In the aftermath of this weekend’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it aborted mutiny of Russian mercenaries against Putin, it’s understandable that a lot of people — from journalists down to average joes — will be looking for historical parallels. The two most obvious historical parallels being 1905 and 1917, both deeply entwined with the story of the fall of Russia’s previous Tsar (more on that later).
Unfortunately, a lot of those takes will be not just wrong, but abominably fucking bad to the point of being dangerous. To be clear, that’s not a uniquely modern pathology; how do you think we ended up with all the bullshit mythologies around Columbus and the fall of Rome?
Anyways, I’m not going to tell you anything that isn’t abundant on the Revolutions podcast’s penultimate, and best, season. But I’m going to use that knowledge so you don’t have to listen to, what, at least 80+ hours of podcast episodes.
1905: Revolution, Aborted Mutinies, And Backlash
1905 is categorized as a revolution in most history books. But it also kind of wasn’t one — it resembles the revolution backlash of 1848 more than your typical upheaval.
The backstory is this: A mere ten years into his reign as a pretty young leader, the last Tsar (Nicholas II) started a war with Japan in 1904, thinking it would be an easy imperialist territory grab. It wasn’t. The Japanese whupped the Russians decisively up and down the Pacific coast.
The strain of the war exacerbated inequality back in the population centers of Western Russia. What would have otherwise been a peaceful protest of workers trying to petition the Tsar at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg (Russia’s second biggest city) ended up becoming Bloody Sunday, which sparked a year-long national wave of general strikes and uprisings. These soon bled into military mutinies. Throughout all these efforts, various communist and socialist groups1 were involved in various ways — from general agitation and rabble-rousing, to direct organizing and supplying things like pamphlets and guns.
The Tsar pretty quickly folded after Bloody Sunday and his uncle’s assassination, and promised a constitution. But the thing was, he didn’t really believe in it, he thought it was an immoral imposition on his God-given monarchical authority, and so he kept trying to wriggle out of the agreement. The combination of arrogance, autocratic blindness, and resultant waffling and double-dealing would eventually catch up to him, but over the course of 1905 he just barely managed to hold the ship of state together by promising a constitution that could be vague enough to be all things to all people while allowing him a backdoor to reassert his monarchical power.
There’s also something to be said for the backlash element. Most Russians in 1905 thought there was something worth saving in the Russian state. They didn’t see the Tsar as a traitor, they just thought he was misguided by his advisors, and/or wanted some more civil liberties. Most of the strikes, uprisings, and mutinies were intended to assert some level of real-time bottom-up feedback that could penetrate to the Tsar so that he could better serve the people. The point of the new constitutional government — including the Duma, the legislature it prescribed — was to institutionalize this role of advice to the Tsar.
1917: Failure And Collapse
The revolutions of 1917 were an entirely different beast. I won’t bore you by repeating the familiar plot points. Rather, let’s just talk about the environment they happened in.
The Communists had by now been organized, with the Bolsheviks ensconced at the helm. Many were veterans of the 1905 revolutionary efforts, having spent the last dozen years arguing over which lessons to learn from its failure to achieve a communist revolution. Many had also spent years recruiting and infiltrating among the military.
The military were beaten down and on the verge of defeat. The Tsar had gone to the front for 2 years to assume direct command, and it was a dual disaster — he was a crap commander, and he was unable to effectively govern the whole country from the front. Worse, his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra, whom he’d left in charge, was of German descent… and thus widely untrusted by Russians in a war against… Germany.
The government established in 1905 was by now widely viewed as a corrupt puppet of the capitalist class, through which they contributed no small part of their own in mismanaging the war and betraying everyday Russians. Even the liberal and moderate-socialist “good guys” were increasingly viewed with suspicion as enablers who hadn’t been extreme enough to deliver on the change they promised.
Amidst all this, all the glorious promised civil liberties never materialized. The back-and-forth between the Tsar and various extremists — whether communists, socialists, anarchists, or even proto-fascists — had been going on for decades at this point, a cycle stretching back even well before his reign. Whatever hope there might have been for increased civil liberties in 1905 dried up after the next inevitable terrorist attack or assassination led to the next inevitable crackdown.
If I were to sum it all up, the Russian people had just about had it with literally everyone who was in power. There was no one they trusted. It’s no wonder that the revolution and civil war remade Russian society so dramatically2: there was so much that needed to be rebuilt.
2023: Parallels With The New Tsar
To be clear, Putin isn’t a tsar. At least not in a technical sense — he was elected, and appears to have zero ambitions to establish a new monarchy led by his children. It seems that he expects his successor to simply be whoever emerges from the power struggle that will incontrovertibly follow his death.
At the same time, he’s an autocrat. His “election” was more of a coronation by the major power centers of the time. As an insider who rose by raw power politics through the ranks of a core institution of state to an office he does not intend to hold monarchically, he resembles nothing so much as many of the mid- to late-Roman emperors, from whose title his own people fittingly derive their word “tsar”.
Like Nicholas, Putin clearly is suffering from autocratic myopia. Perhaps he was never indoctrinated into a mindset of himself as a “father of the nation” carrying a heavenly mandate of absolute monarchy the same way as Nicholas. But it’s obvious that he’s slowly slipped into a mindset of himself as a sort of “supreme caretaker” of the Russian people — not a literal father, but certainly a paternalistic figure.
Like the tsarist regime, Putin has relied on the Russian Orthodox Church to legitimize his reign. Again, perhaps they never crowned him in a religious ceremony — the man himself is irreligious by most accounts — but he certainly bought them off with his embrace of religious social conservatism.
Adding all these things up, it’s really hard not to call him some form of Tsar — a New Tsar.
