FINANCIAL TIMES Robert Service 11 Hours ago A new road for Russia?

 FINANCIAL  TIMES  Robert Service 11 Hours ago 

A new road for Russia?

A diminished Putin may have survived Prigozhin’s mutiny. But, argues Robert Service, history gives him little ground for optimism

(A highway poster recruiting staff for Wagner is removed from a billboard on the outskirts of St Petersburg last Saturday, the day Putin denounced the military group’s actions as treason and pledged to quell the rebellion © AP)

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Most coups strike governments like lightning, and the thunder is a rumbling aftershock. Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny performed it the other way around. For months, he thundered his protest against the official Russian leadership and, as commander of the Wagner private military company, he had the means to cause a shattering crack in the skyline of Russia’s politics.

But his summer thunderstorm blew over inside 24 hours. Fatalities on both sides were numerically small, and Prigozhin halted the convoy of trucks on Russia’s M4 highway, 400km short of Moscow. After standing down his Wagnerite mercenaries — employees whom he pays from his purse with a huge state subsidy — from their treasonous mission, he protested that he never intended to hurl Vladimir Putin from the pinnacle of presidential power.

Instead, Prigozhin claimed to have wanted to oust his great enemies, defence minister Sergei Shoigu and chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov, from their posts. But he notably added a number of other complaints. Fresh from the fighting in eastern Ukraine, where his men were in the vanguard of Russian forces, he declared on the Telegram messaging app that the entire rationale for the war was flawed. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had been elected as a candidate who wished to find accommodation with the Kremlin. Back in 2019, Zelenskyy was looking for an end to the fight in the Ukrainian east.

(Vladimir Putin and defence minister Sergei Shoigu (saluting) at a war memorial ceremony at the Kremlin on June 22 © AP)

Prigozhin raged against the Russian businessmen who were making fat profits from supplying the army’s needs. Under current Russian legislation, his rant would have merited arrest. Not only did he call the war a war — rather than a “special military operation” — but he derided the decision that had brought it about and implied that the entire landscape of current policy required an urgent transformation.

The Wagner convoy, if it had reached its destination in Moscow, would have resulted in some kind of coup even if Prigozhin was telling the truth when he denied any intention of getting rid of Putin. Success for the Wagnerites would have left Putin a trembling puppet, with Prigozhin pulling his strings. But it was all over before any such result was achieved.

" Putin made a crucial mistake in thinking of Prigozhin as a malleable protégé who was incapable of turning against his benefactor" 

The only mystery is how on Earth Putin failed to see any of this coming, at least on the scale we saw last weekend. Like everyone else in Russia, he had heard Prigozhin for months sounding off about the “scumbags” in the defence ministry and the general staff. Prigozhin was notoriously impulsive and uncompromising. He treated even his own personnel with savage beatings when they fell short of his demands. Stories of bloody punishments were widely told.

But Putin made a crucial mistake in thinking of Prigozhin as a malleable protégé who was incapable of turning against his benefactor. They both came from Leningrad, now St Petersburg. Prigozhin was a career criminal who served time in prison. But he was a quick learner who found ample opportunities for self-enrichment in the Russia that emerged from the tomb of the old USSR. He started a catering business and, with his tough background, excelled in protecting his interests and hammering competitors out of the marketplace.

(Yevgeny Prigozhin serves food to Putin at his restaurant outside Moscow in 2011 . . .  © AP)

. . . and appears on his Telegram channel in May vowing to ‘go to the end’ to topple Russia’s military leadership © Getty Images)

Putin himself, who held senior posts in the St Petersburg city administration, had profitable contacts with the local underworld and Prigozhin was one of his entrepreneurial companions. In later years, when Putin moved to Moscow and became Russian president, Prigozhin established troll farms to send disinformation around the world on Putin’s behalf. When Russian foreign policy needed an unofficial armed contingent to operate in Libya, Syria and central Africa, Prigozhin volunteered to put on military fatigues and lead the Wagner Group.

All those were years of intimate co-operation between Putin and Prigozhin. When Prigozhin railed against war profiteers, he kept quiet about the money he has made as privileged supplier of food to the Russian army. Meanwhile Prigozhin’s outbursts against the Russian defence ministry and the general staff were useful in maintaining Putin’s game of divide-and-rule. With the high aristocracy conducting its internal struggles for preferment, the tsar could rest easy in his bed.

But Putin seriously disturbed the balance of power in early June when, forced to choose between Shoigu and Prigozhin, he announced the compulsory incorporation of the Wagnerites into the official armed forces. Prigozhin was being asked to put himself under Shoigu’s orders. Putin had continually praised the Wagner forces for their valour and effectiveness in the field. Yet now he planned to rob them of their autonomy.

For the long-serving and self-serving Prigozhin, this was an insufferable demand that he thought he had the means to quash. Rostov-on-Don was swiftly occupied and a lengthy convoy of battle-hardened Wagnerites sped unopposed from the south towards the city of Voronezh. As Putin rightly explained, this placed Russia on the precipice of civil war.

