The stunning turn of events in Russia – an aborted military rebellion by the head of the Wagner mercenary force – may have weakened the regime of autocrat Vladimir Putin, raising the possibility that the man who has ruled Russia since late 1999 could next lose the vital support of the country’s elites. Much may depend on the course of Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine, whose failures Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin publicly pinned on top defense officials rather than Mr. Putin himself.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historians Michael Kimmage, Sergey Radchenko and Vladislav Zubok put the Wagner mutiny into historical context while analyzing the problems with Mr. Putin’s personalist, informal style of rule that left him looking weak and ineffectual as the mercenaries’ tanks came within 125 miles of Moscow.
“It’s a remarkable thing to have roughly 25,000 soldiers completely outside the command of the government marching on the capital city, taking over the military command post in a city of one million people, Rostov, and then as they bow out of this 24-hour insurrection … demonstrating that elite support for Putin is very thin,” said Mr. Kimmage, an expert on post-Soviet Russia at Catholic University.
Mr. Zubok and Mr. Radchenko deconstruct comparisons between Mr. Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny and the utterly calamitous events of 1917, when Czar Nicholas II was toppled amid Russia’s war failures and revolutionary ferment.
History As It Happens is available at washingtontimes.com or wherever you find your podcasts.
SEE ALSO: History As It Happens: From Grozny to Bakhmut
