Dan Snow's History Hit - Wagner vs Putin: A History of Russian Coups

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

On the 24th of June, 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin and his paramilitary group Wagner carried out what appeared to be an attempted coup in Russia. In a seismic turn of events, his mercenaries marched across the Russian border without resistance and seized key military installations in the city of Rostov-on-Don. While much of what followed remains uncertain, it is clear that this was the most serious challenge to Putin's authority since he came to power in 1999.Dan is joined by Alexander Watson, an expert on Russia and the First World War, to discuss the historical context for coups in Russia.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's Monday morning after a big weekend. I'm not referring to the Glastonbury Festival, which has come to an end here in the UK. I'm referring to the absolutely extraordinary, apparently over but I'm not sure it is, so ongoing, fast-moving, very remarkable attempted coup in Russia, where Putin's former favourite, Prigozhin, apparently attempted to seize power. He marched his troops from Rostov, where effectively the war in Ukraine is being run from on the Russian side, marched them up the highway to Moscow and came pretty close to the capital before turning around and accepting some strange deal to go to Belarus. What's it all mean? Well, your feeds are full of hot takes from journalists, from political scientists, from criminologists, from soldiers, all trying to

analyse what's going on. So I thought we'd get some historical context and we'd go back to one of the best. We'd get Alexander Watson. He's a professor of history at Goldsmiths, University London. He specialises in early to mid-20th century, the giant conflicts, First and Second World War, particularly the involvement of Russia. He came on the podcast before and we talked about Russia in the First World War, determination to fight and win in Western Ukraine, what Ukraine means to Russia, how the Tsarist states sought to use that war to boost their own internal credibility and legitimacy, and how it all fell apart. And in that podcast, I said, well, perhaps we'll catch up with

you again. And we're doing so today. In this episode, we talk about other historical parallels and precedents. He actually goes all the way back to their own empire, but he particularly talks about the collapse of democracy in Germany, 1920s and 30s, the roles that independent paramilitary organisations played in those turbulent times. We talked about Kornilov, who launched an abortive and short-lived coup in the summer of 1917 in Russia. So there's plenty and plenty of historic precedents going on here. I find this stuff really helps me as I watch my news feeds, wondering what on earth is coming next out of Russia and Ukraine. Enjoy. T-minus 10.

Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Alex, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. Thank you for having me. So last time we talked, we both had to keep sort of laughing and pinching ourselves because

everything you said seemed to have such powerful modern resonance. And historians have to be very cautious about that, don't they? Things don't repeat. There's never a kind of neat, perfect second time around. But you were describing the First World War, Russia determined to demonstrate its first class power, choosing the battlefield in back then Western Ukraine, also taking the opportunity to clamp down on the Ukrainian language, nationalism, the importance of Ukraine to Russia. went on to say, and in doing so, the Russian regime weakened itself. I mean, it was best, most elite unit sent to Ukraine. The imperial center was weak. And we both went, oh, who knows what will happen. This weekend, did we begin to see what might happen? And what do you think the parallels are? Because it's different to the Russian revolution in 1917. But what do you think we should be looking out for here from history? So I think we are beginning to see the weakening of the Russian state. We might even

be beginning to see the end of the Russian state in its current form, although historians don't like to predict. And if we are, that's going to cause unimaginable turbulence. Like you, and I guess like most of the listeners as well, I was just transfixed by events over the weekend. Just the most remarkable thing to watch it as one in real time from a distance unfolding. And then it's very sudden end as well. And I have been thinking about historical parallels. And of course, Putin offered one immediately with the 1917 revolution. I assume he meant the February revolution because of course, there were two revolutions in 1917. And also just to underline how complicated anything to do with Russian

