Analyses of established democracies rarely include sections examining the political involvement of their armed forces, for the simple reason that it is inconsequential. General studies on Eastern European democratic transitions are usually attentive to the armed forces only to the extent that, by virtue of their control of the tools of coercion, the military's political stance could potentially determine whether the transfer of power was peaceful or violent. By contrast, the military had assumed a key political role in Latin American and Iberian democratic transitions, because prior to democratization these were praetorian systems ruled by the armed forces, and therefore the most important concern of transition was the manner in which generals left politics.

What about Russia? The Soviet Union was not a praetorian state, and the Russian/Soviet military has essentially no modern tradition of political involvement. Why are civil-military relations a portentous component of Russian politics? The reason is that the depoliticization of the military and the extension of solid civilian oversight authority to all armed forces are imperatives of successful democratization, yet Russia has not accomplished them. In fact, its political elites have done little to develop democratic civil-military relations.