Russia is still on the verge of disintegration, even if Prigozhin turned his men back
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This is the beginning of the end for Vladimir Putin regardless of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s decision to turn around last night. That may seem an odd thing to say. But Putin’s power rests on projection, on propaganda, on the image of invincibility. Now, all of a sudden, the curtain has been snatched back, revealing the Wizard of Oz as a small, mediocre, frightened man.
From the outside, dictatorships can look monolithic. One of the reasons that Western Kremlinologists failed to predict the end of the Soviet Union was that they knew little of the necessarily secret rivalries within it. None of them foresaw that the chief instrument in the dissolution of the USSR would be Boris Yeltsin’s Russian Federation.
Today, the same Russian Federation appears united. Putin’s approval ratings hover around 80 per cent, and his most vocal opponents are in exile or in prison. There are no meaningful opposition parties or critical newspapers. People rally to their leaders during war, and the effect of sanctions has been to strengthen Putin’s control over the economy.
Look closer, though, and that unity begins to look provisional. The siloviki, the strongmen around Putin, sense his vulnerability, and are making alliances in preparation for the transition. The generals and admirals who hold the other half of the nuclear codes could still be manoeuvring. Perhaps nine of Russia’s regions and republics could be ready to call independence referendums, having had enough of a Muscovite clique which seizes their natural resources, conscripts their young men, and offers them nothing in return.
There have been reports that large corporations such as Gazprom have been building private armies, presumably in anticipation of having to defend their assets with force in the chaos that follows Putin. There is occasional talk of absorbing these militias into the regular army; but a more immediate question may be which faction they back if the regime eventually cracks.
One man who understands these subtleties is Prigozhin, a minor Leningrad gangster who rose with Putin and was rewarded with a big catering contract before he launched the Wagner Group.
Wagner’s brutal mercenaries are active in some of the most benighted places on earth. Among other things, they guard gold mines in Sudan and energy deposits in Libya. Their soldiers are often the refuse of Russian jails, but their officers tend to be former regulars, in many cases men who have been cashiered for insubordination, pilfering or violence. Hence their constant need to disparage the army, to portray themselves as the real professionals.
We’ll come in a moment to Prigozhin’s motives. For now, note the single most extraordinary fact of the past 24 hours, namely that Wagner, which could not complete the capture of Bakhmut in six months, was able to take the Russian city of Rostov in six hours.
Hitler said of the Soviet Union that, once you kicked in the door, the whole rotten structure would come tumbling down. Certainly we came close yesterday, and the refusal of some Russian regulars to engage the Wagner mutineers suggested either a collapse of morale on their part or a measure of prearrangement.
A sombre Putin, dressed in black, took to the airwaves to denounce the rising. “A blow like this was dealt to Russia in 1917,” he said. “Intrigues, squabbles and politicking behind the backs of the army and the nation turned into the greatest turmoil, the destruction of the army and the collapse of the state, and the loss of vast territories, ultimately leading to the tragedy of the civil war.”
Quite so. Indeed, as Prigozhin’s men made their short-lived march to Moscow, the parallels with that cursed year were hard to miss. In 1917, army morale collapsed very suddenly, and soldiers turned angrily on the Tsarist regime that had sent them into a hellish war. Chaos ensued and, for a time, the vast Russian empire fragmented into a series of squabbling successor states: Siberia, Eastern Okraina, Karakorum, the Kuban Rada, the Provisional Government of the Urals and others. Eventually, the Bolsheviks managed to reabsorb most of these territories, though some, including Finland, Poland and the Baltic States, broke away.
Could something similar still happen today, as Putin limps on? There are independence movements in Buryatia, Sakha, Dagestan, Chechnya, Kamchatka Krai, Komi, Novosibirsk, Archangel and Tatarstan. In all these places, local elites are preparing for a clean excision, a chance to cut their links with a defeated and dishonoured Moscow regime and join the comity of nations as resource-rich republics.
Prigozhin clearly knew this. He was never in Putin’s inner circle, which was made up chiefly of former Leningrad KGB officers. But don’t underestimate the importance of holding the Kremlin catering contract. The reason that Cristal champagne, uniquely, comes in clear bottles with flat bottoms is that Alexander II wanted to see that it had not been poisoned, and that there was no space to hide a bomb. Putin, whose paranoia extends to breathing specially purified air, would not have entrusted his kitchens to anyone unreliable.
What, then, was Prigozhin up to yesterday? One possibility is that this was simply the climax of his feud with the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu. If, as the former convict claims, his men were being targeted by regular troops, he may have felt that his only option was to show that he could lead men up to Moscow.
A second is that he had – at least for a short period – swapped sides; that the Ukrainians, in one of the most brilliant tactical moves in the history of warfare, had grasped the fact that mercenaries will fight for the highest bidder. Prigozhin’s pronouncements about Ukraine in recent weeks have been strikingly warm.
He has spoken of the courage and honour of Ukrainian troops, and contrasted the efficient way in which Kyiv evacuated civilians from the war zone with Moscow’s haplessness. Indeed, his verbal ire has been aimed, not at enemy soldiers, but at Russian regulars, and his last broadcast before the rising was a denunciation of Russia’s pretext for the invasion.
A third possibility is that he was confident, perhaps wrongly, that he had allies in the Russian high command, and that he attempted a coordinated revolution. At the time of writing, it is impossible to know whether or not Prigozhin is satisfied with Putin remaining in power. We will know soon enough.
But whatever accommodation has been reached, the end of the Putin regime is now in sight. Madame de Staël once quipped that Russia’s system of government was “autocracy tempered by strangulation”, and even Putin seems to sense that his days may be numbered. His justification for the war has been shown to be nonsense, and the defection of the units that were doing the hardest fighting puts victory definitively beyond his reach.
A tyrant can get away with many things. He can murder opponents, impoverish his people, isolate his country. But he cannot get away with losing a war. Let’s call it the Galtieri Principle: a strongman who turns out to be weak has failed in his own terms.
The West should not repeat the mistake in made in 1990, when it tried to hold the USSR together. Halting the break-up of Russia is not in our gift, but our relationship with the successor states is. It may well be that a Muscovite rump state can be defanged, denuclearised, democratised and, one day, admitted into the Euro-Atlantic alliance. But only when the current regime has been utterly defeated – a prospect that is now closer than ever.
