For a millisecond it seemed possible.
Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the Russian caterer turned warlord – armed with tanks and a private army – showed Russia and the world what an alternative to President Vladimir V. Putin could look like.
It was only the second time in Putin’s 23 years in power that a rebel leader with populist appeal had a vision of a conceivable post-Putin Russia. The other occasion was in 2011, when Aleksei A. Navalny led a pro-democracy uprising in the streets of the capital.
By the time Mr. Prigozhin’s mercenaries marched on Moscow, he was trying to draw his firepower from the same core grievance as Mr. Navalny: that Putinism is a system without accountability, run by a clique of corrupt officials more interested in themselves enrich and please the boss than by doing what is good for the country.
The similarities end there. Last weekend’s extraordinary events not only demonstrated Mr Putin’s vulnerability to a power grab, but also the prospect that what comes next could stem from the extreme and unpredictable forces unleashed by the Russian president during his costly war against Ukraine . Mr. Prigozhin, whose mercenaries have been accused of indiscriminate killings and other crimes, made it clear that those forces could be equally if not grimmer.
“Wars are incredibly destabilizing. This is how history is constantly changing,” said Max Bergmann, the director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “It’s totally destabilizing and it leads to a cultural backlash – you don’t know exactly how that will manifest. I don’t think we know which way Russia is going.”
In that short span of turmoil and uncertainty, what was once unthinkable was momentarily more than theoretical, raising questions about how the old Russian leader might go and what might come next.
Western governments, including the United States, pointed to cracks in Putin’s autocratic leadership. A senior member of his own party, Konstantin Zatulin, acknowledged that Mr Putin Mr. Prigozhin’s risk had festered far too long, and that the episode “extended no one’s authority.” Centers of power in Russia – the military, the oligarchs, Putin’s inner circle – were analyzed for possible successors.
No credible names emerged, and in a matter of days Putin had at least restored a veneer of balance to Russian politics, with a series of performances designed to convey a firm grip on power and lasting popularity .
“I wish you health! I hope you live to be 100!” a woman yelled at the Russian president in the southern city of Derbent, where, days after the uprising, Mr Putin found a crowd screaming with joy in a scene that was a stark contrast to his years of Covid isolation.
Yet Mr. Prigozhin, now exiled to Belarus and confusing his Wagner mercenary group, had shown how anyone willing to tell hard truths about the Russian government’s mistakes in Ukraine could find a sympathetic audience, as long as the person but not aiming. personally with Mr. Putin.
Before resigning, Prigozhin built support by combining a populist anti-elitist corruption crusade with calls to transform Russia, at least temporarily, into a version of Kim Jong-un’s North Korea or Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. looking for victory in Ukraine.
He drew on dissatisfaction with an inexplicable system and a distant elite in the midst of Russian losses on the battlefield. But he also responded to a desire, among an aggressive sector of Russian society, to go to much greater extremes if necessary, at one point attacking Moscow’s “weak grandpas” for not having the “balls” to to use nuclear weapons.
His message towards the end was contradictory – suggesting that a dramatic escalation was necessary for the war to succeed, while also denouncing the Kremlin’s entire stated rationale for the war against Ukraine as false. He was a curious messenger, attacking the system responsible for his own wealth and impunity.
But his apparent anger at the deaths of Russian soldiers while answering to leaders with little accountability had money.
“The lower and middle officers, along with the soldiers on the actual battlefield, treated him partly with understanding,” said Leonid Ivashov, a retired Russian general who has opposed the war. “He gave voice to the poor organization of military action, to the poor supplies and to the dying.”
While the uprising could portend more instability for Putin, the events could also present him with an opportunity to consolidate his power and circle the wagons, possibly through further repression.
Mr. Prigozhin is largely a unique figure in Russia, with few others having a platform, a battlefield history and a private army at their disposal to launch an insurrection.
Already, allies such as the head of the national guard, Viktor V. Zolotov, Putin’s former bodyguard, appear poised to gain influence as the Russian leader ensures the country’s armed forces remain loyal to him.
“I am absolutely confident that the regime, despite its weakness, successfully survived the mutiny and resumed its normal course,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a research institute. “I don’t see any forces capable of repeating Prigozhin’s experience. Putin was scared, but that doesn’t mean his regime is falling apart.”
Since Mr. Putin came to power in Russia at the turn of the millennium, he has been diligent in stamping out potential political threats.
Early on, he focused on the class of oligarchs who had risen to power in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He imprisoned the oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky and made it clear to other industrial leaders that they would suffer the same fate if they did not fall into line.
In more recent years, Putin has turned his sights on the country’s pro-democracy opposition. Mr Navalny was poisoned and subsequently imprisoned as part of a wider crackdown on liberal activists. That repression has escalated since the beginning of the war, leaving most of the movement’s leaders in exile or prison.
However, Mr Putin’s approach to the far right was different. As the war got underway, nationalist forces that could theoretically pose a threat to him were given room to operate and at times criticize the military, in part for their usefulness in prosecuting and promoting the war. Mr. Prigozhin was Exhibit A.
For months he was allowed to publicly rant against Russia’s military leadership, even as Russians were persecuted across the country for speaking much less. He was isolated in part by the necessity of his troops on the battlefield; he entered the fray as the Russian army struggled for personnel, and the eventual capture of Bakhmut by the Wagner forces is a rare Russian battlefield success in Ukraine.
Mr Prigozhin’s actions raised the possibility that someone long associated with Mr Putin could act against the Russian leader’s government, even though the Russian leader has ensured that only his most trusted associates hold positions of power around him. occupy.
Mr Khodorkovsky, who was released from Russian prison in 2013 and has been living abroad ever since, publicly called on Russians to take up arms and support Mr Prigozhin shortly after the uprising began.
He described the Russian mercenary as “no friend of democracy” and a “bandit”, but said Mr Prigozhin functioned as a useful knife, cutting away “the malignant Kremlin tumor that has plagued the country for 20 years”. He suggested that Russians pursuing democracy could simply try to remove Mr Prigozhin afterwards.
The backlash among Russian liberals was swift.
“Any call to overthrow the government by force and take power by force can only lead to a government based on total violence,” Lev M. Shlosberg, an opposition politician, wrote in a Telegram post.
Mr Navalny recalled in a statement released from prison that he had heard about the events of the past weekend from his lawyers.
He commented on the irony of Mr Prigozhin and his fighters being allowed to go unpunished for organizing a mutiny while being accused of setting up an extremist organization aimed at violently overthrowing Mr Putin .
Mr Navalny said any future for the country after Putin should be decided by free elections.
“It is not democracy, human rights and parliaments that make a government weak and convulsive,” he said. “It is dictatorships and the usurpation of power that lead to barricades, government weakness and chaos. Always.”
Anton Trojanovsky reporting contributed.