The Sacred Cause: Civil-Military Conflict over Soviet National Security, 1917-1992 (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

To the officers of the USSR Armed Forces, the defense of the Soviet Union was, in the words of a Soviet general, a "sacred cause." What was the nature of Soviet civil-military relations, and what have the new militaries inherited from the Soviet experience? In this book Thomas M.

Nichols examines the struggles over national security policy between military officers and political leaders in the USSR, and shows that the Soviet civil-military relationship has a long history of conflict rather than cooperation.