The Red Army, strangely enough, managed to outlive the Soviet Union itself by a few months as the armed forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States. In May 1992, however, this fiction was abandoned when Russian President Boris Yeltsin decreed the establishment of the Russian armed forces. Unlike in 1917, when there were both continuities and discontinuities from the Imperial to the Soviet period, there was no question that the new Russian army was the direct descendent of the Soviet armed forces and the inheritor of most of its personnel, equipment, institutions, and culture.

The Russian military under Yeltsin experienced a period perhaps even more politically tumultuous than the Gorbachev era. In October 1993 the armed forces were once again thrust into the role of political arbiter in the conflict between President Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet. The Russian army also has been involved in its largest internal war since the civil war in the bloody conflict with Chechnya. These events have strained Russian civil–military relations, as have the continuing economic and social problems faced by the armed forces.

The significant difficulties of the Russian state and its army brought about speculation about the possibility of military intervention in politics. In a 1997 poll, sixty-three percent of Russians said that “the threat of military dictatorship” was one of their concerns. Indeed, even Yeltsin himself remarked in his memoirs after retirement that in the early 1990s there was a “real threat of a military putsch.”