Putin has no mercy on dissent. The father of a girl who at school drew a picture in favor of peace in Ukraine was sent to prison. There are at least 558 political prisoners in Russia, three times more than in 2018, according to a count by Memorial, the Russian human rights organization that won the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
Autocrats are not compassionate. They can’t be. Fear and repression are fundamental pillars of his power. That’s why dictators seem solid until the last day. Despite the setbacks in Ukraine, the Russian president seemed infallible, well protected by his gregarious security forces, but this weekend the mercenary Prigozhin exposed his weaknesses and nothing will ever be the same again. The tsar walks around naked and his rivals lie in wait for him. None more dangerous than Prigozhin.
Upon learning of the uprising of his former ally, the Russian president went on television to denounce an “internal betrayal” and “an armed rebellion” that he promised to crush. This was on Saturday morning. That same night, Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner Group, not only saved his neck with an exile in Belarus, but wrested an amnesty for his mutinous men.
We can only speculate on the three-way negotiation between Putin, Prigozhin and Lukashenko, the president-vassal of Belarus, but the result is very clear: Putin gave up. Before, he had not ordered the elite troops stationed in the Ukraine to go after Wagner’s insurgents. He preferred to avoid an armed clash with the expeditionary force advancing towards Moscow. Not only because he was not sure of the result, but because Wagner’s mercenaries are very popular, more than the military, and perhaps more than Putin himself.
Wagner has given Russia important victories in the Ukraine. The last one, in Bakhmut. It is the same that it was at the cost of some 20,000 casualties. Propaganda makes up the horrors of war. For many Russians, mercenaries are heroes, young men braver and more ferocious than soldiers.
Incompetence and corruption have weakened the military for decades. Modernization plans have not worked. That is why it was good for Putin to have a paramilitary group that would put pressure on the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff.
Dividing and pitting his closest collaborators against each other is a classic strategy of the autocrat. Putin has confronted his Foreign Minister Lavrov with Shoigu, the Defense Minister, and the latter with Prigozhin.
It has been a disaster, yet another example of a decaying Kremlin. If something cannot lose power, any power, it is the monopoly of violence, the army, the security forces and intelligence. The Prigozhin uprising shows that the Kremlin has lost this monopoly. Therefore, there is a risk of civil war.
Putin came to power 23 years ago as the great stabilizer. He used nationalism, repression and oligarchies so that Russia would be Russia again. Skillful management of violence, terrorism and wars, allowed him to gain stature. The Russians thank him for standing up to the West. However, the disaster in Ukraine, the “special military operation” that was supposed to be a ride, and the Prigozhin rebellion have broken his image. There is no more patriotism to hide behind. Now everything is a matter of justice, and justice is precisely what Putin cannot offer the Russians.
Prigozhin knows this and that is why he called the march of his men from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow the March for Justice. No rebellion or coup. Justice for a society mistreated by the inequality of an oligarchic regime. Justice for a country that tends to idealize everything, including the Soviet Union, the Bolshevik empire where the last would be first, where the community, the communist cause, was more important than the individual.
The Kremlin oligarchs have amply demonstrated that they don’t care about Russia, that they only care about making money and saving lives. Prigozhin calls them fat rats. He is as oligarch and corrupt as they are, but he fights, stains his hands with blood and speaks openly, with direct and profane words that connect very well with the Russian of eternal suffering. In the Russia of always, of the maximum virility and the maximum sentiment, Prigozhin is more than Putin.
The president is alone. Loneliness is another characteristic of autocrats, but in a fight like the one that Prigozhin has raised, he should have gone on television together with the Minister of Defense and the Chief of the General Staff, in a room in the Kremlin that projected all the imperial power of old Russia.
Putin, however, preferred the discretion of an office. At the most critical moments, such as when announcing the invasion of Ukraine, he chooses a domestic setting, more typical of a security agent than of a tsar.
Prigozhin, dressed as a military man, surrounded by corpses in Bakhmut, communicates better. He set up the troll factory that from St. Petersburg helped Trump win the US presidency in 2016. He has plenty of resources to win the story and continue fighting. As long as he lives, Putin will not be able to sleep peacefully.
