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Originally Posted by ChalkLine
Because canonically the lead up to war is incremental, I can see all military equipment being seen as strategically important and mothballed rather than disposed of.
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Perhaps. But, with the continuation of the Cold War, a lot of older equipment would likely be given away to client states, to be replaced in Soviet service by newer gear. During the Cold War both superpowers, but especially the USSR, practically gave away material to their Third World client states. For example, the Soviet Union sent hundreds of tanks, SAMs, aircraft and other military equipment to Egypt and Syria leading up to the Six Day War and subsequently rearmed both nations following their massive material losses in that brief but costly war- so much, in fact, that both nations were again flush with weaponry just 7 years later. They also sent dozens of airlifts of replacement equipment during the October (Yom Kippur) War, practically pro bono. Not being blessed with the oil riches of other Middle Eastern Arab states, neither Egypt nor Syria had the money to pay retail (or even wholesale) for nearly any of it. The equipment was usually a generation or two behind what the Red Army was currently fielding at the time.
In our timeline, with the end of the Cold War, such giveaways nearly stopped as the cash-strapped Russians sought cold hard cash payments for what had previously been given away or sold on an IOU basis. So, a lot of older gear that no one would have payed for was put into storage. That said, the Soviets, as Chalk has pointed out on previous occasions, did tend to hoard equipment, even at the height of the Cold War.