Illustration by Yuriy Dyachyshyn/AFP via Getty Images.
“Alea iacta est” – the die is cast. These were the words Julius Caesar is said to have uttered when he died in 49 BC. Crossed the Rubicon to take power in Rome. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner group, is no Caesar, but he possesses the same political intuitions that characterized the Roman conqueror and other historical pretenders to power. Corrupt and cynical, with a criminal record for robbery and fraud, Prigozhyn came from Vladimir Putin’s close circle. Still, he is the first man from this clique to experience some sort of conversion, recognizing that the war Putin launched against Ukraine in February 2022 has disrupted and potentially weakened the power structure within Russia, presenting an opportunity for a bold conqueror has created.
The structure of Russian power was a legacy of the Soviet collapse for 30 years. The collapse of Soviet centralized government in 1991 led to the onset of hypercapitalism. Power no longer belonged to the Politburo, but was taken over by super-rich oligarchs, robber barons of the East. In 1992, billionaire industrialist Mikhail Khodorkovsky wrote that power no longer belongs to “the men with guns”—the communist regime—but to “the men with rubles.”
When Putin was appointed and then elected President of Russia in 2000, he declared himself master of this new regime of power. He and his entourage, including the leaders of the army and security forces, became incredibly wealthy. The state did not assert itself so much against the oligarchs; High-ranking state officials became oligarchs themselves.
Putin knew that in order to rule securely over his cronies, he had to secure the legitimacy of the people. In front of millions of Russian citizens, Putin argued that he was the defender of the common people against the plutocratic oligarchs. He also argued that he came to power to prevent disasters like the bloody and disastrous revolutions of 1917 and 1991 from repeating themselves. Most Russians trusted him that life would become easier and more predictable under his rule. No more revolutions, no more wars and no more wild ideological experiments. The external military adventures in Georgia in 2008 and Syria in 2015 were seen as something that bolstered Putin’s strength as a leader, rather than interventions that violated his pact with the Russian people.
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But the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 fundamentally shook this trust. Putin called the invasion a “special military operation” and behaved as if the war had nothing to do with Russia’s internal affairs. The huge military casualties in the spring and summer of 2022, the disastrous army withdrawal from Kharkiv and Kherson, the ongoing corruption in the armed forces – all have been ignored by the state-controlled media. But Russia’s social networks reflect growing anger among “Russian patriots” who see these defeats as a result of the deeply corrupt and dysfunctional regime that Putin has built.
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Prigozhin’s Wagner group was first active in Ukraine during Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. In the recent war, their mercenaries were deployed in March 2022 in support of Russian forces. Prigozhin feared that the war would lead to instability within Russia, but publicly supported Putin. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov were blamed for military setbacks and defeats. Over time, Prigozhin’s attacks on the oligarchic nature of Russian power grew bolder. His revolutionary proposal was to end the post-Cold War power structure entirely: a military dictatorship in which “the men with guns” would replace rulership with “the men with roubles.” After months of silence from the Kremlin, Putin ordered Prigozhin to join and subordinate to Shoigu and Gerasimov.
Prigozhin then did what nobody in the Putin regime had done before – he rebelled. Its crossing of the Rubicon has far-reaching implications for Russia. Prigozhin behaved like Fake Dmitri at the turn of the 17th century – heir to the Russian throne during the so-called “Time of Troubles” between 1596 and 1612, a brutal period of murderous fighting that unleashed a series of crises in which Moscow was plundered and the dynasty came to a violent end. Prigozhin called his Wagner troops to a “March of Justice” to Moscow. He appealed to the embattled Russian officers to support them. Addressing the nation today (June 24), Putin, realizing the seriousness of the situation, seemed on the verge of admitting that Russia faces an existential threat.
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How will this mutiny end? The unfolding events have broken the spell of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine – the false distinction erected between domestic politics and war is finally over. Millions of Russians who distrusted the likes of Khodorkovsky (the old oligarch, now a leading opposition activist in London) and trusted Prigozhin are in a state of cognitive shock. There is a stark contrast between Prigozhin, a new strongman, and Putin, the old, bunkered autocrat who looks almost like an AI-generated clone of himself. After two decades of “lack of alternatives” there is suddenly one. It is the great misfortune of the Russian people that this decision is made by the men with guns on the planes of southern Russia.
In his work The Techniques of the Revolution (1931), the Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte described the essential components of a successful coup. His main reference was to the 1917 revolution of Lenin and Trotsky. Malaparte argued that a passionate minority with determined leadership can only succeed if they act decisively at a turning point when everything is at stake – without themselves to think about the consequences. Those in power would lose if they hesitated and faltered. The period of charming suspension in Russia seems to have come to an end. Even if the Prigozhin mutiny has fizzled out, it has torn a hole in performative Russian “reality”. And through that gaping hole, anyone can see impending disaster. The next phase of the drama will be decided by the military officers at the front and the security forces at the rear. They can catch and kill the most adventurous of their kind. Or they shout: “Hail, Caesar!”