![]() ![]() Defection involves military actors that abrogate a basic commitment to defend their principal, fail to carry out orders or not report to duty (Brooks 2017 2019). This study puts forward the first analysis of military defection(s) that arose during the collapse of the USSR. While attention has been cast on military defection and its relation to regime transition and democratisation in the Arab Spring, we lack understanding of how armed forces behaved during one of the most significant periods of the twentieth century. However, our understanding of how military actors behaved in the face of territorial disintegration, mass rebellion and political power grabs remains underdeveloped. To date, there have been hundreds of articles and dozens of books written on the topic of the Soviet collapse in multiple languages. ![]() The breaking apart of this governance superstructure into more than a dozen separate states has since received significant interdisciplinary scholarly attention. By the end of 1991, collapse was imminent due to several processes, one of which was driven by national groups that demanded and successfully achieved territorial and governmental independence (Beissinger 2002 2009). ![]() Not only was the USSR one of the more powerful empires in all of human history, but it was home to around 35 different national groups (Sakwa 1990: 233). To enforce order over 22 million square kilometres, the USSR had a military with over 5 million members, a sophisticated nuclear arsenal and it spent upwards of 25% of its GDP on defence through a planned war mobilisation economy. Throughout the 74 years of its existence, the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) evolved into a superpower that comprised 15 different republics and a complex bureaucratic system with substantial state capacity. ![]()
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