Jumping to conclusions about the Prigozhin putsch attempt (or whatever it actually was)
There was a coup attempt in Russia on Saturday led by Wagner mercenary group head, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Lots of people rushed to put out their pet theories about it. Doing so if often a good way to say things you may find embarrassing a few days later. And the Very Serious People (VSPs) didn’t have their usual range of Serious Thoughts prepared for this contingency.
Branko Marcetic took note of the trend.1
The Atlantic wasted no time on Saturday slapping a dramatic headline and subhead onto an Anne Applebaum essay.2
Former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul somehow managed to conclude that Saturday’s events mean that no matter what Ukraine or any NATO countries do in escalating the current war, Russia - or Putin at least - will not retaliate by escalating in retaliation.3
This steps on the Cold War 2.0 narrative that says Putin will refuse to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine War because he’s such a relentless, ruthless imperialist ideologue. At least McFaul sees Putin as willing to negotiate under some circumstance. Although since there seems to have been minimal conflict between Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries and the Russian Army, I’m not sure if Saturday’s events offer a case of “losing on the battlefield.”
McFaul used the same argument on Meet the Press Sunday morning.4 It’s notable that McFaul refers to Saturday’s events as a “game of chicken” in which Putin “blinked.” Foreign policy as testosterone contest is so deeply embedded in the VSPs’ thinking that they just can’t seem to resist. Since the actual events are currently still known only to a few, would it really be so hard for the VSPs to just say, look, we don’t know what happened but here are a few contingencies we should keep in mind?
Even the reliably anti-Russia-hawk Anne Applebaum noted that she was more cautious than McFaul in her assessment in the panel discussion later in the program.
Russia expert Gerhard Mangott of the University of Innsbruck, whose commentary on the current was has been sound, wasn’t impressed with a lot of the initial reactions on Saturday.5
Translation: “I’m amazed if some colleagues are practically celebrating over the current events in Russia. But that is not an attempt at armed rebellion in Liechtenstein, but rather in the biggest nuclear power in the world in quantitative terms.”
Timothy Snyder is a good historian and a close observer of rightwing authoritarianism in the West and in Russia.6 He is also rigidly anti-Russian and dogmatically anti-Communist in the old Cold War sense. In his early take on last Saturday’s coup attempt, he displays some of the important weaknesses of those traits. He confidently lists 10 lessons he takes immediately from Saturday, ranging from the banal to the speculative:
Putin is not popular.
Prigozhin was a threat to Putin, because he does much the same things that Putin does, and leverages Putin's own assets.
Prigozhin told the truth about the war.
Russia is far less secure than it was before invading Ukraine.
When backed into a corner, Putin saves himself.
The top participants were fascists, and fascists can feud.
The division in Russia was real, and will likely endure.
One of Putin's crimes against Russia is his treatment of the opposition.
This was a preview of how the war in Ukraine ends.
Events in Russia (like events in Ukraine) are in large measure determined by the choices of Russians (or Ukrainians).
Item 6 is a good example of Snyder’s perspective. He argues that Putin is a fascist and Prigozhin is, too (both claims plausible enough). There are unlikely to be any “good” sides in Russia for Snyder anytime soon. He makes the quirky comment that Russia “is more clearly fascist than Mussolini's Italy, which invented the term.“ More fascist than the original Fascist Party?!?
In Item 7, he draws this broad conclusion about what Saturday’s events say about Russian public opinion more generally. “Some Russians wanted action, others could not imagine change. Most Russians probably do not care much, but those who do are not of the same opinion.” One can only wonder how he concluded that within a day or so of the events that are still murky to just about everyone.
It might prove hard for Russian propagandists to find any heroes in the story, since for the most part no one resisted Wagner's march on Moscow. If Wagner was so horrible, why did everyone just let it go forward? If the Russian ministry of defense is so effective, why did it do so little? If Putin is in charge, why did he run away, and leave even the negotiating to Lukashenko of Belarus? If Lukashenko is the hero of the story, what does that say about Putin?
Snyder is caught here between holding up Putin as the Big Bad as long as he is in power and assuming that any future Russian leader - most of which will almost surely not be to his liking - will also be a worse-than-Fascist-fascist, too.
Item 9‘s prediction that Saturday’s coup was “a preview of how the war in Ukraine ends” is pretty enigmatic. As vague prognostications tend to be. So, how does this analogy to Saturday’s coup attempt work? Russia starts a counter-offensive, the Ukrainian President says nasty things about them on TV but doesn’t put up any military resistance, and then the Russians give up and quickly withdraw from all Ukrainian territory?
