What Russian Generals Are Reading? -I
I recently read an article which, in my opinion, provides important indicators. This article was published on the Russia Today website. The title of the article was What Russian Generals Are Reading?. This ambitious title was inviting and I accepted the invitation and read the article.
According to it, the Russian generals have carefully analyzed the disintegration of the Soviet Union. They seem to be far from accepting that this disintegration was due to internal causes. Therefore, they emphasized the "external dynamics". As a result, they seem to have defined a new and different strategy. The essence of this strategy lies in a broader understanding of war, taking it out of its purely conventional and nuclear context. In my opinion, its strengths and weaknesses can be briefly discussed.
In identifying its strengths, I should first point out those points in the Soviet Union's conception of the war which, in my opinion, were both right and wrong.
To identify these, we must first examine the Soviet Union's conception of war. The foundational concept was a final showdown between two major powers—the Warsaw Pact and NATO—using a combination of nuclear and conventional forces. This doctrine reached its peak with the ZAPAD exercises in the 1980s, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. The Soviet armed forces relied on mobilizing enormous manpower and resources, making them effective but ultimately cumbersome and resource-intensive. While this massive force might have had little difficulty overrunning Europe in a conventional conflict, it would have inevitably faltered against the superior naval, air, and technological power of Western nations.
The Soviet military's key strength was its formidable organizational capacity, built on vast intelligence. NATO strategists feared its high degree of coordination, detailed planning, and the psychological-political depth of its operations. This organizational threat was so significant that it encouraged Western efforts to foster the Soviet Union's internal disintegration. Nevertheless, the war in Afghanistan revealed a critical weakness: this highly coordinated army, despite its skill in special operations, faltered in a protracted war against irregular forces. This exposed a conceptual gap in Soviet strategy.
In response, Russia's new strategy has taken both correct and incorrect steps. First, it correctly established a resilient center of gravity by prioritizing its nuclear forces, especially its submarine fleet. Second, it chose to use its resources more economically, favoring technology and hybrid warfare over a cumbersome conventional military. Third, it modernized its nuclear arsenal. Fourth, it rightly emphasized the ideological and cognitive elements of warfare. However, as with Achilles' heel, taking a strength to an extreme can become a weakness. A misinterpretation of the ideological element is precisely what weakens Russia's overall strategy.
Let us elaborate. Russia remains an old-style multinational empire, a structure inherited from the Soviet Union. After the collapse, there was an attempt to forge a nation-state under a singular Russian identity, but this effort failed. As a result, the ideology of Eurasianism was developed. Russian Eurasianism is an emulation of the imperial age, aiming to unite Slavic and steppe peoples. Its weakness, however, lies in its ideological fault lines. For a doctrine driven purely by geopolitical necessity, peripheral nations are haphazardly integrated using religion and ideology as tools. For instance, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey are grouped into the same civilizational pool with little regard for their unique structural characteristics. They are mobilized merely to serve the strategic requirements of the power controlling the heartland.
The second critical weakness is that this ideology ignores the internal dynamics of the Soviet collapse, reducing it to an "external conspiracy." This narrative was originally promoted by conservative cadres within the Soviet Union to scapegoat others and consolidate internal cohesion. In reality, the Soviet Union collapsed primarily for internal reasons. The bureaucracy had organized itself into a de facto class with its own class interests, aiming to integrate the country into global capitalism in a way that would preserve its central role. The political cadres believed promises that if the Union were dismantled, they would be rewarded with integration into the dominant Western political-economic system. The "external enemy" argument is therefore a secondary factor that distorts reality.
When a national strategy's diagnosis rests solely on the external enemy narrative, its psychological, cognitive, and ideological components devolve into overinterpretation. This forces a rigid attitude that prevents an accurate grasp of global changes. There is no other reason why countries and thinkers who advocate for a negotiated peace in Ukraine are reflexively labeled "agents of the West" or "traitors." This extreme interpretation creates a strategic blind spot and constitutes the fundamental weakness of Russia's strategy.
End of Part I
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