Unlike Nicholas, Putin doesn’t imagine himself a battlefield commander. But his wars of imperialism are unmistakably driven by his self-conception as an avid and competent amateur historian, as we saw in the wierd dissertation he delivered back in February 2022 on why he was invading Ukraine. Like Nicholas, however, most of the historical analysis he manages to produce is superficial and shoddy: He looks to it for confirmation of his biases, which may look like wisdom to him, but most assuredly is not. Like one too many internet mall ninjas, he’s heard that great apocryphal quote, “Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it,” one too many times, and rather than be curious about the truth behind the quote’s ample mythology (like a real history nerd), he sees it as a mandate to mine history for strategical and tactical advice. Ironically, it’s this very attitude that ensures he will never manage to assemble a coherent-enough historical understanding to ever benefit strategically nor tactically from it.
Like the mutinies of 1905, Prigozhin’s mutiny was mostly abortive. It was mostly motivated by patriotism — nobody would ever mistake Prigozhin for a cuddly liberal reformer. It was motivated by a sense of betrayal on the front, that the (New) Tsar’s advisors are not advising him well. It was carried out under the view that the Tsar cares about the nation and can still change course if only he would listen to the hard-earned lessons of the ordinary soldiers he commands.
Unlike the mutinies of 1905, the Russian military is in a state of unrecoverable collapse. The ease with which Prigozhin was able to organize his coup more resembles 1917, as does the sheer volume of the military that is consumed by the conflict — estimates say as much as 80-90% of available Russian armed forces are involved in Ukraine. The Russian military-industrial complex is shorn of any real capability to rebuild its army into even a passably modern one to go into the next war3; all it produces is vaporware and corruption.
Also resembling 1917 is the reaction of the civilian population. In 1905, ordinary Russians had hope that the new Duma would help resolve the contradictions of autocracy, capitalism, and modernity. In 1917, they were battered and apathetic, wholly undisposed to take the Tsar at his word, ready to just toss the bum out4. In 2023, Russians have been so battered by propaganda and (again) the rampant excesses of war and capitalism, that the citizens of Rostov-On-Don shockingly just didn’t care whether Prigozhin or Putin or whoever else was going to be the new Tsar. This alarming brokenness was a key ingredient to the collapse of 1917; it cannot be ignored in 2023.
Finally, the state of the opposition parties resembles 1905 more than 1917. In 1905, they were disorganized and unprepared. There was no one who was ready to fill in the power vacuum. Sure, plenty of people wanted to, but they were unable to seize the opportunity5 like the Bolsheviks later did. They could only win as a coalition, which coincidentally was the only way Nicholas would accept a loss of power, since it was at the hands of the entire country, not a single whiny constituency whose complaints could be waved away. In the Russia of 2023, the opposition are mostly in jail or exiled. There are Communists and Liberals who get airplay on TV, but they’re there to be designated punching bags for Putin’s propagandists, not a meaningful opposition.
Conclusion
I’m not a fortune-teller. I can’t tell you that Putin is on the verge of losing power or not. I can certainly point to some factors that lean one way — civilian apathy, depletion of the military — and others that lean opposite them — Prigozhin’s exile deal, the lack of meaningful opposition, Putin’s stranglehold on the elites through his security services.
Ultimately, though, I think one of the most interesting dynamics to follow here is what happens to the rest of Prigozhin’s mutineers and Putin’s other mercenaries. Will Prigozhin still command them behind Putin’s back? Will Putin execute Prigozhin’s top lieutenants, allies, and ringleaders, or make an example of some of Wagner’s footsoldiers? Will Putin begin relying more on other warlords like Kadyrov? With the Wagner soldiers signing MoD contracts, will Putin disperse them through the ranks or keep them concentrated in a single unit that can be sent on suicide missions? Everyone in Russia will be watching this play out closely.
These questions are so central because — with the military hollowed out and liable to fail to fend off further coup attempts, and no other opposition running around mobilizing civilian revolt — if a spark is to come topple Putin in the short-to-medium term, then that spark will have to come from within the military. Putin hasn’t (yet) been forced to trade away any actual authority in order to maintain power. And smartly, he’s used his perch atop the security services to maintain the post-Soviet insulation between his oligarchs and his military: oil and mining barons aren’t going to lead troops against him, only a warlord can, and the warlords both don’t trust the barons and look down on them as unmanly.
History doesn’t actually repeat itself; it merely rhymes. Trying to find the rhyme scheme is an inexact science. Thus, my final admonition is simply not to trust anyone who tells you they’ve figured it out. They haven’t. The best we can do is listen to the people who can tell you what a rhyme looks like, and help you see new ways to rhyme. I hope I’ve accomplished even just a part of that today.
There were a LOT of them, not yet fully centralized.
Despite the ultimate result being such a tragic descent into totalitarianism.
As was attempted (successfully or otherwise, you be the judge) between 1905-1914.
And eventually, y’know, murder him.
The Revolutions podcast’s final “Appendix” season makes a great point about this, that most revolutions are not planned, they just sort of happen, and their success or failure rests on how well-prepared the various actors are at the time.
This contrasts to how most self-described “revolutionaries” tend to think. They imagine that they will be the ones to trigger the revolution at a time and place of their own choosing. Thus, they systematically underprepare. Most successful revolutionaries often just happen to have been in the middle of plotting one at just the “right place and right time” when they can capitalize on it.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks were among the few revolutionaries in all of history who ever remotely had a role in sparking their own revolution, let alone a plan for what to do afterwards. Setting their politics aside, you gotta hand that to them.
Good comparative analysis
Forget Russia, look at the US. Lots of similarities between the MAGAites now and the Bolsheviks between 1905 and 1917. There initial attempt to take over the government on January 6 failed. Now they are learning from their mistakes and planning for the next opportunity. They are definitely infiltrating the military and recruiting ex-military.