Understanding the enigma of Russia always fascinated Churchill. There is no power that has defeated Eternal Russia from the outside. The changes have always come from within, either through a coup d’état or by the replacement in power by a group of soldiers or by an internal struggle to replace one faction with another. The vacuum of power never occurs in a State. No one knows what may happen in Russia, nor what will be the immediate fate of Putin and the fugitive coup plotter Prigozhin, leader of Wagner, and his thousands of soldiers who have fought on the front lines in Ukraine.
Everything that has happened in the last 15 months has an air of improvisation and a lack of strategy in the Kremlin. If it was intended to annex Ukraine, it will not be achieved no matter how well they occupy the entire territory, because the feeling of belonging and patriotism is greater than at the beginning of the war. NATO needed to be weakened and it is stronger than ever, with the addition of Finland and Sweden when Erdogan’s veto is overcome. Europe is more cohesive today than before the invasion. Putin has lost the war, even if he suffocates Wagner’s paramilitaries, who for a few hours were heading towards Moscow without encountering resistance.
In his booklet on the coup technique, Curzio Malaparte describes the strategy of Trotsky and Lenin for the coup that succeeded in October 1917 in Saint Petersburg. Lenin claimed that the masses were essential, while Trotsky had enough with a thousand men to seize the State. Trotsky’s tactics succeeded, with a few hundred agitators and technicians who trained unnoticed for a few days on the streets of St. Petersburg to, in a very few hours, on the appointed day, control the railway stations, the telephones, the bridges over the Neva and storm the Winter Palace. The masses are of no use, a few are enough, said Trotsky. Wagner’s column tried unsuccessfully and is apparently disabled outside the Kremlin’s hierarchical structure.
Yeltsin’s coup against Gorbachev in 1991 dissolved the Soviet Union and the hegemony of the Communist Party. Power passed to the oligarchs protected by Yeltsin, who got rich by privatizing part of the State. When Putin was appointed prime minister in 1999, he became interim president after the resignation of Yeltsin and elected president in 2000. The oligarchs who had plundered the state were replaced by the elite of the former KGB , which is the hard core that has ruled Russia this century. One of Putin’s goals has been the annexation of all possible ex-Soviet territories, resorting to the myths and romantic readings he has made of eternal Russia.
In his magnificent history of Russia, Orlando Figes says that if Putin remains in power he will destroy the best of Russia: those parts of its culture that for a thousand years have contributed to the enrichment of Europe.
The Russia that emerges from the war, says Figes, will be poorer, more unpredictable and more isolated in the world. All this shows how dangerous myths can be when they are used by dictators to reinvent an unattainable and at the same time fanciful past.
It has been an unnecessary and pointless war. One observation: neither the extreme left nor the extreme right in Europe have clearly condemned Putin’s recklessness. Western governments, including the Spanish one, have faced him. The ineffectiveness of a national army replaced by mercenaries has been demonstrated. Putin’s political future is uncertain although Russia will always be essential.