The fiasco exposed the inner lineaments of Russian state power. Prigozhin would hardly have launched his mutiny unless he had reason to count on a wide swath of sympathy in the Russian army below the apex occupied by Shoigu and Gerasimov. Soldiers and officers on active service know better than ordinary Russians how badly the war has been going for Russia. Which means that Prigozhin’s latest outburst about the need to face up to the consequences of Putin’s disastrous decision to go to war had the potential to shake morale in the fighting forces.

(Onlookers take pictures on their smartphones as Wagner fighters prepare to leave . . . © Getty Images

. . . and one admirer takes a selfie with Yevgeny Prigozhin © AP)

Putin has made no secret of the fact that he and he alone took that decision. Indeed he has revelled in it. On February 21 2022, just three days before the start of the invasion, Putin teased and humiliated members of his own Security Council about what he intended — and published a video of his bullying performance online. Council members had to sit meekly as they nursed bruised egos.

So now, Putin himself sits uncomfortably on his presidential throne and occupies a political no-man’s land of his own making. Silently, his macho image suffered damage in the Covid years. Instead of muscular handshakes with foreign visitors, he took to talking by phone. He addressed his governing cabinet via Zoom calls. If individuals wished to meet him, they had to stay in medical quarantine in advance. An exception was made for Xi Jinping and Alexander Lukashenko but generally it was made customary for visitors to take chairs at the opposite end of a very long table. Even so, his isolation from public view became a popular topic of conversation, and he began his transmutation from Kremlin Superman to quivering rural resident. No more the sparky judo champion or ice-hockey amateur of previous days.

The war has done more damage than Covid to Putin’s power and status. Until February 2022, he had ultimate mastery of the machinery of state. Those who jibbed at his vision of Russia’s future had been winnowed out of office. Truculent so-called oligarchs such as Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky had been thrust aside.

(Putin hosts a meeting at his very long table with defence minister Sergei Shoigu (second left) last year © Getty Images)

Berezovsky was granted asylum in the UK but died in still undetermined circumstances in 2013. Khodorkovsky opted to stay in Moscow, only to be arrested and imprisoned, before fleeing abroad.

Mikhail Kasyanov, prime minister in Putin’s first government, was pushed out of office in 2004 for objecting to the emergent policy programme that Putin wanted from him. Liberal politician Boris Nemtsov was murdered on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015. Opposition activist Alexei Navalny was poisoned by novichok in 2020; although he recovered in Germany, he was put on trial on returning to Moscow and thrown into a prison camp where he is still held today.

While all this occurred, Putin has been a loyal boss for those who agreed to toe his line. He guarantees a cornucopia of rewards for compliance and competence, and his leading officials enjoy plush apartments and the high life. Even if they can no longer moor their yachts on the French Riviera, their bank accounts bulge with the profits of power.

"Other members of Russia’s ruling elite are capable of acting on their recognition that Putin is herding the country into a hell hole"

Some liberals, too, have succumbed to temptation and compromised their political credos. One of president Boris Yeltsin’s last prime ministers, Sergei Kiriyenko, recanted his life-long liberalism and now works as Putin’s first deputy chief of staff. Dmitry Medvedev, whom Putin allowed to serve as president in 2008-12 and who sought a framework of partnership with the west, has turned himself into a policy hawk. Medvedev talks recklessly about crushing Poland and using nuclear weapons if Russia encounters unseen difficulties.

As for Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev, who always shouted his anti-westernism more loudly than Putin himself, his influence steadily gained in prominence. Shoigu, Putin’s favoured holiday companion, was made defence minister to improve efficiency in the armed forces — and he survived in office despite the scorn poured on him by Prigozhin.

A compact group of loyalists, then? I doubt it. Just as Prigozhin astounded Russia and the world with his mutiny, so others in the ruling elite are capable of acting on their recognition that Putin is herding the country into a hell hole. All of them are used to thinking soberly about the geopolitical environment — none more so than Patrushev, former head of the Federal Security Service, whom Putin brought with him from St Petersburg and who is nothing if not a glacial calculator.

(Mikhail Mishustin, Russia’s prime minister (left), on Moscow’s Red Square with former president Dmitry Medvedev on May 9 2021 © Reuters    )

There are also boisterous weathervanes such as Medvedev, and prime minister Mikhail Mishustin may not be the compliant technocrat that he appears. Who yet knows? None of them are prissy about taking harsh measures. The time may come when — if Putin won’t change his policy and behaviour or won’t go quietly — they will prove they have the collective temperament to show him the door.

It wouldn’t be easy. No coup is. The easiest coup in modern Russian history occurred in the February 1917 revolution, when the semi-autocratic bubble of the Romanov dynasty burst and Tsar Nicholas II submitted his abdication at the behest of parliamentary politicians while street demonstrations were bringing normal life to a halt in wartime Petrograd. After the communists seized power in the October 1917 revolution, they faced a serious threat that did not end with the ensuing civil war; the anti-communist mutiny by the Kronstadt naval garrison in 1921 off the coast near Petrograd had the potential to spread like a wildfire at a time when industrial strikes and peasant revolts were intensifying. Brutal military measures had to be introduced by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky to suppress the rebellions.

