The Remains of a Rebellion

WITH THE WISDOM of hindsight it’s easy to say the Wagner Group’s rebellion, or mutiny, would have failed against the might of the Russian state. Where was the surprise? In the ‘mutiny’ itself? Or the speed with which Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenaries took Rostov-on-Don, followed by Voronezh, and were two-thirds of their way on to Moscow? Perhaps we were surprised by how vul­nerable the man in the Kremlin looked for those 24-odd hours of mayhem? Maybe it was the sudden end to the march on Moscow?

After the deal was struck, Vladimir Putin’s first prime minister and now defector Mikhail Kasyanov told a Western media outlet that Prigozhin can’t stop in Belarus and would need to hide away in Africa—a continent not unfamiliar to Wagner but where its future is now uncertain. The issue is not so much the disloyalty that Putin never forgives but the fact that Prigozhin unleashed what could, in the long term, turn out to be the beginning of the end of the regime. In a throwback to the last decade of the Soviet Union’s existence when the emaciated core of the system was laid bare, although it wasn’t noticed everywhere, Moscow suddenly looks vulnerable within—on top of the weakness with­out exposed by a war of its own making. That is Prigozhin’s sin.

The clue to what Prigozhin has exposed lies in the contrast between what Putin called his actions in a national address last weekend—treason—and the amnesty given to the Wagner chief with the FSB dropping all charges and letting him move to Belar­us. How could a ‘traitor’ be ‘pardoned’ so easily? Prigozhin hasn’t been just another political opponent. From confidant to rebel, he is the only Kremlin critic who has led tanks towards Moscow. How did he get the deal? How much does he know? Of course a lot, but then the Putin regime never liked ‘clean’ operatives because they would not be eas­ily blackmailed or controlled. What did they get him to do that would sink one and all? We know quite a lot but nowhere near everything. By the time Putin’s next national address came on June 27, Rus­sians were expecting something big (and bad), but the five minutes belied those hopes (and fears). The unpredictability of the Kremlin’s predictable hardening post-Prigozhin, too, is a mark of what has happened.

When his antecedents were excavated after his name became associated with the Kremlin’s outer—never inner—circle, first as “Putin’s chef”, there was no surprise in the discovery that Prigozhin hailed from St Petersburg. Where else but the ex-KGB mediocrity and ex-FSB boss’ hometown where many of Putin’s trusted men—but not Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, Prigozhin’s bête noire—come from? (Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face (2012), on the significance of St Petersburg for the post-Soviet career of Putin and his buddies, can still explain the rise and fall of all the Prigozhins of Russia.) Now it’s been revealed that Prigozhin was forced to advance the march on Moscow— not a coup against Putin as he maintained—when his plans were leaked, and his two targets for detention (abduction?), Shoigu and Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov, got wind of the plot. Putin reputedly likes to play one loyalist against another, keeping his authority unthreatened as the factions compete, and Prigozhin’s unabated verbal attack on Shoigu (and Gerasimov) worked as part of the pattern. Till it ceased to be only verbal.

Shoigu, as far removed socially and geographically from the remnants of the old nomenklatura or the oligarchy in its Yeltsin and Putin avatars, is more than a survivor—no Putin confidant has lasted as long as he has in as risky a job as his. Mark Galeotti’s recent book, Putin’s Wars (2022), shows how, after a string of mostly capable and reformist but eventually exhausted (or scan­dalised) defence ministers—Igor Sergeyev, Sergei Ivanov and Anatoliy Serdyukov—in Shoigu Russia found the rational, methodical, empiri­cal ‘engineer’ who would complete the transformation of the military into a 21st-century fighting machine. Shoigu didn’t have a military background. But then the Crimean annexation and the intervention in Syria established his credentials. The unravelling finally began when Russia invaded Ukraine— a war Shoigu, reportedly, was reluctant about. The pertinent question since February-March 2022: Exactly what sort of modernisation and prepared­ness did the Russian military invade Ukraine with? Prigozhin, who made his money from the government contracts to supply food to Russia’s schools, military bases, etc and had long denied any con­nection with Wagner, stepped into that widening gap between Putin’s hopes and the battleground reality.

The man behind the St Petersburg troll factory—the Internet Research Agency—was not the only one with a private army but his motley crew of ex-special services men and convicts captured Bakhmut after eight months of fighting. At that stage of the war, that seemed better than much of what the military had achieved. Did Prigozhin, whose invective-laden social media broadcasts from Ukraine soon turned on his homeland, get angry because the military establishment was really short-changing his men on equipment? Was it to favour other private armies (even Shoigu has one)? With the Wagner dead in Ukraine as his backdrop, Priogizhin had cried murder. Then on June 13, he lost an impor­tant political and personal battle when Putin showed his hand and backed Shoigu’s plans to get all mercenaries to sign contracts with the military. Prigozhin’s catering business was already under threat; his military allies had fallen to the disappointment of the Ukrainian campaign. The contracts were the last straw. If he lost control of Wagner, Prigozhin would lose it all.

And yet, all of that is irrelevant. Prigozhin is an extreme case of an all-too-familiar Russian phenomenon and a lesson for Putin. He was used because the deniability of Wagner’s ac­tions—accused of many counts of savagery and massacre across a substantial global geography—helped the state. But the state’s balance sheet was getting overwhelmed by one liability.

It’s easy to say instability in Russia would have helped Ukraine. Yes, if the Russian military had to withdraw; if the ranks had joined the rebels. But instability in a giant state is usually not a good thing. That would have been the primary thought in South Block in New Delhi, where a Russian implosion, however unlikely, would have meant not just a problem of oil and arms sourcing but a geopolitical catastrophe waiting to engulf Central Asia. What was theory has been brought closer to practice thanks to Prigozhin.

In choosing Shoigu-Gerasimov (did he have a choice?) perhaps Putin precluded an even worse version of himself. In 23 years, he was never made to look so weak. The latter address marked a change in diction and tone where Putin appeared to climb down to the level of the “Dear Friends” he began with. He distinguished between the ordinary Wagner fighters who were ‘patriots’ and the leaders of the rebellion who had ‘betrayed’ the country. In the Putinist worldview, patriotism is the one test the Russian can’t fail. Of course, it was ‘Russia’s enemies’— Ukraine, the West, and the traitors—who were behind Prigozhin’s mutiny because the poison can only be injected from the outside. With Prigozhin’s exile and the contract-signing or disbanding of Wagner, the antidote, it will be argued, has been administered. But what’s left of the Putinist state if it cannot punish its enemies, especially the enemies within?

Prigozhin’s prediction that “[t]heir [dead soldiers’] mothers, their wives, their children will come and eat them [the military establishment] alive when the time comes… we have only about two to three months before the executions” was made with more sincerity than his tears for the Wagner dead. For now, Russian missiles will keep killing in Ukraine—women, children, twin sisters, et al. Inside Russia, it is another story. Although he may have no hand in what happens hereafter, in two days Prigozhin seems to have done more damage than all of Putin’s political opponents could do over two decades.

RussiaSergei ShoiguUkraine crisisVladimir PutinYevgeny Prigozhin