Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

troop withdrawals from Eastern Europe, elimination
of short and medium-range missiles under the INF
Treaty, and promises to get rid of tactical nuclear
weapons all reverberate today in the Russian disappointments
and attempts at revising former agreements
and understandings.
THE BORIS YELTSIN REGIME
While Mikhail Gorbachev’s ouster from power
and the disbandment of the 75-year-old communist
regime was generally received in Russia without huge
regrets, the effects of the ensuing disintegration of the
imperial Soviet state left a deep imprint on the lives of
millions of Russian citizens. Without underrating the
novelty and magnitude of the problems faced by the
government of Boris Yeltsin—the first President of the
new Russian state—and minimizing certain achievements
in their resolution, it is clear that, by and large,
throughout the Yeltsin rule, Russian society continued
to slide into moral degradation, structural disintegration,
and economic morass.
On top of the significantly diminished territory,
population, economy, resources, military, and power
projection capabilities, the society continued to be
plagued by traditional Russian woes: bureaucratic
dictates, mismanagement, and corruption, as well as
public apathy and despondency epitomized by alcoholism
and addiction. Uncontrolled redistribution,
i.e., plunder of what was left of the unwieldy albeit
bountiful Soviet inheritance, was accompanied by
rampant criminality. By the late-1990s, Russia looked
like a failed state on its way to disintegration and collapse.
110