Putin Has Lost His Totalitarian Grip After Ukraine. By Aviezer Tucker

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Putin Has Lost His Totalitarian Grip After Ukraine

Aviezer Tucker

11 - 13 minutes

Shutterstock. Asatur Yesayants.

Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group’s recent march on Moscow undoubtedly caused Russians of a certain age to think, “This could not have happened under Stalin or Brezhnev.” Wagner’s warriors and tanks progressed for hundreds of kilometers toward the Russian capital without someone so much as putting up a roadblock, laying a road mine or firing a rocket-propelled grenade to slow their progress. This unimpeded march signals the end of Putin’s totalitarian state—and the likely start of a new unraveling of the longstanding Russian empire, with major consequences for both Europe and Asia.

In a proper totalitarian state, the secret police ensure that conspiracies like Prigozhin’s are infiltrated before they get off the ground. Each stage in the plotters’ planning and execution is monitored and recorded. When the whole network of insurgents is completely mapped out, its members are arrested, preferably in the dead of night, while the conspirators are in their pajamas.

It is astonishing that Vladimir Putin’s FSB in contrast to its totalitarian predecessor, the Soviet Union’s feared KGB, did not infiltrate such a broad conspiracy, especially one directed from a well-known power center like Russia’s Wagner Group. Amazingly, the FSB had no agents among the many criminally compromised and shady characters around Prigozhin to alert the Putin regime to the impending plot. The FSB also had no agents on the ground with the power to arrest the plotters once they began the march.

The decline is striking. The old KGB was able not only to infiltrate society so broadly and deeply as to make effective conspiracies close to impossible; it also atomized civil society, because ordinary people were afraid to trust each other. Anybody could be an informant, and anything one said could and would be used against them outside a court of law. Attempts to organize not just against the state, but simply outside the state, would fail, because members of aspiring civil organizations could not trust one another. Fear of the unknown informant atomized society into individuals rightly suspicious of each other. Only during the post-Stalinist, late-totalitarian era were nuclear families strengthened by the general—though not absolute—ability to trust immediate family members, even if they could trust no one else.

As the Central Police State Withers Away

The FSB has now proven itself incredibly feeble and ineffective. Prigozhin has demonstrated that it is possible not only to conspire in broad daylight right under the nose of the regime’s power structures, but to get away with it. Putin has hence lost his power of deterrence against other, less obvious plots and conspiracies. Other ambitious power brokers are likely talking now and coming to trust each other without fear of secret police surveillance and infiltration. Next, they may be drawing up and executing plans, with Russia disintegrating into warring factions.

Following centuries of imperial expansion, Russia is currently the largest country in the world. Yet Wagner’s unobstructed march on Moscow indicates that Putin and his circle’s direct control extends to at most a radius of a few hundred kilometers around Moscow. Putin is no longer the czar of an empire, but the Prince of Muscovy. What could Putin do if, say, a far eastern governor, official or officer in a place like Vladivostok declared independence? Local leaders of areas rich in natural resources may consider breaking away from Russia, perhaps with Chinese backing, to declare their own republics while the Prince of Muscovy lacks the central power structure to discipline them—a repeat of the previous imperial implosion in 1917. At most, Muscovy could then try to ally itself with other local chieftains to restrain the rebels, and the Russian government would devolve into a quasi-feudal system with decentralized political power, where the country’s new boyars would elect a czar with limited power in Muscovy.

The rise of warlords like Prigozhin and the Chechen Ramzan Kadyrov mark a transition of power in Russia. In the Soviet Union, power lay with the KGB and the Communist Party. When the Soviet empire dissolved, power shifted to those oligarchs who controlled Russia’s vast natural resources and mass media. By bringing these oligarchs to heel, Putin transferred control of the media and natural resources back to the state. The state and the corrupt clientelist elite were then financed by income from selling natural resources, while the state-controlled media kept much of the population conveniently gas-lighted.

But now as a result of Putin’s ill-conceived invasion of Ukraine, power has shifted from the natural-resources kleptocratic state to the warlords—or to use a Roman analogy, from the emperor to the legions. In the Roman Empire, the emperor became dependent on professional—as opposed to citizen-farmer—soldiers, and these legions, rather than the Roman city elites, came to choose the emperors from among their leaders. They also assassinated emperors. Since the composition of the legions came to resemble that of the empire, Roman emperors were no longer Roman, but multiethnic and even multiracial. Similarly, if warlords can be crowned in Moscow by their legions, non-Russians like the Chechen Kadyrov and the half-Jewish Prigozhin can contemplate becoming “emperors” too, despite Russians’ traditional disdain for Chechens, and despite the barriers that have greeted prominent Jews nearing the pinnacle of Russian power.

