Putin’s Breaking Point
Are the cracks in Vladimir Putin’s autocracy signs that Russia is about to break? Audley Senior Advisor and former British Army Officer Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton looks to Russian history for answers.
Much has been written on the state of democracy in our present day. Some of it, it must be said, is pure pontificating, but this does not negate the widely felt anxiety that our democratic institutions are under threat. As warnings are issued of faith in democracy waning, the influence and aggressive behaviours of autocracies in our geopolitics become ever more ominous. The reality is, true democracy will always be fragile, at times frail even, but through all the dents and knocks it holds its purpose. Conversely, for all their displays of power, autocracies are brittle; cast iron one moment, gone the next.
For proof of this, look at Russia. While many in the international community are understandably alarmed by Vladimir Putin’s regime, even more so in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, recent reverses in the conflict and the Wagner mutiny show Russia is not exceptional; like any autocracy, it is inherently brittle, fragile.
But does this mean it is about to break? To answer that question, we need to look at the grand sweep of Russia’s history over the past few centuries to gain clues about the brittleness or otherwise of the Russian Federation today.
First, a qualifier: for Russian Federation read Russian empire. What the world witnessed over recent decades in Chechnya and Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine’s Crimea, and what we are now seeing in the Russian invasion of greater Ukraine, is nothing less than post-Tsarist, post-Soviet Russia seeking to reassert its ‘otherness’ in the time-honoured way: through empire and imperial spheres of influence. Wade through the 2021 analysis of Russia and its birthright written by Vladimir Putin. Disregarding the warped interpretation of history (that it’s so flawed is irrelevant), the thing to take from it is that Putin regards himself as the lineal heir of Rurik, the two ‘Greats’ Peter and Catherine, Josef Stalin, and every other autocrat – when has Russia not been ruled by autocrats? – who has seen it as their sacred duty to perpetuate the Muscovite imperial dream.
All empires end though. Some falter and regain their footing, but in the end they all cease to be. Putin banks on the partial disintegration of 1991, which saw the loss of the eastern European satellites and the secession of older imperial territories like the Baltic States and, of course, Ukraine, as just such a setback to be overcome – much in the way that British imperial aspirations survived and then flourished after the secession of the Thirteen Colonies. But the difference between now and the late eighteenth century, when the bell curve of Western-style imperialism was in the ascendant, is that today the curve is about to ground out, the Russian Federation being its last geriatric survivor.
A popular counterargument is that Russia is not an empire at all, and it is a false premise to draw comparison between her vast continuous hinterland and past empires that went out and conquered lands far from their own. Tell that to the peoples of the north and south Caucasus and all those other ethnic and cultural entities stretching across the swathe of central Asia, which were conquered and brutally suborned by Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They have been oppressed ever since, remaining against the will of their majorities within the borders of the Tsarist empire, the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation. Today they give up their sons as cannon fodder on the Ukrainian battlefields so that European Russians don’t have to send their own. They hate the Russians – albeit in a sensibly veiled way, given their traumatic histories – with the intensity that oppressed peoples reserve for their bullying overlords.
But what will it take to initiate the next great freeing? What spark, what Battleship Potemkin moment will ignite the disintegration of the latest iteration of empire? Prigozhin’s coup has failed, and Wagner are now reportedly joining their warlord in exile. Maybe President Putin has sealed the cracks. That Prigohzin still lives and that the mutineers have been allowed to leave Russia with ‘colours flying and bayonets fixed’ would suggest, however, that he hasn’t.
There is a truism about Russia that, whilst most coups fail, the fissure in the rockface they expose only widens. Usually brought about by a slackening of autocratic grip in a belated effort to appease, within months or just a few years regimes topple. The stalled 1905 Revolution presaged 1917, the failed putsch against Gorbachev’s reforms in 1991 led to the immediate collapse of the Soviet Union. What neither presaged was the end of Russian imperialism. To what extent that remains inextricable from the character of the Russian state is not to be answered here, but it does not have to be. 1991 showed that just a loosening of control from the centre is all it takes for people to seize their opportunity for freedom.
The Ukrainian military leadership have it right, therefore, when they talk of the objective of their summer offensive being not so much to take ground, more about breaking the will of the Russians to continue the fight – and not just at the tactical level on the frontline, but right the way up the chain of command, ultimately to the political leadership in Moscow. It is this that has the potential for the battle grounds of Ukraine to have such far reaching consequences for the integrity of the Russian Federation itself and the world at large.
The nexus is a simple one: failure of the will to prosecute the war in Ukraine leads to political challenge and chaos in Moscow, leads to the iron grip being loosened on the extremities, leads to break-up of empire. If this were to happen, there could be no starker illustration of how grassroots tactical success can influence the grand strategic outcome; the cracks spread and the ultimate breakage occurs, just as it did in 1917 and 1991.
As with all moments of such seismic change danger is everywhere. Even the temporary disintegration of the Russian state – with its vast arsenal of nuclear weapons – into a ‘Game of Thrones’ of competing entities based loosely around the GRU, the FSB, territorial forces, and the army, is a truly terrifying prospect. It is one that the West remains in the foothills of thinking about. Who knows what would be left at the end of it all? One thing: the Russian itch for empire.
So how likely is this? I am willing to stick my layman’s neck out and say that our Ukrainian friends and allies will achieve their aim in the next 6-18 months. Russian steadfastness on the battlefield will disintegrate. Things could unravel very quickly after that. The Russian Federation, the latest iteration of the Russian empire, could be as dead and buried as the Tsars and the commissars in a few years, or months. But, as when we remove one layer of a Russian doll, we may find another iteration of the same thing confronts us.
By Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, Senior Advisor at Audley and former British Army Officer.
Image credit/kremlin.ru./https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode