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Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised speech on June 26 that the armed rebellion by Wagner mercenaries “would have been suppressed in any case.” (Video: Reuters)
Vladimir Putin cares about history. The Russian president has spent a great chunk of his time in power self-consciously cloaking his rule in the mantle of far earlier Russian eminences. He sits in his Kremlin meeting room under the shadow of statues of Russia’s imperial icons, including empire-building czars Peter the Great and Catherine the Great; he has linked his country’s war in Ukraine to campaigns waged there by Peter more than three centuries ago. In his telling, it’s a mission of redemption and reconquest, a restoration of Russian greatness.
Putin’s “special military operation” — the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine that he unleashed last year, to ruinous consequences for both countries — is itself born out of his revanchist, neo-imperialist worldview. In justifying the operation last February, he dismissed the sovereignty of Ukraine, casting it as a borderland inevitably bound to its larger neighbor. He said the idea of the Ukrainian nation was a fiction propagated by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. And he lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union not because of the loss of its communist ethos, but because of the disintegration of a polity that once reflected the far reaches of Russian imperial might.
On Saturday, as he faced what was arguably the starkest challenge to his 23-year rule, Putin turned to history once more in a televised address. His message was altogether different.
At the time, detachments of the Wagner mercenary company, led by their boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin, were marching north to Moscow in what was an astonishing, if short-lived, insurrection against the Kremlin’s military leadership. Their mutiny was quelled later in the day through negotiations that saw Prigozhin, a former Putin loyalist, depart apparently for Belarus and Wagner forces return to their bases. But before that deal was hatched, Putin declared Prigozhin and Wagner’s actions as “a betrayal of our people” and “a stab in the back of our country.”
Putin is reaping what he sowed
The U.S. calls the Wagner Group a “significant transnational criminal organization,” but it proes fighters for hire worldwide — with Kremlin approval. (Video: Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)
In his speech, Putin likened the moment to the crisis that saw the Russian empire slide out World War I and into the full throes of the Bolshevik Revolution. “It was such a blow that was dealt to Russia in 1917 when the country was fighting in World War I, but its victory was stolen,” Putin said. “Intrigues, bickering and politicking behind the back of the army and the people turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, the destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war.”
Analysts pointed to the inaccuracies of the potted history put forward by Putin. “It wasn’t the internal strife that lost Russia the war and led to revolution,” noted Jeet Heer in the Nation. “Rather, it was losing the war (or rather a series of wars) that undermined the legitimacy of the czarist government, producing the internal strife that led to the Russian Revolution.”
Given the setbacks and struggles endured by a depleted Russian war machine in Ukraine, the lessons from the past seem quite clear. “It is apt that Putin referenced the events of 1917 in his denunciation of Wagner’s actions,” wrote Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank. “It is important to reflect on the extent to which the deterioration of the Russian Army in 1917 saw numerous mutinies, negotiations and fragmentation within the Russian command. The collapse in 1917 started at the front and it took months to develop.”
But it’s quite startling that Putin himself seemed to be drawing the comparison. He appeared to style himself as the flailing, bungling Czar Nicholas II, swept out of power by forces larger than his reckoning. And Prigozhin, who made his fortune as Putin’s favored government caterer and went on to create one of Russia’s most notorious and capable private armies, seemed to be Lenin, boldly cutting a path toward regime change and a new Russian future.
Putin makes his imperial pretensions clear
At least on the latter front, the analogy falls apart. Prigozhin is no Lenin, but a warlord with pettier aims. On Monday, he resurfaced in a posted online, saying that Wagner’s “march for justice” launched Saturday was carried out to prevent the outfit from being subsumed into the Russian military. He did not disclose his location or the whereabouts of many of his fighters. Prigozhin has loudly criticized prominent figures in Putin’s inner circle — though not directly Putin himself — over their perceived inept handling of the war.
In a somewhat conciliatory speech delivered Monday night, Putin said “the organizers of the rebellion” had betrayed their people, but Wagner forces would be allowed to leave for neighboring Belarus. He attempted to show unity and strength through a meeting of his security chiefs, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, whose removal Prigozhin had demanded.
But the unspoken effects of Wagner’s lightning advance toward Moscow may eat away at Putin’s edifice of power, with Kremlin insiders and the country’s elite growing all the more nervous at his apparent loss of control. “How is it possible for them to drive tanks hundreds of kilometers north toward Moscow and not be stopped,” an associate of a Moscow billionaire told my colleagues. “There was no resistance.”
Russian elites “remain in a state of silent shock. Many are grappling with how fragile the entire ‘construction’ has proven to be,” tweeted Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. She added that they are “asking themselves the question, how was it possible to get out of such mutiny unpunished,” and may “come to realize that much more is now allowed than might have seemed.”
Putin has spent a generation insulating himself in the Kremlin’s hall of mirrors and experts suggest that he could be blinded by his ideological delusions. “What he did not mention was that up until the moment he left power, Czar Nicholas II was having tea with his wife, writing banal notes in his diary, and imagining that the ordinary Russian peasants loved him and would always take his side,” Anne Applebaum wrote in the Atlantic, referring to Putin’s Saturday invocation of the events of 1917. “He was wrong.”
