proposal, vetted and signed by Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov in October 2001, calls for civilianizing some twelve hundred enterprises and institutions, stripping them of their military assets, including intellectual property, and transferring this capital to five hundred amalgamated entities called “system-building integrated structures.” This rearrangement will increase the military focus of the OPK by divesting its civilian activities, beneficially reducing structural militarization, but will strengthen the defense lobby and augment state ownership. The program calls for the government to have controlling stock of the lead companies (design bureaus) of the “system-building integrated structures.” This will be accomplished by arbitrarily valuing the state’s intellectual property at 100 percent of the lead company’s stock, a tactic that will terminate the traditional Soviet separation of design from production and create integrated entities capable of designing, producing, marketing (exporting), and servicing OPK products. State shares in non-lead companies will be put in trust with the design bureaus. The Kremlin intends to use ownership as its primary control instrument, keeping its requisitioning powers in the background, and minimizing budgetary subsidies at a time when state weapons-procurement programs are but a small fraction what they were in the Soviet past. Ilya Klebanov, former deputy prime minister, and now minister for industry, science, and technology, the architect of the OPK reform program, hopes in this way to reestablish state administrative governance over domestic military industrial activities, while creating new entities that can seize a larger share of the global arms market. It is premature to judge the outcome of this initiative, but history suggests that even if the VPK modernizes, it does not intend to fade away. See also: KASYANOV, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH; MILITARY- ECONOMIC PLANNING; MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Epstein, David. (1990). “The Economic Cost of Soviet Security and Empire.” In The Impoverished Superpower: Perestroika and the Soviet Military, ed. Henry Rowen and Charles Wolf, Jr. San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies. Gaddy, Clifford. (1966). The Price of the Past: Russia’s Struggle with the Legacy of a Militarized Economy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Hill, Christopher. (2003). “Russia’s Defense Spending.” In Russia’s Uncertain Future. Washington, DC: Joint Economic Committee. Izyumov, Alexei; Kosals, Leonid; and Ryvkina, Rosalina. (2001). “Privatization of the Russian Defense Industry: Ownership and Control Issues.” Post-Communist Economies 12:485-496. Rosefielde, Steven. (2004). Progidal Superpower: Russia’s Re- emerging Future. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Shlykov, Vitaly. (2002). “Russian Defense Industrial Complex After 9-11.” Paper presented at the conference on “Russian Security Policy and the War on Terrorism,” U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, June 4-5, 2002.
STEVEN ROSEFIELDE
Although the means have grown more sophisticated, the basic function of military intelligence (voyennaya razvedka) has remained unchanged: collecting, analyzing and disseminating information about the enMILITARY INTELLIGENCE emy’s intentions and its ability to carry them out. Since the Soviet era, military intelligence has been classified according to three categories: strategic, operational, and tactical. Strategic intelligence entails an understanding of actual and potential foes at the broadest level, including the organization and capabilities of their armed forces as well as the economy, population, and geography of the national base. Operational intelligence refers to knowledge of military value more directly tied to the theater, and is typically conducted by the staffs of front and army formations, while tactical intelligence is carried out by commanders at all levels to gather battlefield data directly relevant to their current mission.
Before the Great Reforms (1860s-1870s), Russian generals had three basic means of learning about their foes: spies, prisoners of war, and reconnaissance. Thus, at the Battle of Kulikovo (1381) Prince Dmitry Donskoy dispatched a reliable diplomat to the enemy’s camp to study the latter’s intentions, questioned captives, and personally assessed the terrain, all of which played a role in his famous victory over the Mongols. While capable commanders had always understood the need for good intelligence, until the early eighteenth century the Russian army had neither systematic procedures nor personnel designated to carry them out. Peter I’s introduction of a quartermaster service (kvartirmeisterskaya chast) in 1711 (renamed the general staff, or generalny shtab, by Catherine II in 1763) laid the institutional groundwork. The interception of diplomatic correspondence, a vital element of strategic intelligence, was carried out by the foreign office’s Cabinet Noir (Black Chamber, also known as the shifrovalny otdel), beginning under Empress Elizabeth I (r. 1741-1762). Inter-ministerial rivalry often hampered effective dissemination of such data to the War Ministry.