That analogy probably needs some work. This is also fairly cryptic under that item:
Moscow elites who think ahead should want those troops withdrawn [from Ukraine] now. On its present trajectory, Russia is likely to face an internal power struggle sooner rather than later. That is how wars end: when the pressure is felt inside the political system. Those who want this war to end should help Ukrainians exert that pressure. [my emphasis]
Cold War 2.0 enthusiasts are fond of the idea that the Russia of today will collapse like the Soviet Union did in 1991. But it’s a surprising generalization to say that wars in general end “when the pressure is felt inside the political system.“ The Second World War in Europe ended when Germany’s army and government collapsed. The short-lived post-Hitler government didn’t take a poll to see whether German citizens were happy about continuing it.
Even in the Bolshevik Revolution analogy that The Atlantic’s headline writers used above, Russia had two revolutions in 1917 (February and October) largely because of public outrage about the war. But even though Lenin’s government was willing to offer huge concessions to the Central Powers (and did at Brest-Litovsk), the war and externally-backed civil war carried on until November 1920.7 With enormous implications for Ukraine, in particular.
Wars end for lots of reasons, not all of them reducible to “pressure [being] felt inside the political system.” And, to repeat the old cliche, in wars the enemy has a say. Short of a complete rout of the Russian forces or voluntary withdrawal by the Russian government from the Ukraine war, external pressure will be asserted by Ukraine and NATO. Two sentences later, Snyder writes, “Events in Russia (like events in Ukraine) are in large measure determined by the choices of Russians (or Ukrainians). In the US we have the imperialist habit of denying agency to both parties in this conflict.”
A related comment in the essay appears to be a “tell”: “The Putin regime exists, and the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are relatively wealthy, thanks to the colonial exploitation of hydrocarbon resources in Siberia.” (my emphasis)
As Snyder himself documents at length in his book Bloodlands, both Germany and the Soviet Union (and Imperial Russia before that) had a “colonial” attitude toward Ukraine.8 So did Poland, Lithuania, and the Austro-Hungarian empire.9
But Siberia today as a colony of Russia? No doubt the indigenous people in the region were colonized by Russian expansion there from the 16th to the 19th centuries. New Cold Warriors love the idea of the current Russian Republic breaking up into smaller political units. But it’s worth remembering that the Soviet Union at its end in 1991 consisted of 15 separate soviet republics, all of which then became independent countries, Russia and Ukraine included. Siberia was not a soviet republic. It was and is part of the Russian Federation.
Those who like the idea of the current Russia breaking up further should considered one of The Boss’ more Catholic-tinged songs: “With every wish, there comes a curse.”10 When the USSR dissolved, only Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan had nuclear weapons. How many new countries in a theoretical post-Russia world would have nukes?
At the end of his essay, Snyder writes:
Putin choose to invade Ukraine for reasons that made sense to him inside the system he built. Prigozhin resisted Putin for reasons that made sense to him as someone who had profited from that system from the inside. The mutiny was a choice within Putin's war of choice, and it exemplifies the disaster Putin has brought to his country. [my emphasis]
Snyder here seems to endorse a practical observation shared by international-relations “realist” theories and various other foreign-policy perspectives, i.e., that a country’s leaders act on their perceptions of their national interests as they understand them. To be fair, Snyder is careful to phrase that as “reasons that made sense to him [Putin].”
For New Cold Warriors who operate on the liberal-interventionist Democracy vs. Autocracy framework, it’s heresy to suggest that national leaders make such practical calculations, however mistaken or immoral they may be. In that framework, Our Side is the Democracy side and so our foreign policy choices are inherently moral and superior to those of Autocracies. Arguing that position without pure cynicism requires that one definitely not look too closely at who is considered to be in the camp of Democracy and Righteousness. (Saudi Arabia as part of the Democracy side, for instance.)
Marcetic, Branko (2023): Twitter 06/25/2023.<https://twitter.com/BMarchetich/status/1672993641252663298?s=20> (Accessed: 26-06-2023).
Applebaum, Anne (2023): Russia Slides Into Civil War. The Atlantic 02/24/2023. <https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/06/russia-civil-war-wagner-putin-coup/674517/> (Accessed: 2023-25-06).
McFaul, Michael (2023): Twitter 06/25/2023.<https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1672930754026962952?s=20> (Accessed: 26-06-2023).)
Meet the Press full broadcast - June 25. NBC News YouTube channel 06/25/2023. (Accessed: 25-06-2023).
Mangott, Gerhard (2023): Twitter 06/24/2026. <https://twitter.com/gerhard_mangott/status/1672567125896986627?s=20> (Accessed: 26-06-2023). Translation from German is mine.
Snyder, Timothy (2018): The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York : Tim Duggan Books.
Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Russian Civil War 05/18/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/event/Russian-Civil-War> (Accessed: 26 June 2023-26-06).
Snyder, Timothy (2010): Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. London, New York, Bodley Head: Basic Books.
Kappeler, Andreas (2014): Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine. München: C.H. Beck.
Bruce Springsteen - With Every Wish (Audio). Bruce Springsteen YouTube channel 10/25/2019. (Accessed: 2023-26-06).