Assessing the Russian military as an instrument of power

This article was written for the Unz Review: http://www.unz.com/tsaker/assessing-the-russian-military-as-an-instrument-of-power/ It has been a quarter of a century now since the fall of the Soviet Union and yet the memory of the Soviet Armed Forces is still vivid in the minds of many of those who lived through the Cold War or even remember WWII. The NATO-sponsored elites of eastern Europe still continue to scare their citizens by warning of a