history is, although the February Revolution is called the February Revolution, it of course happened in March. And the famous October Revolution, which is actually a Bolshevik coup d'etat, not really a revolution, happened in November. So 1917 is the obvious parallel to go for insofar as it leads on directly from the conversation that we had before. Russia is involved in a big war and it collapses internally. And it seemed that we might be seeing the start of that over the weekend. But there are big differences as well, huge differences, which I think undermine the comparison. And it's worth bearing in mind that Putin made that comparison deliberately to incite fear and encourage support. After 1917 was this horrendous period of turbulence and violence for Russians, and suggesting that that could happen again is obviously very scary and encourages people to

be conservative to support the status quo. The big difference between what we saw over the weekend in 1917, or even going back to 1905, is the absence of the Russian people. You know, everyone's writing on Twitter, where Russian air defence, where this, where that, well, where Russian people in this? It was noticeable that very few people appear to have come out to support Putin. But it was also noticeable that very few people appeared to come out to support anybody. And that's the big difference between 1917 and today. There isn't this, any popular movement that we can see for regime change. So let's just rehearse a little bit of what happened in 1917. People in the imperial capital, St. Petersburg, or Petrograd, as it was called, shortages, grim, hunger. Was there a genuine

sort of popular agitation? Absolutely. Russia is three years into the war. It's lost about two million men killed. Horrendous casualties, which again just sort of makes us pause and think about for sure the horrendous casualties in this war and what I've seen, perhaps 200,000 Russian casualties. But the First World War is on a scale of magnitude even greater. You've got food shortages in the cities, not because there are food shortages in Russia as a whole, but because the transport network has broken down. The trains, which are cities are reliant on supplying them with food, are instead supplying the army with food. So as a result, there is food, but it's in the countryside, it's in the wrong place. People in the big cities in St. Petersburg are getting hungrier and hungrier.

These cities have filled with refugees. They filled with peasants from the countryside come to work in the industrial war effort. So you have huge deprivation, huge tensions. And that bursts out on International Women's Day. I always harangue my students when I see Che Guevara posters on their walls because it's women who make revolutions. It's not men. And that was true in 1917. It was women demonstrating for International Women's Day, queuing up in a bread queue for food that finally lost their patience and started this process, which in a week resulted in the end of a 300-year-old imperial dynasty. Nicholas II was gone eight days after. And that is something that we did not see this weekend. There didn't seem to be many people out on the streets at all. So you said that it's not a very useful comparison. Is there anything

though about 1917 that we should be thinking about before we look for more useful analogies and comparisons? So 1917 differs from today for two reasons. One is the absence of the Russian people being involved in politics, it seems, at least in any explicit way. The second as well is that neither side appear to me to be offering some sort of ideological promise of the future that is attractive. You know, you've got to bear in mind that the revolutionaries gathered support in 1917, the Bolsheviks gathered support in 1917, because they said, look, this is awful. And we have a genuinely radical plan to change Russia, to change the Russian Empire, to change your lives something better. And the Soviet Union, at least in its early decades, was built both on violence and on a utopian idea of what the future would be if only people could

hold on and work hard and keep with it. And Putin doesn't offer that and neither could Prigozhin. And that's a huge difference. There's no positive future for Russia being offered other than more of the same. What is the same as 1917 is the weakness of the Russian state. This superficial strength on the outside, which has been shown to be false increasingly by the war, as the First World War showed the Tsarist regime's superficial strength to be false and the rotten core inside. And it was just remarkable how quickly Przegorzin and Wagner were able to get so close to Moscow, just extraordinary. So that's where the link with 1917 rests, I think, with showing that fundamental weakness. In terms of other parallels, I think the big lesson here,

and again this speaks to Russian state weakness, is the danger of relying on somebody else for armed force. If you want a really old parallel, we can go right back to ancient times and think about the fall of the Roman Empire and how the Roman Empire increasingly relied on auxiliaries from outside Rome in order to man its armies and the spiralling consequences of that, how badly that ended up. But if I'm looking for a more modern parallel, the thing that occurred to me was Germany in 1920 after the First World War with the cap putsch. After the First World War in Germany, Germany loses the war, there is a revolution, a pretty moderate left-wing government comes to power, and it has a lot of popular support,

