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JUNE 27, 2023
Meyerson on TAP
On Russia, Where the Past Is Never Past
The Wagner Group mutiny re-enacted aborted coups of yore.
Nothing quite brings down a government like a bloody, interminable, and
unsuccessful war. In the course or at the end of World War I, all four
European empires (Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and [semi-European]
Ottoman) collapsed. The soldiers on the other side of that conflict
weren't invariably inclined to follow orders either, as the 1917
mutiny <[link removed]> of
roughly half the French army makes clear. Stateside, the fate of Lyndon
Johnson's presidency is further confirmation of this rule, although
rebellion in the ranks in Vietnam was confined to the occasional
fragging (i.e., blowing up) of gung ho officers by their despairing and
infuriated underlings in the field.
The weekend Wagner Group mutiny is the latest demonstration of the
regime-weakening effects of slaughterhouse-level casualties in
gridlocked conflicts, something that's a recurring theme in Russian
history. A number of commentators have cited parallels to the fall of
the Tsar, but I think a closer parallel is the aborted coup that a
disconsolate general attempted to stage against the government of
Alexander Kerensky, the beleaguered prime minister who headed what
passed for a government for a few months between the Tsar's fall and
the Bolsheviks' coup.
Kerensky came to power at a time when Russian soldiers, whose officers
kept prodding them with swords or revolvers at their backs to charge the
German machine guns, were fragging their own officers or, in the
hundreds of thousands, simply deserting. Nonetheless, Kerensky persisted
in waging the war.
At the same time, parties of the left-the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and
Social Revolutionaries-were growing steadily more powerful and had, in
their soviets, their own organs of quasi-government. Bolshevik
organizers were also recruiting thousands of fed-up soldiers to their
cause, or at least to stop obeying their officers' orders.
All this was distressing not just to Kerensky but to Russia's still
Tsarist-in-spirit officer corps-and particularly to the army's
commanding general, Lavr Kornilov. Today, 106 years after his threatened
march on Moscow in the late summer of 1917, the relationship between
Kerensky and Kornilov has yet to be fully figured out by
historians-much like that between Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin
today. Some accounts have Kerensky urging Kornilov to storm Moscow to
wipe out the soviets and all the left parties, though he then switched
to opposing Kornilov's threatened charge only when he realized that
the general wanted to depose him, too, and set up a military
dictatorship. In any event, Kerensky then ordered the government to arm
the soviets so that thousands of workers and pro-soviet soldiers could
deter the general. This had the effect of causing Kornilov to call off
his attack, and also of arming the Bolsheviks, who proceeded to
overthrow Kerensky themselves barely one month later.
This strikes me as a precedent of sorts for the not entirely discernible
byplay between Putin and Prigozhin. For a time, clearly, Putin welcomed
having rival centers of power (which he believed he controlled) that he
could balance off against each other and that, by attacking each other,
could deflect any blame that might stick to him for plunging the nation
into a blood-soaked war of choice. His Kerensky-esque moment of clarity
didn't arise until he realized that Prigozhin, like Kornilov, posed a
threat not just to his ministers but, whether Prigozhin intended to or
not, to the entire Putinian order.
The equanimity with which the soldiers in the regular Russian army
appeared to view the Wagner Group's takeover of Rostov-on-Don also
calls to mind the inability of Kerensky to rally any troops to defend
his government when the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace.
To be clear, I'm not equating Kerensky, who was a moderate in way over
his head, with Putin, who's an overreaching and increasingly
dictatorial autocrat. Prigozhin, however, bids fair to be remembered as
Son of Kornilov. And the Russian Way of War-inadequate intelligence,
indifference to the lives of its own soldiers and just about anyone
else-seems not to have changed much since 1914. Only this time, there
are no Bolsheviks, or social democrats, or even liberals, waiting in the
wings.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
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