Counter-Currents
1,597 words
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the flamboyant leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, launched a coup against the Russian government on June 23, 2023 which began after he broadcast a video message over social media. His mercenaries captured Rostov-on-Don with little resistance, and then a column consisting of at least 5,000 men equipped with armor, field artillery, and air defenses marched towards Moscow. The group traveled north along the M4 highway, battled with attacking aircraft, and then stood down after a deal facilitated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. The Wagner Group’s “civil war” was over within a day.
Although Priogzhin and his men were accused of treason by Russian President Vladimir Putin, they have not been criminally charged and are being allowed to relocate to a new base in Belarus. From there, they pose a threat to Ukraine’s northern border and Poland’s eastern frontier.
Winston Churchill said that Russia was “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” American diplomat George Kennan likewise wrote that the situation in Russia during the early stages of the Cold War “involve[d] questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that [he could not] compress answers into single [sic] brief message without yielding to . . . a dangerous degree of over-simplification.”
In short, Russia is hard for outsiders to understand. It is difficult to determine what really happened in the Wagner Group’s mutiny. It could be that Prigozhin, on a high from his success in Bakhmut, really thought that he could seize power in Russia. He also might have been paid by foreign governments to start a civil war in Russia, but failed to generate popular support for his rebellion. Perhaps he took the money and double-crossed his paymasters. Or, perhaps he staged the entire thing in order to keep funds from the Russian military coming his way. Likewise, the entire event could have been a deception operation to provide cover while a large force was moved into a position where it could threaten both Poland and Ukraine. Only the fullness of time will reveal the truth. But whichever is the case, it could be the tip of the iceberg of discontent within Russia, and more violence and instability will follow no matter what.
Russia is a difficult country to conquer. The Teutonic Knights, the Poles, the Swedes, the French, and the Germans have all made attempts to do it at various points in history, and all were soon defeated. Although there was one exception: In 1917 the German army captured most of the Russian Empire’s western holdings and then forced Moscow to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 on terms that were greatly favorable to Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Central Powers didn’t pull this off via outright conquest, but were instead able to cut a deal with the Bolshevik government that replaced the Tsarist regime after the October 1917 Revolution. Lenin’s fledgling Communist government was weak and riven with hostile factions, and was thus in no position to bargain with the strong and well-organized German Empire.
In the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, the Ukrainian army is unlikely to reconquer all Russian-held territory by force of arms. But there is hope for victory through a palace coup in Moscow that replaces Putin, or a civil war that compels the Russian forces in Ukraine to withdraw. Since such a thing happened before in 1918, such a scenario has precedent.
The situations are not entirely comparable, however. In 1917, Russia had been unstable for decades. The Tsarist government had been the target of terrorism and assassinations since the mid-nineteenth century. This led to a revolution following Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War which was defeated, although the Tsar was greatly weakened by it. The Russian revolutionaries were able to apply the lessons they had learned in 1905 to ensure victory in 1917.
Prigozhin, for his part, has no discernible ideology, and his actions seem to be centered entirely on his personal beefs with officials in the Russian Ministry of Defense. The Wagner Group yielded to Putin’s government after very little fighting. To win without the need for battle is the ultimate victory, and the Russian military accomplished just that. The Russian forces in Ukraine likewise continued to hold their lines, and the Ukrainians made small, if any, advances during the uprising. The hope for the outbreak of a Russian civil war therefore seems highly improbable at present.
The Wagner Group is made up of two types of men. The first is convicts, who are used as shock troops, and such even the casualties among them don’t negatively impact Russian society. The second is experienced veterans, who join up to avoid the hassles, additional duties, and bureaucracy of duty in the Russian army — not to mention to receive higher pay. Their professionalism won Bakhmut for Putin.
The Wagner Group’s rebellion is emblematic of the problem that all governments that field large, well-armed military forces face: the ever-present threat of a military coup. One of the major controversies of the George Washington administration was whether the United States should have a standing regular army or not. Public sentiment was not in favor of such a force at the time.
The ideal military was the Roman Republic’s. In the early years of Rome, the callused-handed Roman citizens would assemble on the Field of Mars just after the crops were planted and go to war if necessary. The Roman army only recruited Roman citizens, and all social classes were expected to participate, while the patricians served as officers. Citizens who served were expected to bring their own weapons and armor. Promotion was based on merit, and enlistments ended when it was time to harvest the crops.