The USSR steadily pacified but the Communist party itself remained in an agitated condition. During Joseph Stalin’s ascendancy after Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin kept a sharp eye on those who expressed concerns about him. More than once he submitted his resignation from Communist party offices, mainly in an attempt to see whether anyone had the gumption to accept it — and he went on to murder his principal challengers Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev in ensuing years, once he had consolidated his supremacy.

"Even if Putin’s entourage bites the bullet and removes him, it is far from clear that they will put Putinism into reverse gear"

Stalin became a Soviet dictator who terrified all who worked for him. But a kind of coup happened in 1953 when his surviving associates chose to deny him medical intervention after he collapsed at his dacha in Kuntsevo outside Moscow. Stalin slumped into unconsciousness and expired. His successor Nikita Khrushchev himself tumbled from office in 1964 after a vote in the Politburo. His comrades had had enough of his arrogance, economic mismanagement and humiliating handling of the Cuba missile crisis. Khrushchev prided himself on agreeing to go without making a fuss.

Coups require strong nerves and utter ruthlessness from their organisers. KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov mounted a coup against USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991, the plotters holding Gorbachev responsible for the economic ruin and administrative chaos that had flowed from his programme of reforms to communism.

(A man stands on barricades in central Moscow during the August 1991 coup . . . © Alamy

 . . as the Communist hardliners who sought to oust Mikhail Gorbachev sent a convoy of tanks into the city © AP)

After putting Gorbachev under house arrest in a palatial dacha on the Black Sea coast, Kryuchkov shrank from suppressing the protesting crowds in central Moscow, and his fellow conspirators melted into inactivity. Defence minister Dmitry Yazov sank into depression. Others drank themselves into mindlessness, and then prime minister Valentin Pavlov consigned himself to hospital.

Brutal power-mongers became patty-cake insurrectionaries awaiting their own inevitable arrest. Gorbachev was liberated but his power and standing never recovered, and the USSR itself fell apart at the end of the year. The shambles of the August events helped to dissolve the foundations of Soviet communism.

Whether Putin’s comrades will show the necessary amplitude of bravado in moving against him is an open question. The war has aggravated the grievous problems of Putin’s rule. Foolishly, for a believer in a multipolar world, Putin continually baited the US rather than using it to counterbalance China — and his interference in the 2016 US presidential election did much to rally American public opinion against him.

This was a staggering abstention from realpolitik. Putin also unnecessarily endorsed a terror campaign against defectors such as Alexander Litvinenko, whose 2006 assassination in London framed global attitudes against Russia. In 2014 Putin imprudently invaded Crimea: this had the effect of ratcheting up the economic sanctions that have done much to stunt the benefit his country had from full integration into the world economy. In 2022 alone, he frightened more than a quarter of a million Russians into taking flight from his new Russia with its militarist police state — and most of them have the skills and verve that his country can ill-afford to lose.

It has all turned out so differently from what it could have been when Yeltsin appointed Putin as his heir apparent. George W Bush said he could “get a sense of his soul” and found Putin “straightforward and trustworthy”. Putin started with an understanding of the need for freedoms of the market and civic initiative, but now enforces a brand of state capitalism for cronies. Hopes for a liberated and democratic Russia, such as existed in the 1990s, have been pounded into oblivion. Putin’s PR flair in hosting the 2018 Fifa World Cup and annual Formula One grand prix in the 2010s have come to naught.

Russia’s most recent history textbooks have been rewritten to emphasise statehood at the expense of individual self-determination. Russia, already a police state, is being indoctrinated by bellicosity and xenophobia. Social protest movements are handled violently by the security agencies. Poetry and rock music may continue to offer a challenge to this appalling result, but they offer only a palliative and not a cure.

(Putin meets a group of people in Dagestan this week 

© EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

Putin still has levers of compulsion that he can pull. He controls national TV news output and can put on a good show, even glad-handing the Russian youngsters he avoided during the pandemic. He can fire generals who refused to obstruct Prigozhin, and there must be several of them.

But the fact remains that he is the principal author of the entire mess. The pity is that if Putin’s entourage bites the bullet and removes him or claws down his presidential status, it is far from clear that they will put Putinism entirely into reverse gear. They are drugged with the delights of his vision of Great Russia.

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Ultimate power in Russia, moreover, lies with the Russian army and the FSB. All the ministries and big business are infiltrated by secret policemen. Corruption and malfeasance pervades every regional and city administration. Liberal politicians are hardly known outside educated circles, and the extra-parliamentary far-right groupings have never been more brazen. As the great poet Boris Pasternak wrote: “Getting through life is not a stroll across a field.” For nearly 24 years under Putin, Russia has been hauled back into a barbed-wire condominium from which reformers such as Gorbachev and Yeltsin struggled to liberate it. We may well discover that a coup brings an era to its end without solving its problems — and without the televised spectacle of a race of rebel military trucks along the Russian M4 highway.

Robert Service is emeritus professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford.

His book ‘Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution, 1917-1924’ will be published by Picador on November 9

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