Brutal Maniac Fails to Depose Other Brutal Maniac

By Jim Geraghty

Sunday, June 25, 2023

 

Think about all the things that must go right to pull off a successful coup.

 

You need to accurately sense that there is widespread discontent with the country’s ruler within the country, and in particular within the armed forces – often in a nation where speaking out against the ruler carries dire or fatal consequences. You absolutely must be a figure with the kind of official or unofficial stature to seize control of the armed forces. You need to either recruit, co-opt, or otherwise neutralize every other armed group within the country – the police, the domestic security services, the intelligence services. You must operate in absolute secrecy, while simultaneously recruiting more and more people to your cause. You need to make sure no one you speak to goes running to the ruler to rat you out, and everyone who joins the coup remains fully committed until it is complete. If anyone gets cold feet, you and your co-conspirators will likely be executed.

 

Oftentimes, in a dictatorial state like Russia, the leader has been paranoid about efforts to depose him since his first day ruling the country. State surveillance is ubiquitous; perhaps the best camouflage is an endless rumor mill where everyone is under suspicion all the time, so no particular act stands out as suspicious.

 

Once the operation begins, you must operate quickly – you must have already snatched as many levers of the state as possible – communications, key transportation routes and hubs, important government buildings — before the ruler or the general public realizes what is happening. You need the kind of access and power to suddenly either kill or isolate and imprison the ruler. And even if all that goes right, it’s still a giant gamble – which orders do the soldiers follow? What is a desperate ruler willing to do as hostile forces close in on him? And how does the general public react?

 

In this light, it’s surprising that coups ever succeed.

 

Maybe you must be a crazed maniac to try to launch a coup against a cold-blooded, paranoid dictator like Vladimir Putin. Then again, Yevgeniy Prigozhin meets most people’s definition of a crazed maniac. As a young man, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison for robbery, fraud, and involving minors in prostitution. After serving nine years, he turned a hot dog stand into the country’s largest catering company with government contracts. In 2019, his lucrative catering firm was accused of causing dysentery outbreaks at seven state-run day care catering and kindergartens in Moscow. He shrugged off a video of a “traitor” being executed by sledgehammer blows to the head, declaring, “a dog receives a dog’s death. . . . It was an excellent directional piece of work, watched in one breath.” He boasted that his forces were deliberately turning the battle of Bakhmut into a “meat grinder” to maximize the casualties to the Ukrainians.

 

And yet, Bellingcat calls Prigozhin “the Renaissance man of deniable Russian black ops.” Besides running the Wagner Group and sending retired Russian soldiers all around the globe to enforce Russia’s will without leaving government fingerprints, Prigozhin is the man behind the Russian Internet “troll factory,” the Saint Petersburg–based Internet Research Agency,. He was indicted by former FBI director Robert Mueller for a conspiracy to steal the identities of American citizens, posed as political activists in a plot to influence the 2016 election.

 

As the world learned this weekend, a man crazy enough to launch a coup against Putin is also crazy enough to say, “eh, nevermind” after a day and accept exile in Belarus because Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko asked him nicely to avoid starting a Russian civil war. Perhaps Prigozhin lost his nerve, or belatedly realized the odds were stacked against him. His short-lived upheaval left those of us in the West wondering how much control Putin really has over the Russian state.

 

More than a few foreign-policy wonks have warned that under Putin, Russia was devolving into something more akin to North Korea: irrational, unpredictable, provocative, a barely functional state by many measures, but still nuclear-armed and capable of threatening anyone. For decades, Russia watchers in the West convinced themselves that Russia was antagonistic but rational, and that President Biden was correct to seek a “stable and predictable” relationship with Russia. But as we’ve seen since the invasion of Ukraine started in February 2022, neither Putin nor Russia are all that stable or predictable.

 

If Putin died tomorrow — or he became incapacitated — the current prime minister would become acting president. The current prime minster is Mikhail Mishustin, a man who is in that job precisely because he has no ambition to replace Putin or any demonstrated capacity to disagree with him. According to the Russian constitution, after the president dies, an election to replace him should be called within 90 days. Mishustin would be eligible to run, but he doesn’t seem like a man with a burning hunger to run a nuclear-armed state that is now a global pariah.

 

The men who rise to the top of the Russian system tend to be like Putin and Prigozhin – egomaniacal, ruthless, brutal, paranoid, shameless – an odious combination of cold-blooded ambition and wicked comfort with violence. Maybe this weekend’s events signal the beginning of the end for Putin’s rule. But whoever replaces Putin isn’t likely to have a dramatically different geopolitical worldview or code of ethics from his predecessor. Russian leaders feel vulnerable and threatened, and so they seek to avert those threats by taking a bellicose stance toward the country’s neighbors and the West.

 

After two decades of Putin’s shameless provocations and aggression, the West yearned to see Russia’s leadership weakened. But there’s no guarantee that a weaker Russia will be a more stable Russia.