We’ve been mentioning Yevgeni Prigozhin an awful lot lately.
I think he doesn’t deserve all the attention he’s getting. What does deserve attention, though,
is the phenomenon itself, which warrants a deeper dive into things.
Today, we’ll ask an unexpected question: Is there any chance Putin loses? Can his system start cracking?
Is Prigozhin’s figure a sign that the regime won’t put itself back together again?
These questions aren’t that easy. One simple circumstance hampers a quick answer.
We believe in Putin too much and can hardly imagine his ultimate failure.
There are reasons for this, and it's true even if it doesn't seem so at first. Let's talk about this in more detail.
Let’s go back 15 months and recall the public sentiment in the weeks leading up to the war and early into it.
Both experts and ordinary observers said that this war would cost a lot of blood, that Ukraine would fight back,
and Russia would never take Kyiv in three days.
Everyone was talking about the utterly disastrous economic, political, and social repercussions.
But the word “defeat” was largely out of everyone’s vocabulary.
Sure, Ukraine will fight back, but sooner or later, it’ll be crushed at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.
The overwhelming majority agreed that it was only a matter of time; that Russia is stronger,
and everything would be over by summer at best, no matter the heroic pushback.
Few people now mention this, but Ukraine, for the most part, held the same view.
We will resist as best we can, but we have no real shot at winning this one.
Just remember that Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered Putin peace on terms that look absolutely unthinkable today.
He was ready to “freeze the status” of Crimea for 15 years, which would’ve effectively legitimized
its annexation. That’s how desperate the situation seemed.
Why did we all think this? Granted, Western experts were largely playing the numbers game.
But why did we suddenly put so much faith in the Russian army? What didn’t we know about?
The hazing? The private palaces of the Defense Minister and the generals?
The rampant theft of supplies? The officers’ incompetence?
Didn’t we know the true value of Putin’s wonder-weapon cartoons?
We’ve already discussed this. No one in Russia has ever perceived the army as a military force.
Its main purpose in our society is initiation.
Native American tribes send boys on forest survival missions to become men.
The Russian army starves and deprives young men of sleep; makes them sweep the drill ground with a shovel,
paint the lawn, and fulfill other absurd whims of their superiors.
In the public mind, the army is a kind of forest inhabited by mythical creatures.
In it, laws and common sense are powerless, everything isn’t what it seems,
and life in it will drive you crazy for a year.
But if you hold out and don’t break down re-making your bed for the zillionth time, it’ll somehow help you man up.
Those who return from a mandatory stint in the army don’t talk about combat training.
Their stories usually sound more like a Monty Python sketch.
And the sergeant major’s rank has become synonymous with theft.
Because if he’s incapable of stripping his army unit of everything from missiles to the bathroom tiling,
there’s probably something wrong with him.
So why did we all suddenly decide that an army that’s doing anything but military training,
where soldiers starve and freeze to death even in peacetime, can’t be defeated?
An army whose hierarchy is a cascade of theft, lies, and hot air.
Knowing all this, why did we think that the unabashed corruption hadn’t just devoured the army completely?
The answer is, we didn’t believe in the army. Instead, we weirdly believed in Putin.
In his regime’s ability to achieve its goals. True, at great cost.
True, terribly inefficiently and shoddily. But we believed that Putin’s system would have its way.
WARPED OPTICS
Up until the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive last September,
we looked at the Russian army in stunned disbelief.
They clearly wouldn’t be able to score more wins, but surely they wouldn’t give up
what had already been seized, or would they?
Although we knew the answers perfectly well, it was incredibly difficult to realize
how pathetic and worthless Putin’s regime is.
There’s a similar effect in politics. Putin has been in power for so long that we may simply overlook
the signs of how the government system is decaying. Even if they’re staring us in the eye.
In August, it’ll be 24 years since Vladimir Putin was appointed prime minister. 24 years is a long time,
a whole era. The class of ‘99 may already have grandkids.
There’s a popular joke about how there isn’t a single cat left in the world born before Putin’s ascent to power.
But in truth, the world as we know it today shaped up during Putin’s rule.
In ‘99, you couldn’t have a cell phone without permission from the state comms regulator.
1% of Russia’s population browsed the internet.
You’d go to the post office to wire money to another city or make a long-distance call. If you needed to find out
what year Ramesses II died, how long a kangaroo’s pregnancy lasts,
or write a report on birds for your science class, you went to the library, not Wikipedia.
In ‘99, the digital camera was a very expensive gadget meant for the rich.
Everyone used film cameras and had their photos printed at Kodak kiosks, which took a few days
or a few hours if you paid extra. The world was getting its news from printed newspapers and TV broadcasts.
A world where we have the universe at our fingertips.
A world where we can connect to anyone anywhere on the planet.
Where any financial operations, all human knowledge, and entertainment are one click away.
A world where you can watch my video, send your mom some money, trade stocks,
and play Candy Crush without once turning away from your phone. This world emerged during Putin’s rule.
When he came to power, your car’s navigator was a paper map sitting in the glove compartment.
There’s a reason I’m talking about the technological advances of humankind.
It’s the simplest way to measure the scale of an era.
The world has changed so much that today’s people would have
a hard time just going about their daily lives in ‘99.
So much has happened and changed that almost nothing in our way of life reminds us of ‘99,
except one thing. Vladimir Putin is still in power.
Sure, now he appears before the people through a 60” LCD screen with 4K resolution
and an internet connection, but it’s still Putin.
This makes it easy to fall for the illusion that it’s forever.
Putin’s regime has seen all sorts of pitfalls and crises, most of them self-inflicted.
But it has always ridden out the storms, pulled through, and returned to the status quo, stabilizing itself.
It would seem that the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas is a life-or-death bet,
resulting in a crushing pariah status.
And when a Russian missile shot down a Malaysian Boeing carrying Dutch nationals,
it seemed that was the regime’s undoing.
Something like that couldn’t just go away.
Well, turns out it could. There were some economic ramifications, but no political ones.
The West imposed sanctions on two tiny banks, prolifically expressed its deep concern, and by 2018,
Moscow was hosting the FIFA World Cup with the French president rooting
for his national team next to Putin during the final game.
Or take COVID-19. The way it was handled seemed pretty disastrous on all accounts.
The Russian authorities didn’t declare a proper lockdown, didn’t distribute aid,
brazenly lied about the disease being defeated, and botched the vaccination campaign.
They even held a national vote to amend the Constitution right in the middle of the pandemic.
All the unimplemented measures resulted in a million excess deaths in a single year.
Few governments seem to have failed the fight for the lives of their citizens more miserably.
The system proved to be good-for-nothing cowards.
Yet, this crisis slipped by as if nothing had happened.
It turned out that Russians were far more lenient toward the risk of sickness and death than toward
any attempt of the government to interfere in their lives.
Nobody expects the government to help them out. What matters is that it doesn’t make vaccination mandatory.
These two stories are the first to come to mind. But there’ve been many such cases over the past 24 years.
Every time the regime seemed to be verging on the abyss, it somehow climbed back to normal.
And after a few months, no one even remembered what once seemed like an ultra-massive
crisis capable of tearing down the system.
And just as with the army, we may fail to notice that the system is irrevocably destabilized
till the very last moment.
Even if all the obvious signs are in the news every day.
Because nearly 25 years without change have warped our optics.
A SECOND GOVERNMENT
Now, take the Prigozhin phenomenon.
Merely a year ago, it didn’t exist and couldn’t have existed under our regime.
In a way, we now have a second government with its own propaganda,
its own army at the front, and its own law enforcement back at home.
Unlike the main government, it has a charismatic leader who can ad-lib thrilling speeches instead
of a bureaucratic fuddy-duddy muttering something from a piece of paper.
This second government is outright competing for everything.
It’s vying with the defense ministry for clout and resources and with the political leadership
for public opinion. This newfangled government openly bosses around state officials and bends them to its will.
The mayors who dared hinder the lavish funerals of PMC Wagner soldiers.
The retired general, currently an MP, who dared to mention that mercenarism is illegal in Russia.
They all chickened out and hid in a corner fairly quickly.
One might say that it’s all just a cheap show. That these are stunts performed by professionals.
That Putin allows Prigozhin to exist as long as he needs him, but that as soon
as things get heated the secret services will get rid of him.
This line of reasoning makes some sense, but it’s based on the assumption that Putin is
in charge of the situation and can afford even the most extreme risk.
Like the loss of the state’s monopoly on violence or the emergence of a populist politician
who’s quickly gaining legitimacy with the public.
But what if this isn’t true? What if we’ve fallen into the same trap that made us think that the Russian
army couldn’t screw up in Ukraine?
What if such a prolonged lack of change prevents us from recognizing clear symptoms
that things are out of whack?
What if we have more faith in Vladimir Putin than he has in himself? What if our faith is baseless?
I don’t mean to say that Prigozhin will seize power tomorrow or that he’s important in his own right.
No, Prigozhin is just a symptom. In any other situation and in any other country,
it would be taken very seriously because for the government, it’s a lethal symptom
But we’ve convinced ourselves over the years that Putin can’t lose.
We’re so sure of Putin’s invincibility that all public discussion boils down to what he’s up
to and what cunning plan he’s implementing by having his own generals and officials humiliated.
We wonder what Putin is trying to achieve by having a hideous armed version of Navalny
with a similar political agenda jump into the public eye while the real Navalny is in jail.
But who decided he’s trying to achieve anything?
Who told us he’s in control? Sure, it’s very easy to ridicule those who predict that Putin will stand trial
next week.
But the other extreme view is far more widespread, and yet, almost nobody notices it.
It’s the idea that Putin is detached from reality to the point where political, economic,
and perhaps even physical laws no longer apply to him.
That he can roll the dice as much as he wants to and get into as many hopeless situations
as he wants to because time, luck, and God will bail him out.
Maybe they will. Maybe in a few months, we’ll stop seeing mentions of Prigozhin.
Maybe, after a two-year-long bloodbath, the 2024 presidential election will be a breeze.
Maybe none of the risks that Putin is amassing will come true and the system will bounce back.
All this is possible. But it’s not certain, and we shouldn’t treat it as such. And not because it sounds sad.
But because if we’re convinced that Putin can’t lose, we’ll miss the moment when he actually starts losing.
See you tomorrow!