Since only Romans served, loyalty to Rome itself meant more to the soldiers than loyalty to any particular leader or political faction. It would have been unthinkable for the Roman Army to be disloyal to the Roman Republic. This worked until the Romans’ campaigns were being fought too far away for them to be concluded between planting and harvest. The citizen-soldiers involved in such deployments returned to unplowed fields, with little to live on. As a result, domestic political tensions increased. The Romans then reformed their system to create an army of volunteer professional soldiers, but this led the soldiers of the various legions to become beholden to their commanders, who could in turn could use his legions to advance his political career. In 88 BC, Roman General Lucius Cornelius Sulla used his army to capture Rome in order to advance his interests against his rival, Gaius Marius. Thereafter, the Roman Republic limped on until finally becoming an imperial dictatorship.
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The Roman Empire’s military recruitment policy shifted to focus on enlisting mercenaries. The Empire’s northern frontier eventually came to be defended by Germanic mercenaries rather than Latin citizen-soldiers. In Britian, the Roman Britons recruited Anglo-Saxons. While this worked for a time, the Romans in the West were eventually overcome by their Germanic mercenaries due to ethnic rivalries.
Rome was far from the only government that ended up being defeated by its own mercenaries. For example, the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt, Arabia, and the Levant was founded by slaves who had served as soldiers in the Ottoman army. Even in traditionally well-governed Britain, military men have sometimes been a threat. Oliver Cromwell dissolved Parliament and took power in London with help from a regiment of his New Model Army in 1653. Nor has the United States been immune: President Kennedy feared a military coup, and as President sponsored a movie to warn of such a danger.
The Wagner Group is comprised mostly of ethic Russians, so a mutiny based on ethnic grievances is unlikely, but the threat of armed men influencing Russian domestic politics remains. The Russian army is not the army of the Roman Republic. To counter the threat of a military coup, a state needs two armies with two different chains of command.
The Soviet Union feared its military throughout its existence, and during Stalin’s era its government mitigated the problem by setting up a parallel set of officers backed by an armed internal security force that was loyal to the Communist Party called the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), and which was kept independent of the Red Army’s chain of command. All its orders had to be signed both by its commander as well as the Communist Party’s Political Officer. During the Second World War, retreating Red Army soldiers were often shot by NKVD blocking units.
Mercenary forces are a double-edged sword. They can employ men who are otherwise unfit for military discipline and remove troublemakers from society. Such units can also be raised quickly. But ultimately, mercenary armies pursue their own interests rather than those of the state or the nation they allegedly serve. They also don’t have an incentive to provide law and order or to quickly end wars in which they are engaged. There is always the possibility that they will create the problem for which they will provide the solution — for a fee — as was seen in the Landsknecht of the Thirty Years’ War.
The Wagner Group’s future is currently unclear. Russia’s position in Europe is actually being strengthened by having Wagner billeted in Belarus. It’s also possible that there might still be a genuine mutiny that could unravel Putin’s ability to rule or even a Russian civil war, although those eventualities might end up being worse than the current state of affairs. The mutiny could also possibly be the start of events which could lead to negotiations and peace, if Putin has been rattled enough.
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21 comments
I disagree with the quotes by Churchill and Kennan that Russia is so inherently mysterious as they say. The mumbo jumbo about complexity is a well known ruse by liberals to avoid meaningful counter measures against Bolshevism and to pursue “peaceful coexistence.” Bolshevism is no more complicated than any other form of evil. Churchill and FDR fought WW2 to make the world safe for Communism, which otherwise would have been destroyed by Germany and Japan.
The problem of evil is not that it’s “complicated.” The problem with dealing with evil is the moral and intellectual confusion, if not deception, by so called Western leaders for the last 100 years.
Evil doesn’t exist. To call certain political ideologies evil is extremely childish. Liberalism, Fascism, National Socialism, Anarchism, Socialism or Communism,none of these systems are “evil”. Evil belongs to the theological realm, not the political. Also George Kennan was no liberal.
Exactly. So they found explanations for each act of high treason. The most shocking for me was to discover that Herbert Hoover campaigned to save Lenin and the Red army from the famine they inflicted upon themselves, while as a president, Hoover did absolutely nothing to save the Americans during the great crisis. More than that, Hoover took great care to export technology and knowhow in order to modernize the savage red army.
What riddle do we have here? Same old sleazy, greazy, disgusting corruption. Just like today, when it comes about Russia.
