The victory over Nazi Germany was the crowning achievement of the Soviet state in its seventy-four years of existence. This chapter examines civil–military relations in the period from the military victory in the Great Patriotic War to the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. The war established the Soviet Union as a global superpower, and the victory helped legitimize Soviet rule in a way that more than twenty years of “building socialism” had been unable to do. The four major theories – domestic structure, organizational structure, corporate interest, and organizational culture – all predict that the military was unlikely to be involved in sovereign power issues. Opportunities for intervention were low because the domestic political order was fairly solid and multiple military and security bodies existed capable of counterbalancing each other. There also were few motives for intervention for most of this period, because the army's corporate interests generally were respected by the post-Stalin leadership and the officer corps remained attached to an apolitical organizational culture.

This chapter investigates five sovereign power episodes in the postwar period, first in the Khrushchev era and then in the period from Brezhnev to Gorbachev (see Table 5.1). In the Khrushchev period there was one instance of military arbitration due to disputes in the political leadership. The army also played an implementation role in one power struggle, but under strict party control and not as an independent actor. The armed forces never sought an expanded political role; and aside from these two episodes, they played no role in resolving the sovereign power issues that arose.