Survival lessons in Russian defense conversion

The period of Perestroika, beginning in the second half of the 1980s in the former Soviet Union, was the beginning of disarmament and defense conversion in the USSR. Most of the Soviet military capacity was concentrated in Russia, and the conversion of the defense industry became very complicated and painful. There are a number of definitions of the conversion process. In Russia, defense conversion was usually understood to be a full or partial transformation of a defense enterprise´s capacity to civilian capacity. If one analyzes the USSR and Russian governments´ policies on defense conversion during the past decade, it becomes evident that what was planned was substantially different from what was actually realized. In this article, I have paid attention to the outcome of the conversion process. Conversion changed the attitude of the world towards Russia. The image of a highly militarized society, which Russia has managed to preserve for decades, is becoming rather dim