The failed Prigozhin coup attempt against Vladimir Putin has provided a lot of people with creative ways of saying that they’re not quite sure what is happening.
It’s time to turn to the historians, and two of the best, Robert Service and Niall Ferguson are both worth reading.
With a long history of studying Russia and the Soviet Union, Service sees power grabs in a system with no rules and few loyalties as inevitable. They just become more frequent and visible when the Tsar (who manipulates the power balance ) has been weakened by poor decisions.
“A compact group of loyalists, then? I doubt it. Just as Prigozhin astounded Russia and the world with his mutiny, so others in the ruling elite are capable of acting on their recognition that Putin is herding the country into a hell hole. All of them are used to thinking soberly about the geopolitical environment — none more so than Patrushev, former head of the Federal Security Service, whom Putin brought with him from St Petersburg and who is nothing if not a glacial calculator.”
But as the external factors (like the war in Ukraine) and the internal factors (principally the willingness of Russians to fight) which influence that balance are unpredictable, its not easy to know when Putin will lose his utility as the balance keeper. And what follows.
He also sees Putin’s pivot to China as a strategic error:
“Foolishly, for a believer in a multipolar world, Putin continually baited the US rather than using it to counterbalance China — and his interference in the 2016 US presidential election did much to rally American public opinion against him.”
While Service has Russia’s twentieth century at his fingertips, Ferguson looks to the seventeenth (the era of Schiller and Wallenstein as he puts it, rather than Lenin and Putin.)
And he reckons that Russia has returned to a “time of troubles”.
“When Putin falls [he predicts] there will be more than one claimant to the throne, just as there were multiple “false Dmitrys” in the early 1600s, all pretending to be Ivan’s youngest son.”
The early 17th century was a time of troubles in many places but Ferguson sees the weakening of state authority and the growth of private centres of power as a more general phenomenon, deriving more from breakneck technological and social change, than Putin’s mistaken strategy.
“In our time, too, power has seeped away from the state, back to private corporate entities. Wagner, whose mercenaries have been deployed from Syria to Mozambique to Venezuela, is only one of many nonstate actors engaged in organized violence around the world. And, of course, the big tech companies now dominate the innovation frontier in artificial intelligence, as well as owning a rising proportion of the communications infrastructure on which modern states rely.”
He seems less impressed with the West’s current solidarity – an implicit commitment to defend democracy anywhere (at least with guns and money, if not bodies) – than he is worried by the studious non-commitment of countries like India.
He paints a picture of a world in which a few good outcomes seem probable (i.e., the forging of democratic Ukrainian nationhood); others remote (say a transition to the rule of law in Russia?); but a lot more things will be outwith the control of states. Or perhaps the states we like.
So not a good time to be a weak country (as Euro-pacifists have discovered); nor to have irreconcilable social divisions; and particularly not to be on poor terms with the United States.
Its not clear if Yevgeny Prigozhin had much of a plan but, if these historians are right, that won’t necessarily deter others.
Point of Order is a blog focused on politics and the economy run by veteran newspaper reporters Bob Edlin and Ian Templeton
“A compact group of loyalists, then? I doubt it. Just as Prigozhin astounded Russia and the world with his mutiny, so others in the ruling elite are capable of acting on their recognition that Putin is herding the country into a hell hole. All of them are used to thinking soberly about the geopolitical environment — none more so than Patrushev, former head of the Federal Security Service, whom Putin brought with him from St Petersburg and who is nothing if not a glacial calculator.”
But as the external factors (like the war in Ukraine) and the internal factors (principally the willingness of Russians to fight) which influence that balance are unpredictable, its not easy to know when Putin will lose his utility as the balance keeper. And what follows.
He also sees Putin’s pivot to China as a strategic error:
“Foolishly, for a believer in a multipolar world, Putin continually baited the US rather than using it to counterbalance China — and his interference in the 2016 US presidential election did much to rally American public opinion against him.”
While Service has Russia’s twentieth century at his fingertips, Ferguson looks to the seventeenth (the era of Schiller and Wallenstein as he puts it, rather than Lenin and Putin.)
And he reckons that Russia has returned to a “time of troubles”.
“When Putin falls [he predicts] there will be more than one claimant to the throne, just as there were multiple “false Dmitrys” in the early 1600s, all pretending to be Ivan’s youngest son.”
The early 17th century was a time of troubles in many places but Ferguson sees the weakening of state authority and the growth of private centres of power as a more general phenomenon, deriving more from breakneck technological and social change, than Putin’s mistaken strategy.
“In our time, too, power has seeped away from the state, back to private corporate entities. Wagner, whose mercenaries have been deployed from Syria to Mozambique to Venezuela, is only one of many nonstate actors engaged in organized violence around the world. And, of course, the big tech companies now dominate the innovation frontier in artificial intelligence, as well as owning a rising proportion of the communications infrastructure on which modern states rely.”
He seems less impressed with the West’s current solidarity – an implicit commitment to defend democracy anywhere (at least with guns and money, if not bodies) – than he is worried by the studious non-commitment of countries like India.
He paints a picture of a world in which a few good outcomes seem probable (i.e., the forging of democratic Ukrainian nationhood); others remote (say a transition to the rule of law in Russia?); but a lot more things will be outwith the control of states. Or perhaps the states we like.
So not a good time to be a weak country (as Euro-pacifists have discovered); nor to have irreconcilable social divisions; and particularly not to be on poor terms with the United States.
Its not clear if Yevgeny Prigozhin had much of a plan but, if these historians are right, that won’t necessarily deter others.
Point of Order is a blog focused on politics and the economy run by veteran newspaper reporters Bob Edlin and Ian Templeton
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