Mutinies like Prigozhin’s Typically Harbingers of Larger Events Like Revolutions or Civil Wars, Rogov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 26 – The Prigozhin mutiny is “not the end of history but its beginning” as far as Russia is concerned, Kirill Rogov says; because “mutinies, even failed ones, very often in history are harbingers and beginnings of a process” that will lead more or less quickly to a revolution, putsch or civil war.

            That is because the appearance of mutinies is “the manifestation of a process that can be defined as ‘the collapse of a regularly functioning state,” the Russian analyst says, a trend typical of “an aging personalist regime where formal institutions have for a long time been made subordinate to personal ties” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=64990AAB26F44).

            And such mutinies, Rogov continues, inevitably raise questions in the minds of elites as to what can lie ahead if the leader who earlier guaranteed stability now appears to have lost the ability to do so. The answers they give to those questions then inform their actions toward that leader and each other in the future.

            What is likely to happen next and how quickly depends on two things in particular, Rogov says: Will Putin dismiss Shoygu and his senior generals as Prigozhin wanted? And will the Russian government punish those in the Prigozhin forces who killed Russian soldiers during the mutiny?

            If Putin does the first, that will smack of the kind of deal that will further erode his authority; and if the Russian state fails to do the second, that will likely leave the Kremlin without an effective army and only invite more challenges, political and military, to its waning power.