Prigozhin’s abortive coup signals open season on Putin
Victorious Roman generals frequently turned on the emperors that had appointed them. When an Ottoman Sultan died it was literally a part of the succession process for his surviving sons to fight to the death to inherit his mantle. Now in Russia, a mercenary chieftain launched an abortive rebellion against his erstwhile patron. The shock value of last weekend’s developments should be zero.
There is a structural logic for the preference autocrats have for personalised and informal mechanisms through which to exert their power. In fact, the tendency to disdain official institutions is the quintessential hallmark of all authoritarian populists from Putin to Trump to Erdogan to Qadhafi and Mussolini. Hitler preferred his Waffen SS to the Wehrmacht; Mussolini his Brown Shirts to the Italian Army. After his successful coup a young colonel Muammar Qadhafi eviscerated Libya’s formal army and built up a network of competing security services.
The advantage of shadow power centres for the autocrat is that they provide flexibility, secrecy, lack of accountability, and facilitate the personalization of patronage and loyalty. The disadvantage, however, is that unshackled from oversight and institutional checks and balances, yesterday’s loyal vassal may turn into tomorrow’s mutineer. Putin has long been aware of this risk, hence his own Praetorian Guard, the Rosgvardia, are essentially his own private militia.
But live by the sword, die by the sword. It should be no surprise that Russia’s appallingly planned and horrifically executed ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine has primed many for mutiny. Who wouldn’t want to protest against being used as cannon fodder for an unprovoked immoral war waged without enough ammunition or food against one’s neighbours with whom many are linked by ties of kinship, travel, language, religion, and history?
Ever since Prigozhin took Bakhmut, I have been predicting that if he was not put in charge of the whole military apparatus, he would rebel or go AWOL. Yet, Putin decided earlier this month to subordinate Wagner to the Ministry of Defence, insisting that Wagner salaries would not be paid past the first of July if its fighters did not contract with it.
This is exactly the same dynamic which kicked off the civil war in Sudan earlier this year. It should come as little shock that Prigozhin rebelled and instructed his Wagner Group to briefly aim their weapons at their Kremlin paymasters.
Although his exact endgame and chances of success will never be known, in retrospect it seems more likely that his fiery rhetoric and pantomime mutiny were actually a strange form of negotiation for Wagner to gain power in relation to the Ministry, and for Prigozhin to be readmitted into Putin’s inner circle. It seems unlikely that they were intended as a fundamental challenge to Putin’s system. Prigozhin’s failure was certainly due to a miscalculation – either of the balances of forces or of Putin’s likely response.
It was a wild gamble undertaken by a desperate man. That the abortive mutiny was embraced within the rapacious Wagner Group is completely logical. Its fighters have less hierarchy, less official discipline, have fought harder and most fundamentally have less to lose. They are essentially a militarised slave caste. Some have quite elite training, while others never held a weapon before they were shipped out to lie in a dung infested trench.
Revolts of a militarised slave caste have gripped societies as dissimilar as Imperial Rome and Islamic Egypt. Rarely are they successful, as when the Mamluks replaced the Ayyubids in 1250 AD. More frequently, they end bloodily, as when Spartacus was put down in 71 BC…
