“It is a stab in the back of our country and our people,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told his nation Saturday as he faced an unprecedented challenge from his former ally, Yevgeny Prighozin, head of the Wagner mercenary group.
“This was the same kind of blow that Russia felt in 1917, when the country entered World War I, but had victory stolen from it. Intrigues, squabbles, politicking behind the backs of the army and the people turned out to be the greatest shock, the destruction of the army, the collapse of the state, the loss of vast territories, and in the end, the tragedy and civil war. Russians killed Russians, brothers killed brothers.”
As often happens, Putin’s version of history wasn’t fully accurate. For one thing, Russia entered the war in 1914, but the convulsion he described did begin in 1917, with the overthrow of the Tsar and the outbreak of a revolution and eventually a civil war. The Soviet regime that emerged from the chaos would rule Russia and its empire as a totalitarian state until 1991.
The events of the past few days represented a shocking escalation of the simmering conflict between Prighozin and the defense ministry, which accused him of attempting a coup while he contended that military brass ordered an attack on his soldiers.
When Putin declared in his speech that the revolt was a betrayal and must be put down, Prighozin replied that the president was “deeply mistaken,” though he later said he was turning around his troops rather than march to Moscow. And the Kremlin said the standoff was resolved through discussions with the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko.
Whatever happens now, the episode was a striking sign that, as the nation grapples with its losses in Ukraine, Putin’s hold on power may no longer be unquestioned.
“The Russians were not stabbed in the back during World War I, as Putin suggested during his remarks on Saturday,” wrote Peter Bergen. “In fact, they fought a ruinous land war in Europe that was characterized by the extreme incompetence of Nicholas II and his senior leadership. As Russian losses on the battlefield mounted, Russian soldiers mutinied, helping to instigate the 1917 revolution. Sound familiar?”
“A keen student of Russian history, Putin is aware of the stakes here. His invocation of the events in 1917 shows that he knows that the Wagner group mutiny may pose an existential threat to his regime. He has expunged pretty much all resistance by any civilian organizations, so he only faces a real threat from Russian military forces.”
Prighozin was a menace Putin himself created, wrote CNN’s Nathan Hodge. The Wagner force served the Russian president as a useful tool he could control for foreign adventures. But, Hodge noted, “by giving Prigozhin free rein to raise a private army, Putin both unleashed the political ambitions of the businessman and surrendered the state’s monopoly on the use of force.” He pointed out that “the ‘stab in the back’ narrative around Germany’s defeat” in World War I “was one of the myths that helped propel the Nazis to power.”
Putin’s weakened position was not a complete surprise. When Putin met recently with war correspondents and bloggers, wrote Mark Galeotti, “he was implicitly acknowledging three things: that the Kremlin is having trouble spinning its war in Ukraine, that unofficial commentators are in their own way as powerful as the state media machine and that the confident official narrative is failing to get much traction.”
“At times, Putin seemed unaware of the details of the war he so notoriously tries to micromanage, and at times keen to distance himself from it.”
“Whatever might be going wrong was, of course, always someone else’s responsibility.”
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