Much of the western analysis of the events in Russia last weekend has concluded that Vladimir Putin displayed his weakness by allowing Yevgeny Prigozhin and other Wagner group commanders to depart peacefully for Belarus, and the rank-and-file to join the Russian army or retire to their homes. Of course, if Putin had in fact crushed the revolt by force and executed its leaders, commentators would have used this as more evidence of his brutality and ruthlessness, and perhaps also of the innate savagery and violence of the Russian national tradition.
These conclusions are coloured by an understandable dislike of the Russian leader, and they do not constitute sober and objective analysis. In fact, though Putin was obviously responsible for creating the background to this mess, we should consider the possibility that at the weekend he handled things well. In his address to the nation on Saturday morning, he displayed determination and resolve. Putin made clear that he had no intention of surrendering to Prigozhin’s demands, and that if he and the other Wagner leaders continued their revolt, they would be charged with treason (and, by implication, probably executed).
Since it also quickly became apparent that there was going to be no mutiny in support of Wagner within the regular army, Prigozhin was faced with the choice of an attack on Moscow that would almost certainly have led to the slaughter of his men and his own death, or a surrender on terms. In these circumstances, Putin had nothing to gain by seeking violent revenge, which would have killed large numbers of Russians and badly undermined the Russian war in Ukraine. He had everything to gain by showing magnanimity. He had, after all, won.
In addition, a key reason why Putin did not act much sooner to suppress Prigozhin and end his feud with the Russian high command was precisely that for more than a year, Russian domestic propaganda had built up an image of the Wagner fighters as Russian military heroes. Their slaughter would not have gone down well with ordinary Russians.
There are two wider lessons from what happened in Russia last weekend. The first relates to the long history of coups, quasi-coups and elite rebellions across the world. A very large proportion of these were not intended to overthrow the ruler and seize supreme power, and nor did they lead to battles. Rather, they were armed demonstrations by the local equivalent of medieval barons, intended to pressure the monarch into “redressing grievances”, dismissing rival barons from court and granting some lucrative positions to the rebel chiefs.
If the monarch stood firm, in many cases the barons involved would apologise, vow loyalty to the king, stand down their men and go into exile for a while. If the monarch yielded, they would stand down their men, pocket their gains and vow loyalty to the king – though in the process, as Edward II, Richard II and others found, the monarch might have lost so much authority that he fell to a subsequent revolt and came to a sticky end. Last weekend in Russia, the monarch stood firm.
The other lesson relates to the deep inhibition in Russian society against Russian soldiers shedding the blood of other Russians, connected in turn to deep fears of civil war and chaos. These have old roots in elite nightmares about “Russian revolts, senseless and merciless”, as Pushkin called them; but even more in inherited memories of the ghastly aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and in the anarchy and economic misery of the 1990s that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Putin’s words about 1917 in his speech on Saturday therefore have immense resonance for many Russians: “A blow like this was dealt to Russia in 1917, when the country was fighting in the first world war. But the victory was stolen from it: intrigues, squabbles and politicking behind the backs of the army and the nation turned into the greatest turmoil, the destruction of the army and the collapse of the state, and the loss of vast territories, ultimately leading to the tragedy of the civil war … We will not allow this to happen again.”
Perhaps the greatest single mystery about the fall of the Soviet Union is why the Soviet army did not fight much harder and kill many more people in an effort to hold it together, and why the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991 was rejected by most of the armed forces and therefore collapsed so quickly. These aspects of Russian history provide part of the answer to this mystery.
The events this weekend confirmed that the fate of the Putin regime will be decided in the first instance not by conspiracies within the Russian elite, but by what happens on the battlefield in Ukraine. If the Russian army can hold its existing line, Putin will claim victory against what he has successfully portrayed to the Russian people as a united western attempt to destroy Russia.
If the Ukrainians break through, then Putin may be forced to resign, but he may also escalate towards nuclear war. Perhaps the most dangerous effect of the blow to Putin’s prestige from the Wagner revolt may be that even without a Ukrainian victory, he will feel compelled to restore his image of strength by retaliating directly against the west for its support of Ukraine. In that case, the dangers to Putin’s regime will be eclipsed by those to humanity in general.
Anatol Lieven is director of the Eurasia programme at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of books including Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry