AP Photo
Members of the Wagner Group military company sit atop a tank on a street in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, June 24, 2023, prior to leaving an area at the headquarters of the Southern Military District.
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 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.
