Putin is not out of the woods – he stands gravely weakened
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As Yevgeny Prigozhin astonished the world by calling off his march on Moscow, Vladimir Putin, it seems, has narrowly avoided his 1917 moment. Russia has had a varied experience of coups and mutinies, from palace revolutions in the 18th century, an abortive mutiny in 1825 by liberal army officers who had tasted freedom in the West fighting Napoleon and, most importantly, in 1917, when the army high command told Nicholas II that his time was up.
Putin’s hope will be that Prigozhin’s bizarre about-turn means that this becomes perhaps the shortest-lived major mutiny in Russia’s long history.
It would be a grave mistake to believe that Putin is out of the woods. He stands gravely weakened.
In the simplest terms, mutineers tend to end up dead, although Prigozhin believes that he will survive to win another day. One thing that Russian armies under various regimes seem to have in common is the brutality with which their men are treated, the brutality with which they behave in response, and their lack of loyalty to their superiors.
These events merely remind us that nothing ever changes in Russia.
Since then, every Russian regime has linked its prestige with the Great Patriotic War, and treated the army with a show of respect. But, at the same time, a large internal paramilitary force has been there to balance the power of the regular army.
And for the generals, the memory doubtless persists of thousands of their predecessors who ended with a bullet in the back of the head.
Remember the most disastrous failed coup of recent history: the army plot against Hitler in 1944, by conservative officers who knew he was leading the army and the country to disaster. But when Hitler survived the bomb that was meant to kill him, the coup collapsed and the plotters were soon dead.
We shall soon find out if Putin has similar personal authority.
The sainted incompetent Nicholas II did not. It is worth meditating on his fate, and that of Russia following his downfall. In 1914 he was a popular leader in a patriotic war, commanding an army regarded as formidable. In reality, it was badly trained and equipped, with commanders preferred for their loyalty to the regime, and soldiers who were badly treated and unmotivated.
Almost immediately there began a succession of military humiliations, soon blamed on the Tsar and his entourage. Even when the military situation was stabilised, it was too late to regain prestige. Huge numbers of soldiers were killed, but huge numbers surrendered – more than in any other army. Revolution began in February 1917 when junior officers and ordinary soldiers refused to crush popular riots, and then in early March senior army and navy commanders unanimously insisted that the Tsar must abdicate to prevent catastrophe. But of course catastrophe was not prevented: there followed defeat by Germany, years of civil war and decades of horrific tyranny.
Ultimately, power grows out of the barrel of a gun, as Mao put it bluntly. Many political thinkers have reflected more subtly on this point.
The German social theorist Max Weber defined the very essence of the state as its monopoly of legitimate violence.
For a state to exist at all, the men with guns have to be willing to obey it. After the fiasco of the past few hours and months, how long will this apply to Putin?
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