

Russia and the other successor states inherited from the Soviet system a fateful legacy—a defense industry of a scale and character that threatened to obstruct efforts to create market economies and democratic polities. Soviet commentators in the years of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began to use the term “military-industrial complex” (MIC) to characterize this hypertrophied defense industry, adopting a term hitherto reserved in Soviet ideology for the United States and other capitalist countries. The Soviet MIC began to be identified with political conservatism, or outright reaction, as a constellation of military, economic, and political forces determined at all costs to block reform and preserve the socialist system and the union. Whether this was ever an accurate characterization of the Soviet defense industry is debatable. As this author has argued elsewhere, the Soviet defense industry was not monolithic in behavior and attitude and did not necessarily share common interests with the uniformed military. 1 However, it is undeniable that some of the leaders of the abortive August 1991 coup represented a conservative “military-industrial” interest, and there is also no dispute that from the 1930s on the defense industry, with its associated governmental and party institutions, was one of the strongest pillars of the Soviet state.