A reminder: Challenging a tyrant comes with dangerous consequences
We have witnessed in recent years how difficult it is to overthrow a ruler who has a strong base of support and is willing to kill to retain power. The dictator in Guatemala was recently in the news for his violence, but he is only copying what he has seen in Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and a slew of nations that most people can’t find on a map. We know that Putin has murdered challengers overseas and even right under the walls of the Kremlin.
Hence the apparent assassination of Yevgeny Prigozhin by an anti-aircraft missile or a bomb on his plane should not have come as a surprise to anyone. He had risen from nowhere to become a major figure in Russian foreign affairs, commanding a mercenary force fighting in Syria and Africa on Russia’s behalf, a force recruited from prisons and made into the most effective unit in the Ukraine war.
He had felt sufficiently confident of his power that he accused Putin’s jealous generals of not only mismanaging the war, but of denying his Wagner mercenaries the munitions needed to continue their advances. Pulling his men back from the front lines, he sent them to seize the command center at Rostock, then to advance swiftly on Moscow.
His men met little resistance, and what they did meet — helicopter and air attacks on their columns — they shot down. Then, to widespread surprise, he ordered his men to return to their bases.
Prigozhin met with Putin at least once, then went to Africa, where local unrest had overthrown pro-Western rulers, making the situation ready for more interventions by his “Wagner” forces.
The name Wagner was the nom de guerre of his lieutenant Dmitry Utkin. (An example of a fictious name used to disguise the identity of its bearer or to enhance the mythology around him was Stalin, the man of steel, which was also certainly easier to spell than Ioseb Dzhugashvili.) Utkin was the former special forces officer who first envisioned forming the Wagner force and was later its field commander; and he had chosen the name Wagner to honor Hitler’s favorite composer.
Since Putin claimed that “the Special Military Operation” was intended to root out neo-Nazis in Ukraine (whose president was Jewish), we can see how intellectually incoherent right-wing beliefs in Russia are. Utkin and Prigozhin worshipped brute force, and they died together with other key officers when the plane crashed near Moscow.
Mercenaries are nothing new in history. Since early modern states could not afford a standing army and feudal forces would not stay in the field for more than a short time, rulers employed mercenaries who could be quickly trained by professional officers and would fight as long as needed. Professionals were also better fighters than amateurs.
Mercenaries’ importance grew swiftly during the Thirty Years War (1618 through 1648), when the armies raised by regional rulers proved incompetent in battle compared to the Catholic mercenaries raised Albrecht von Wallenstein. Once the war ceased to be between religions, but a struggle between states for supremacy, there was no easy way to end it.
When Wallenstein suggested making compromises with the enemy, then to make himself ruler of the lands in northern Germany, the emperor authorized Scottish and Irish officers to murder him. The war ground on for more than twenty more years, with as much as thirty to fifty percent of German-speaking population dying from starvation and disease. Since the wider war included
Poland, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy, it was the most dreadful conflict in European history until 1939 through 1945. Hitler was able to call on its memory to justify his actions against enemies he claimed had brought down Germany in the First World War and now, he said, threatened the nation’s very existence.
When Hitler’s private army, the Brown Shirts led by Ernst Röhm, challenged his policies, Hitler had the SS massacre Röhm and his officers in the Night of the Long Knives. Thereafter, Hitler had only the army to worry about (but that is another long story).
The careers of Wallenstein, Röhm, and Prigozhin are similar enough so that Putin’s action should not have surprised us.
William Urban is a Lee L. Morgan professor of history and international studies at Monmouth College.
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Challenging a tyrant comes with dangerous consequences
