The Russian Military: Power and Policy. Edited by Steven E. Miller and Dmitri V. Trenin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. 272p. $50.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

When Russia became an independent state at the end of 1991, it inherited the bulk of the Soviet armed forces and the Soviet defense industry. The Russian government initially tried to persuade the other former Soviet republics to preserve a unified military force, but in May 1992, after those efforts had proven fruitless, Russian President Boris Yeltsin established a separate Russian army on the basis of what had been left over from the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet military had been deteriorating since the late 1980s, sweeping reform of the new Russian army seemed an urgent priority. Economic, military, social, demographic, and political considerations all pointed to the need for a much smaller army equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry and configured for plausible combat scenarios. Advocates of reform hoped to place the Russian military under strict civilian control, including parliamentary oversight, and to replace the mass, conscript-based system of the Soviet army with a fully professional force. They also hoped to devise a completely new military doctrine that would be appropriate for the realities of the post-Soviet era.