When Vladimir Putin awoke on Saturday after a nightmarish dream, he found himself in bed transformed into Tsar Nicholas II. He was lying on his hard back, wrapped in a tight-fitting jacket; on raising his head, he saw the chest loaded with imperial medals, the chevrons and garters twinkling before his eyes, but with a splendor now tarnished. Stretching his arms, he understood that this vision was nothing more than the fleeting vestige of a Kafkaesque nightmare and breathed a sigh of relief, convinced that everything was going according to plan.
Between yawns, he mentally reviewed the speech he had to give to a nation he had inoculated two decades of apathy. The script would be the usual: press the key of the most convulsive periods in the memory of Russians. Thus, he compared Prigozhin’s mutiny to what happened in 1917, and with that he drew three alarming parallels. The first was to put himself in the shoes of the unpopular Nicholas II, whose weakness caused a bloodbath. The second, with the First World War in mind, involved the admission that Russia was not succeeding in the “special operation”. The third is that the conditions were set for a civil war.
He needed to show the same determination with which he once sent behind bars those who dared to protest in the street, even holding a blank piece of paper. The rebels would receive severe punishment, he assured. And behind all sabotage, as you know, there is always the West. Putin does not want to be measured by results on the Ukrainian battlefield, but by his role in global politics. Changing the focus of events is their strategy. But, as a report by the Organization for Security and Co-operation (OSCE) points out, “[Russia’s] internal repression and external war are connected by a communicating tube.”
If there’s one thing Putin detests, it’s being taken for a softy, the most intolerable under mob logic, a world he knows well from his early days in politics as deputy mayor in St. Petersburg. Already installed in power, it is said that he asked his courtiers who had been the greatest traitors to the country and, before they had time to answer, he himself mentioned Nicholas II and Mikhail Gorbachev, for him , two stachyrots who brought about the demolition of great Russia. And he added: “I will never abdicate.”
However, hours after his statement threatening the rebellion, with the mediation of the Belarusian dictator, an agreement was reached with Prigozhin. As the title of an essay by Peter Pomerantsev on Putin’s Russia says, nothing is true and everything is possible. Including the generous state funding of Wagner’s killers, now publicly acknowledged after repeatedly denying it.
The long-tongued Lukashenko explained how the negotiation went and reproduced fragments of conversations with Putin, in which the hampa slang they both share came up.
Given that the march lasted just over thirty hours, we will no longer know what would have happened if the column bound for Moscow had not been stopped in its tracks. One thing is clear: more than a march for justice, as Prigojin called it, it was a revenge, no longer against Putin, but against the Defense leadership.
Each end of an era looks for an opportunity to shine one last time with all its splendor before the curtain falls. For Nicholas II, it took the form of a flamboyant costume ball in the halls of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg over two nights in February 1903. Fascinated by the first Romanovs who sat on the throne, he decided that the party was a trip back in time, to the 17th century. The rendezvous became one of the most dazzling moments in the social history of the Old Slavic regime, in addition to its swan song: Crimean roses, caviar and champagne in dojo, elaborate period dresses for the occasion with rhinestones and luxurious brocades, as well as performances by tenor Fyodor Xaliapin and ballerina Anna Pavlova.
But a new, hostile Russia was already penetrating windows inside. Who knows if the ex-chef will not have given Putin an invaluable gift by suddenly connecting him with reality, a touch of attention that has allowed him to show off with great pomp. On Tuesday, Russian newspapers showed a victorious Putin in his address to law enforcement in the Kremlin’s Cathedral Square. Yesterday, those here collected the bombing-punishment against a restaurant in Kramatorsk.