Good points all. There is something weird about the US, which rushes to the aid of foreign peoples at every disaster, but which reacts with indifferent to the suffering of fellow Americans. In 1917, a munitions ship exploded in Halifax Canada and wiped out much of the City, killing and wounding thousands of people. Almost immediately, hundreds of volunteers pulled out of Boston Mass on trains that rushed to the aid of that shattered city. The relief effort, organized by American volunteers in Boston, reached Halifax before the Canadian government did. Amazing. Just like today. Homeless Americans are everywhere, but most relief is directed toward illegal aliens, new Democrat voters imported into the country to replace Americans and vote for scum like Biden and Gavin Newsome. There is something weirdly self destructive in the American psyche.
Russia is the Golem created by the West. Of course, every Golem would turn against its creators, earlier or later. For this it would be punished, dissciplined, but not destroyed.
I do not know why the West did and does that. Maybe really simply for money, as Dr. Sutton wrote in his book The Best Enemy Money Can Buy. Or maybe sometimes the West needs Russia/SU as a gendarme in Central Europe and Northern Asia and also as deliverer of cheap raw materials and cannon fodder for European wars, against the French in the beginning of the 19th century, or twice against the Germans in the 20th century. Or also America many years supported Putin’s imperialism as an “ally” against the evil “Islam terrorism” and potentially also against Red China.
There was no rebellion. It’s just a performance. Putin needed a pretext to, if necessary, have a potential reason to fire the defense minister, a compromise figure connected to a wide layer of bureaucracy and through them to the oligarchs and therefore a figure for Western lobbying in behind-the-scenes politics.
Prigozhin, fully Putin’s man.
Otherwise, Putin is very weak for not having negotiated a private settlement between Shoigu and Prigozhin before Prigozhin decided to publicly mutiny resulting in the deaths of precious Russian airmen.
No, Putin is smart. Comparing to Prigozhin (with his very bad international image) he looks just OK for the West, so nobody would attempt to entthrone him. He is now something like a lesser evil.
Yes. and so they both performed another one good cop/bad cop show.
First, the Poles did conquer Russia after the battle of Klushin in 1610 – the tsar was captured and made to do homage, Moscow was occupied, and the boyars agreed to have Polish prince Vladislav to be tsar. In the long term however the fervently Catholic Polish king did not want his son to rule as an Orthodox tsar, so from a lack of ideas the effort eventually peutered out and the Poles contented themselves with adding Smoleńsk to their Commonwealth.
Second, before its conquest by Alexander the Great the Persian empire relied heavily on Greek mercenaries (beginning as early as Xenophon’s anabasis), so there is another example of mercenaries overthrowing their erstwhile clients.
The Polish forces consisted then mostly not of Poles, but of Litvins (Belarussians) and lesser of Ukrainian Kossaks.
This article is a good summary of recent events is Russia. Now I know more about the Wagner Group and its recent attempted coup.
This war is a huge tragedy for millions of people. I hope for a negotiated, compromise settlement.
I hope for a negotiated, compromise settlement.
Now it is not possible because
a)both warring parties still hope they could get the whole and ultimate victory. For Russians it is the conquest of the most part of Ukraine or maybe of the whole territory. For Ukrainians it is the reconquest of the all occupied territories. Both is not possible, so the war would last longer just like Iran-Iraq war of 1980’s. The war of today is really much alike that half-forgotten war, partially territorial and partially religious, very bloody, not necessary for both sides and ended in a tie.
b) both sides are only proxies of real hostile powers, the West led by Britain and the US, and the People’s Republic of China. China plays the Sixth stratagem “Make a sound in the east, then strike in the west” (or vice versa), so while the West/US is concerned with the war in Ukraine, the PRC gets ready to the invasion of the Republic of China, wrongly called also Taiwan.
Russia is a difficult country to conquer.
Yes, and no. It is difficult to conquer from without, only with a pure military invasion of some foreign military. But on the other hand it was centuries long ruled by foreigners who got the “soft” power “from within”. Varyagians, Baltian pirates, terrorists and slavetraders, got the power in the end of the 9th century, seemingly “invitated” by locals, but in reality annihilated local Slavic and not Slavic princes and enslaved the population, which then were sold in the whole Mediterranean. The invasion of Eastern Tuerkic tribes, called Mongolians, uncorrect transcription of Myngi El, was practically means the same as “Das Ewige (Tausendjaehrige) Reich”, ended not in occupation of some Russian lands but in the complicated system of vassalities. And, well, the so-called “Russian” Tsars since 18th century and up to 1917 were all Germans by origins, and they called their Russian subjects “half-animals” (poluzhivitnye) or “aborigines/natives” (tusemtsy). The rulers of the Soviet Union were Jews, Georgians, Latvians, full “Communist International”. So Russia was not conquerred from without, but the foreign powers sometimes installed there their puppet regimes, however, sometimes those puppet regimes turned against their former masters. Nothing unusual here for anybody who knows the Golem legend.