It would take another century for military intelligence properly to be systematized with the creation of a Main Staff (glavny shtab) by the reformist War Minister Dmitry Milyutin in 1865. Roughly analogous to the Prussian Great General Staff, the Main Staff’s responsibilities included central administration, training, and intelligence. Two departments of the Main Staff were responsible for strategic intelligence: the Military Scientific Department (Voyenny ucheny komitet, which dealt with European powers) and the Asian Department (Azi-atskaya chast). Milyutin also regularized procedures for operational and combat intelligence in 1868 with new regulations to establish an intelligence section (razvedivatelnoye otdelenie) attached to field commanders’ staffs, and he formalized the training and functions of military attach?s (voen-nye agenty). The Admiralty’s Main Staff established analogous procedural organizations for naval intelligence.
In 1903, the Army’s Military Scientific Department was renamed Section Seven of the First Military Statistical Department in the Main Staff. Dismal performance during the Russo-Japanese War inevitably led to another series of reforms, which saw the creation in June 1905 of an independent Main Directorate of the General Staff (Glavnoye Upravlenie Generalnago Shtaba, or GUGSh), whose first over quartermaster general was now tasked with intelligence, among other duties. Resubordinated to the war minister in 1909, GUGSh would retain its responsibility for intelligence through World War I.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Lenin established a Registration Directorate (Registupravle-nie, RU) in October 1918 to coordinate intelligence for his nascent Red Army. At the conclusion of the Civil War, in 1921, the RU was refashioned into the Second Directorate of the Red Army Staff (also known as the Intelligence Directorate, Razvedupr, or RU). A reorganization of the Red Army in 1925 saw the entity transformed into the Red Army Staff’s Fourth Directorate, and after World War II it would be the Main Intelligence Directorate (Glavnoye Razvedivatelnoye Upravlenie, GRU).
Because of the presence of many former Imperial Army officers in the Bolshevik military, the RU bore more than a passing resemblance to its tsarist predecessor. However, it would soon branch out into much more comprehensive collection, especially through human intelligence (i.e., military attach?s and illegal spies) and intercepting communications. Despite often intense rivalry with the state security services, beginning with Felix Dz-erzhinsky’s Cheka, the RU and its successors also became much more active in rooting out political threats, whether real or imagined.
Both tsarist and Soviet military intelligence were respected if not feared by other powers. Like all military intelligence services, its record was nevertheless marred by some serious blunders, including fatally underestimating the capabilities of the Japanese armed forces in 1904 and miscalculating the size of German deployments in East Prussia in 1914. Yet even the best intelligence could not compensate for the shortcomings of the supreme commander, most famously when Josef Stalin refused to heed repeated and often accurate assessments of
MILITARY REFORMS
Nazi intentions to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. See also: ADMINISTRATION, MILITARY; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; MILITARY, SPECIAL PURPOSE FORCES; SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF
Fuller, William C. (1984). “The Russian Empire.” In Knowing One’s Enemies: Intelligence Assessment before the Two World Wars, ed. Ernest R. May. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Garthoff, Raymond L. (1956). “The Soviet Intelligence Services.” In The Soviet Army, ed. Basil Liddell Hart. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Leonard, Raymond W. (1999). Secret Soldiers of the Revolution: Soviet Military Intelligence, 1918-1933. West-port, CT: Greenwood Press. Pozniakov, Vladimir. (2000). “The Enemy at the Gates: Soviet Military Intelligence in the Inter-war Period and its Forecasts of Future War.” In Russia at the Age of Wars, ed. Silvio Pons and Romano Giangia-como. Milan: Fetrinellli. Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David. (2003). “Reforming Russian Military
