#12 - RW 6-18-04 - RW Home
Moscow Times
June 15, 2004
General Staff in Command?
By Pavel Felgenhauer

Last Friday, the State Duma gave final approval to a Kremlin-sponsored slate of amendments to the federal laws on defense, military service and the status of military personnel. The bill received overwhelming support and aroused no serious opposition or debate. Within a week or so, the bill should clear the Federation Council and be signed into law by President Vladimir Putin.

In the 1990s, the Federation Council, then composed of governors and the heads of all regional legislatures, helped to balance the enormous power of the executive branch. Upon taking power in 2000, Putin wasted no time in bending the Constitution and turning the upper house into a rubber stamp by filling it with unelected officials who nominally represented the regions, but were in fact handpicked by the Kremlin.

Now the Kremlin has total control of the Duma, as well. The lower house contains a token opposition, too small to block the Kremlin's anti-democratic bills restricting public assembly, referenda and other issues, but big enough to raise a stink. The amendments to the law on defense hardly even registered on the radar screen, however, apparently because no one took them all that seriously.

On paper, at least, the bill profoundly alters the structure of the military. Up to now, Russia has had an all-powerful, Prussian-style General Staff that controlled all branches of the armed forces and was more or less free of outside political constraints.

Military intelligence -- the Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU -- is as large as the former KGB and has global reach. It is also an integral part of the General Staff. In all questions of defense procurement, strategic planning, threat assessment and the like, the General Staff controls information vital to the decision-making process. Former high-ranking GRU officers have told me that in the Soviet era, the General Staff routinely and deliberately used the GRU to mislead the Kremlin into increasing military spending. There are grounds to believe that this practice continues today.

The new version of the law on defense omits all references to the role of the General Staff. From this point forward, the Defense Ministry will have full command of the armed forces. No longer will the General Staff be the "operational command body" of the military.

Many observers have interpreted this change as an indication that Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov has come out on top in his long-running feud with his first deputy, General Anatoly Kvashnin, head of the General Staff. The amendment has also been seen as a decisive break with the past and the beginning of a genuine, Western-style transformation of the military. Last month, Putin publicly called for the introduction of civilian control -- an impossible task so long as the General Staff remains in charge.

But can reform be achieved with the stroke of a pen? Before the General Staff can be stripped of its command and control functions, an alternative structure must be put in place. And before the Defense Ministry can assume command, it must become a proper ministry. At present, the Defense Ministry is little more than a typical hierarchical military command structure with all lines of command passing through the General Staff.

Laws passed by parliament don't count for much in Russia. The ruling bureaucracy interprets the laws as it sees fit and issues regulations on their implementation. Parliament has no oversight power, it cannot reprimand ministers, nor can it investigate the actions of any agency of the executive branch.

Putin's regime based on unlimited personal power has breathed new life into the pseudo-science of Kremlinology, a guessing game that makes predictions about future policies based on the hints and telling silences of Kremlin insiders. In the Soviet era, Kremlinology was primarily a Western practice. But in Moscow these days, you can read reams of typically Kremlinological "analysis" of the new defense law.

In fact, the new law may signal profound change or it may mean nothing at all. Had Putin really wanted to reduce the role of the General Staff, he could have begun by getting rid of Kvashnin rather than submitting a bunch of amendments to parliament. As you recall, last year Putin abolished the Border Guards without sweating the fact that his actions violated existing law. And the law was rewritten a few months later.

Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.