Sorry, Russians are not able for successful military Putsch. The military has never succeed in it and never got the power. Decabrists of 1825, Kornilov in 1917, Red Marschalls in 1937. Zhukov in the end of 1950’s, GKChP in 1991, Rokhlin’s coup in the end of 1990’s all those attempts failed. The Russian military is not an elite structure, has not the traditions of own professional honor, and is not a caste for themselves. Russians are not Tuerks, Greeks, Chileans, or Spaniards. Franco, Pinochet, Atatuerk, Tuerkes, Greek Colonels are not possible there.
Despite all the war-gaming, I don’t think the Russian military foresaw this outcome. They took a huge chance launching and continuing this disastrous war. The last couple of military stunts paid off (Crimea, South Ossetia/Abkhazia, Syria etc). It appears they anticipated sacking Kiev, installing a puppet government and then annexing Novorossiya within a few days. They upped the ante using paramilitaries on this front rather than keeping them in Africa because they needed cannon fodder that nobody would miss and to avoid full mobilization. This Wagner mutiny absolutely did not benefit Putin or Russia. Nothing good came from it, especially because the paramilitary got away with it, setting a precedent for others to follow. I have never seen the dynamic between Ramzan Kadyrov and Putin repeated in any other time in history of a regional strongman maintaining loyalty to a dictator. The Chechens appear to have realigned entirely with the Russian Federation despite the brutal wars in the 1990s and a fierce insurgency over following 15 years, especially Kadyrov fought against Russia. Chechnya has become more autonomous, homogenous and safe as Kadyrov toadies up to Putin, and even had Chechens en route to put down the Wagner revolt. I imagine they are preparing to best position Chechnya and successfully secede if the Russian Federation ever collapses like the Soviet Union did.
Or maybe Kadyrov will rule the whole Russia – nothing unusual here, Caucasian Stalin has ruled the Soviet Union for 30 years and is still the most popular politician in Russia for the whole its history. The other moment however is that Kadyrov represents only A PART of Chechenian population, some tribes, but not all tribes, and another tribes hate them and would use any chance to get their independence.
I did contemplate that because it is similar to Alexander Lukashenko since both have been ‘Russophobic’ previously, but now seemingly forgo their own ethnocentrism against the wishes of the majority. Most of Belarus now speaks Russian over Belarusian, not because of Russian colonization, but because it is a lingua franca. Lukashenko seems likelier because of the pan-Slavic imperium, especially because several Soviet leaders were Ukrainian. Stalin was born Orthodox Christian, so there is no Caucasian solidarity or parallel with Kadyrov because Islam is an alien religion to most of Russia. His visage does present as Russian besides the beard, yet I can’t envision him leading anything but Chechnya.
Maybe, but I still would not exclude this possibility. The Russians were ruled by foreigners or aliens most part of their history. Kadyrov would be simply another one of them.
Ukrainians have voted for an assimiliated and non-religious Jew Zelensky, and I have heard from them such arguments for this decision like “Slavs are stupid, Jews are smart, maybe it would be better to be ruled by a Jew, than by another one dumb and corrupt Slav druncard”. Right or wrong, but the same argument could be used also by Russians for Kadyrov.
Islam is an alien religion to most of Russia
The Muslims in Russia are mostly practicing believers (of course, the Islam of Tuerkic peoples is different from the stricter Arabian variation, and many of Muslim Tuerkic peoples are either very secular, as Edil-Tatars, or have strong pre-Islamic folk traditions of Tengrism). But the Russian Orthodox Christians are mostly Christians only twice a year, on the Christmas, and on the Eastern. That is something like the pure nominal Christianity without any spiritual connection. Without the state support the Russian Orthodox Church would not matter anything. Only different Protestant sects and so-called Staroobryadtsy (Old Believers) are true believing Christians there.
“In Britian, the Roman Britons recruited Anglo-Saxon …”
This seem to suffer from some kind of anachronism. Could you elaborate please?
I see nothing wrong with what he said. The Romanized British Celts in the last years of Roman Britain did, it seems, hire Germanic Angles and Saxons as mercenaries to help defend Britain against other Angles and Saxons after the Roman Legions withdrew from the Island.
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