Few nations have such a deep sense of their own history as the Russians. In fact, President Putin justified his invasion of an independent neighboring state with a biased tract about the historic “unity” of Russians and Ukrainians.
But another word, also with great resonance in Russian history, now hovers over the Kremlin’s struggling military campaign. And that word is: mutiny.
Notably, it was brought up last week by the woman dubbed Putin’s chief propagandist, Margarita Simonyan, during the nightly discussion program on the status of “military special operations” on Moscow’s main TV channel.
The striking-looking Simonyan is the head of RT, the Kremlin’s English-language broadcast network (now banned in the UK); but here she was addressing a Russian audience.
Morale is desperately low even before even more ill-equipped and less combat-ready forces are pushed into battle against a Ukrainian army armed with some of NATO’s deadliest weapons and which has recently won stunning victories
She raged at the incompetence with which Putin’s September 21 announced “partial mobilization” was being carried out and at the gross inadequacy of the care for the hundreds of thousands who would be called up to fight: “Students, people with serious illnesses, single mothers, people over 62 . . . and you get rotten stuff, no helmets or body armor.’
criticism
She warned the leaders of the armed forces: “Comrades commanders, do not anger the people!”
And now came the reference to historical precedent. Simonyan urged the “commanders” to remember the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, which was sparked by the fact that all the meat available to the crew was infested with maggots.
“I would like to remind you that in 1905 such trifles led to the first mutiny of an entire military unit in the history of our country. Is it that what you want?’
She, of course, absolved Putin from any criticism and commended her supreme boss for “taking upon himself the very heavy burden of responsibility.” I doubt that would have comforted the increasingly deluded Kremlin resident.
As with the invasion of Ukraine, the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 suffered from a series of blunders based on an exaggerated sense of its own military capabilities, and the Japanese, to some surprise, won.
Another word, also with great resonance in Russian history, now hovers over the Kremlin’s struggling military campaign. And that word is: mutiny. Notably, it was brought up last week by the woman described as Putin’s chief propagandist, Margarita Simonyan, during the nightly discussion program on the status of the “special military operation” on Moscow’s main TV channel.
The Potemkin mutiny was crushed, but the hardships and humiliations associated with that conflict led to uprisings within Russia itself — known as the 1905 revolution. The result was that the tsar was forced to allow political reforms, including the introduction of multiparty elections.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks saw the Potemkin mutiny as an inspiration for their own seizure of power in 1917.
They hired Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein to make a film about this historic event. Battleship Potemkin, first shown in 1925, became the totemistic account for the masses of why “the workers” rose up against the oppressive orders and callousness of their masters. 1917 saw occasional mutinies in the ill-equipped Russian army, almost two million of whom died in World War I. But the mutiny that broke out for Tsar Nicholas—who had taken personal command of the army in 1915—was at the Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) garrison.
The soldiers refused to obey the tsar’s orders to quell uprisings in that city, and before long a “provisional government” was installed, from which the tsar abdicated the following day, March 15.
Footage of Russian troops being told to take their wives and girlfriends’ tampons to dress wounds they receive as tourniquets are not available
The following year Nicholas II and his family met their horrible fate – shot and bayoneted by the Bolsheviks.
The overthrow of the provisional government by the revolutionaries was in turn aided by a mutiny in the army, whose troops had been won over by Lenin’s promise to end the war.
The slaughter in Ukraine is clearly not on the scale of World War I. But the reason Putin felt compelled, with apparent reluctance, to call up hundreds of thousands more is because so many of his best troops had already been slaughtered.
Morale is desperately low even before even more ill-equipped and less combat-ready forces are pushed into battle against a Ukrainian army armed with some of NATO’s deadliest weapons and which has recently won stunning victories.
corpses
It was not sympathy for the people of Ukraine that prompted tens of thousands of employable Russian men to flee the country in the past week, but the fear that, once drafted, they too would soon become part of the next shift of bodies on Ukrainian soil.
And in Dagestan, a republic where 99 percent of the population is said to have voted for Putin and where a disproportionate number of young men have been drafted, there have been demonstrations by mothers with banners that read: “Our children are not fertilizer! ‘
Last week, the New York Times published excerpts of thousands of intercepted personal calls made by Russian forces in March as they were being pushed back from the Kyiv suburbs.
The NYT had received the recordings from Ukraine’s security agencies but only released them now because the newspaper had spent months verifying all phone numbers and identities for authenticity. Here’s a selection, edited to take out some of the (understandable) profanity. Nikita to his mother: ‘Sixty percent of the regiment is already gone.’ Yevgeny to his partner: ‘There is no one left from my Kostroma regiment.’
Sergei to his mother: “There were 400 paratroopers. And only 38 survived…because our commanders sent soldiers to slaughter.” Sergey to his girlfriend, explaining why they shot their prisoners in Bucha instead of keeping them prisoners: “We should have fed them, and we don’t have enough to ourselves meal.”
A similar selection was published a month ago by the Kyiv Post, which gave more details about the Russian troops’ anger with their own officers (much in the spirit of the Potemkin mutineers).
They speak of flatly refusing to fight – which explains why thousands of Russian troops simply fled from Ukrainian forces in the Kharkiv region, leaving behind huge amounts of ammunition and armor.
An intercepted call September 2 reveals a Russian soldier telling a relative: “In our unit they will come together, they will go [the senior commander] Zavatsky, and lay down your arms . . . all the infantry, it seems to me, they couldn’t care less.”
The reason Putin felt compelled, with apparent reluctance, to call up hundreds of thousands more is because so many of his best troops had already been slaughtered
Humiliating
Other recorded conversations between Ukrainian soldiers show how surprised and even shocked they were by the ease with which they killed the Russian invaders: the most recent concerns the battle for control of the Lyman strategic hub in Donetsk, which Ukraine caught up to over the weekend.
This was particularly humiliating for Putin, as he had only just declared this region Russia after one of his rigged referendums.
What follows is shocking: “Lots of dead Russians. Like chasing squirrels in a pecan orchard. . . We took them down before they knew what was going on. They were low on ammo, no medkits, very little food. . . I got away shaking like a leaf, not scared, just ‘wired’ and sick of killing people.”
By all accounts, Putin, who has increasingly taken personal control of military planning, à la Nicholas II, had resisted requests from his officers to retire early from Lyman. This latest slaughter of Russians is entirely at his own expense, even as Margarita Simonyan and other Kremlin propagandists continue to claim that the backlash is the responsibility of the “commanders,” not the supreme commander, to put it mildly. Boss.
But their warnings of “mutiny” and even a “Potemkin moment” – rooted in some of the most tumultuous episodes in Russian history – foreshadow the end of this war, if not Putin’s fall.
Not only are Russia’s troops lacking in food and the most basic equipment; At the most recent call-up, they were even told to take their wives and girlfriends’ tampons with them to dress any wounds they receive as tourniquets are not available.
Putin sees himself as succeeding his country’s most revered rulers — particularly Peter the Great — in restoring what he sees as territory rightfully owned by Russia. Instead, he faces the fate of the last tsar.