The Butler (Almost) Did It

Inevitably, there will be other competing sources of power, as well. Built into any imperial bureaucratic household will be the modern equivalent of the majordomo, the secretary, the food taster, the manservant, the gatekeeper or a combination of the above. This idea may sound comical to modern ears; indeed, the media likes to ridicule Prigozhin for being the Kremlin’s “chef.” But rather than calling Prigozhin a “chef,” a better title would be the historical “majordomo,” head of the imperial household. Majordomos controlled finances and budgets, and they could create militias and become warlords in empires where there was scant distinction between the state and the imperial domicile.

Prigozhin started life as a convicted criminal who went on to sell sausages for a living, become a restaurateur, rise to a major food contractor for the Russian state, and then use his background in the Soviet penal system to recruit prisoners as soldiers and become a warlord. His role has historical antecedents: The Frankish Carolingian dynasty started as the majordomos of the Merovingians, and along the way, the Carolingian majordomo-warlord Charles Martel halted the Muslim expansion into Europe in the battle of Tours, while his grandson, Charlemagne, founded the Holy Roman Empire, which later disintegrated into what eventually became Germany, France and Italy.

From this perspective, it was not unreasonable of Prigozhin to aspire to become a Carolingian emperor. He failed. But somebody else will have to take over the management of the imperial household. Putin and the next Prince of Muscovy will have to keep replacing their majordomos to prevent them from accumulating power. But inexperienced majordomos would make mistakes.

Of Empires, Dissolution and Tragedy

Including the Soviet era, Russia has been an empire for a few centuries now. Empires eventually disintegrate, but not linearly. During their decline and fall, they go through centrifugal and centripetal cycles—the general tendency being centrifugal, but with interspersed centripetal phases. The Soviet imperial phase ended with the centrifugal breaking away of the empire’s constituent republics. Had the Chechens been successful in their attempt to break away from Russia, they might well have been the first domino in the disintegration of the post-Soviet Russian Empire.

But Putin came to power during the Chechnyan rebellion and forestalled the empire’s dissolution. He then embarked on a process of concentration of power, vertical integration and imperial expansion across Russia’s borders into neighboring republics. The invasion of Ukraine was the capstone of this strategy.

It backfired. Prior to the invasion, Putin had attempted to use a witches’ brew of anti-modernist ideologies to consolidate the Russian state, mobilize conservative rural and provincial populations, and project soft power abroad to segments of the world population that modernity had left fuming at the side of the global highway. With his bungled attack, Putin exposed himself as a simple imperialist, but of a pathetic, failed variety—a Prince of Muscovy who thought he was a czar, a Wizard of Oz revealed as a snake oil salesman. Such a snake oil ideology will not find many buyers.

Should Russia begin to disintegrate, it will be the end of the Ukrainian campaign. Russian soldiers may retreat from the battlefront on their own initiative, as they did in 1917, but more significantly, whoever is in control in Moscow will need the legions to support him in the power struggles for Muscovy itself. Once somebody gains power there, he will have to use the legions to retake control of as much of the former territory of Russia as possible, much like the Bolsheviks did following their victory in the civil war against the Whites. He won’t be able to afford to use scarce legions abroad.

During a Russian disintegration, command and control over Russia’s nuclear arsenal will be of paramount significance for the West, just as it was during the collapse of the Soviet Union. There could be a proliferation nightmare if competing warlords and their legions attempt to win the biggest “toys” to establish their power and be taken seriously.

Russia’s disintegration would also provide opportunities to the other surviving historical empire: China, the Middle Kingdom, where centripetal forces are still on the ascent as China’s leaders, aided by modern surveillance technology, move to homogenize their empire in radical ways reminiscent of Stalin’s Russia. Though all empires, including China’s, will break apart eventually, it can take centuries, and in the meantime, China would have plenty of opportunities to expand into Russia’s former domain.

The methods of Chinese imperialism are subtler than Russia’s tank columns. Expect China to offer breakaway Russian regions loans for investments in public projects executed by Chinese companies and workers and secured by Chinese security forces. This kind of largesse could lure much of the Asian part of Russia—and perhaps more—within the Chinese orbit of influence and control. China’s “Belt and Road” initiative could become a Eurasian Golden Horde, an expansive geopolitical tent.

Putin may be remembered historically as a failed centripetal strategist who overstrained the forces that kept his empire together and consequently unleashed the preexisting centrifugal forces that would break his empire apart. All this would have made an excellent Shakespearean tragedy, where the character flaws of tragic heroes, like King Lear and Macbeth, bring them down—in this case, a tragedy about the Prince of Muscovy who thought he was an emperor.

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