Wagner’s mutiny has age-old echoes of another Russian debacle
While Russian soldiers braced themselves in their trenches in Ukraine, a charismatic military leader suddenly marched his troops towards the capital. He promised to save the nation from traitors who drove it to catastrophic military defeat.
The rebels stopped short of their target, but the repercussions of the mutiny contributed to Russia falling apart shortly afterwards. The already weakened army collapsed, the government fell apart and the country descended into a devastating civil war.
These events took place in 1917, but they seemed to be on President Vladimir V. Putin’s mind as he responded to a lightning attack on Moscow by mutinous mercenaries this weekend. The uprising had once again exposed the danger of Russia’s involvement in a protracted, seemingly unwinnable war, showing how domestic tensions can suddenly break through the country’s authoritarian facade of stability.
Mr. Putin, an amateur revisionist historian, devoted a significant portion of his first televised speech during the mutiny to Russia’s demise in World War I.
“Intrigues, power struggles, political games behind the backs of the army and the people have led to enormous shocks, the collapse of the army and the state,” he said Friday evening.
He seemed to refer to the aftermath of Russia’s February Revolution in 1917, when dissatisfaction with Russia’s disastrous prosecution of the war overthrew the monarchy and paved the way for the Bolshevik takeover eight months later, in the more famous October Revolution.
It was in that unstable period that the charismatic nationalist officer General Lavr Kornilov marched his troops from the front to Petrograd, modern St. Petersburg, the capital of that time. His goal was to seize power and restore order.
Both men justified their actions by presenting themselves as the nation’s last defense against chaos, using the media of their time to cultivate an image of mystery and power.
Kornilov, a Siberian Cossack, appeared in public surrounded by a bodyguard of Turkmen cavalrymen, and in 1917 posters with his likeness graced the streets of Moscow. media videos of the front lines surrounded by heavily armed members of his Wagner paramilitaries with their faces covered.
The eventual leader of Russia’s anti-Bolshevik armies, General Anton Denikin, described Kornilov as “an ensign. For some of counter-revolution, for others of the salvation of the motherland.
With similar symbolism, Mr. Prigozhin called his troops’ attack on Moscow “the march of justice.”
Both men arrived at their destination within hours of their journey, only stopping when the prospect of massive carnage became a certainty.
Kornilov’s cavalry division halted just outside Petrograd despite sabotage by leftist railway workers and pleas from civil society leaders. His attempted coup, though short-lived, had dealt a fatal blow to the already weakened caretaker government of moderate socialist Aleksandr Kerensky, leaving him powerless to prevent a Bolshevik uprising a month later.
The failure of Kornilov’s plan also accelerated the disintegration of the Russian army. As with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine the previous year, Russia entered World War I in 1914 expecting a quick conflict. Instead, the army got caught up in a losing battle of attrition against the better-armed Germany in the territory of present-day Ukraine and other western parts of the former Russian Empire.
“The consequences for the military leadership were catastrophic,” wrote Yale University historian Laura Engelstein of Kornilov’s attempted coup in her book on the Russian Revolution, “Russia in Flames.”
Kornilov’s chief field officer, General Aleksandr Krymov, shot himself shortly afterwards. Kornilov and several other senior military commanders were arrested. On the front lines more and more soldiers refused to obey orders, deserted and shot their officers, as Germany pushed deeper into Russia.
Similarly, Mr. Prigozhin’s battle-hardened armored columns traveled from occupied Ukraine, stopping about 200 kilometers outside Russia’s modern capital, Moscow, after encountering minimal opposition from troops loyal to the Kremlin. Prigozhin’s flight to Moscow pierced Putin’s aura of invincibility, exposing the shaky security apparatus behind his rule and forcing him to offer amnesty to the rebels to avoid a costly battle.
“Russia’s hope that a protracted war is in its favor and that it can survive Ukraine is a dangerous illusion,” wrote Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Moscow-based security research group Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies. “Prolonging the war entails great political risks for the Russian Federation.”
Mr. Putin and the majority of Russia’s influential pro-war military commentators have denounced Wagner’s mutiny as a stab in the back. They say it has undermined the military as it tries to repel a wide-ranging offensive from Ukrainian assault divisions trained and armed by NATO states.
Wagner’s destruction of several Russian military aircraft and their crews on their march to Moscow has only fueled charges of treason.
“Everything is allowed now,” Igor Girkin, a former Russian paramilitary leader and prominent war blogger, wrote of Wagner’s mutiny. The authority of Mr. Putin has been “completely destroyed almost everywhere,” he added.
It is still too early to measure the impact of Mr. Prigozhin’s uprising on the Russian armed forces. Russia’s main defenses have generally held up since Kiev launched its counter-offensive in early June, but the pace of Ukrainian advance seems to have picked up somewhat since the mutiny.
In recent days, Ukraine has liberated the strategic village of Rivnopil in the Donetsk region, and Russian military bloggers have claimed that Ukrainian soldiers captured swampy riparian areas along the Dnipro River, near the southern city of Kherson, in possible preparation for a wide-ranging attack in that area.
Like Kornilov, Mr. Prigozhin has sometimes exaggerated the Russian military’s difficulties to justify his radical actions.
“Russia will wake up one day and realize that even Crimea has been surrendered to Ukraine,” Prigozhin said three days before the uprising. He claimed, without providing evidence, that the Ukrainian counter-offensive was rapidly retaking land.
The analogy between the two leaders is not perfect, said Ms. Engelstein, the historian. Kornilov was an Imperial officer who tried to restore central authority. Mr. Prigozhin, on the other hand, is a rogue paramilitary leader who tried to overthrow the military command.
Yet both men have adopted similar solutions to their countries’ perceived problems.
“Like Prigozhin, Kornilov believed that Russia’s setbacks in the war it was waging were caused by the weakness of civilian leaders,” Ms. Engelstein said.
After his arrest, Kornilov finally reached southern Russia, where he organized an armed resistance against Bolshevik rule. He died in one of the first battles of the ensuing civil war in Russia.
Following Russia’s decision not to prosecute Mr Prigozhin for his uprising, he is said to have arrived in Belarus on Tuesday. While he has not commented on his plans for the future, his latest statements suggest that the end of the mutiny has not dampened his public ambitions.
“Many are disappointed that we stopped,” Prigozhin said in an audio message Monday, referring to ordinary Russians. “Because in the march of justice, in addition to our struggle for survival, they saw support for their fight against the bureaucracy and other vices that exist in our country.”