but right-wingers don't like it, army officers don't like it, and army officers and civil servants in 1920 attempted to oppose it. And they were able to attempt to depose this government, in part because the government had been forced to rely on, if you like, something that looked almost like today's private military companies. They were called Fricor in 1920, in order to try and fight off far-left revolutionaries against it, who were seeking to bring this moderate government down. And those far-right revolutionaries in order went out to dissolve their units. And that played into this cat push in which they attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully,

to depose this government. And I think what we see here, the lesson of the weekend and the lesson of the cat push, is that if you are having to rely on people outside the central state, outside the army, in order to defend your regime, in order to do your fighting, then you're instantly in a very vulnerable situation. And I think it's telling that Putin has had to rely so heavily on Wagner in Ukraine. And this is where this problem comes from. But of course, that in itself reflects the broader weakness of the central Russian state and the central Russian army. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about attempted coups in Russia and elsewhere. More coming up. I'm James Patton Rogers, a war historian, advisor to the UN and NATO, and host of the Warfare podcast from History Hit. Join me twice a week, every week, as we look at

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every week, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. I've seen some historians talking about Corneloff and that Corneloff affair of 1917. Can you tell me a little bit about that? And that was pretty reflective, it feels like that's pretty reflective of the weak post-Tsarist kind of

revolutionary state and its relations with its soldiers. Yeah, that's true. So this took place in the early autumn of 1917. So to recap, the first revolution, by our calendar, March 1917 revolution deposes the Tsar. There's then what's called the provisional government, which comes in, which doesn't have huge backing, but it's supported by another organisation called the Petrograd Soviet, which does have popular backing. And it attempts rather ineffectually both to introduce some sort of democracy in Russia, while also continuing to fight the First World War on the side of the Allies. Actually, it's worth pausing at this point just to say how difficult it is to predict what's going to happen.

And 1917 shows us that as well. In 1917, in that first revolution, the March Revolution, when the Tsar fell, many people in Russia's enemies, many people in Germany, believed that actually the revolution would improve the Russian war effort, would make the Russian army better at fighting, would make Russia more dangerous, and would make it even more difficult for Germany to win the war. And of course, that proved to be spectacularly wrong. But then, as now, it's a cautionary tale to warn us about,

we don't know what is going to happen. I can give you authoritative judgments, but in the end, it can go up in smoke. You know, who knows? With Kornilov, he was made the Russian commander of the army by the provisional government in the summer of 1917. He was instrumental in putting down a far left rebellion, attempting to destroy this kind of moderate government and replace it. And then he tried to move his troops towards Petrograd, which is now St. Petersburg, at that time the capital of Russia. And he was stopped doing so by railway workers who went on

strike and refused to move his soldiers. There's some debate in historical literature about whether he was actually attempting a literature about whether he was actually attempting a coup, whether he was attempting to become a military dictator or not, but it certainly seems to be a possibility. Unlike Prigozhin's, Kornilov's attempt to coup, military coup, evaporated very, very quickly. But unlike Prigozhin's, it evaporated very quickly because of Russian popular action, grassroots action, unionists. And we just didn't see that over the weekend. It clearly wasn't strikes or unionists or popular public opinion that prompted Przegorzin to turn back. It was something else. So again, we've got that

gulf in where Russian people, what are the Russian people doing? Very, very different from 1917. What's your hot take on where the Russian people are? You mentioned earlier, it was a lack of a kind of optimistic outcome. Is there something, do you think, are there more deeper structural things around us? Do we take to the streets less, not just in Russia, but elsewhere? Is there something going on? Or are they just scared and hoping that they just get through this with society kind of intact and not too much trauma? I think that's certainly an element of that. I mean, it's really important to remember just how long you can be imprisoned for simply, in Russia today, simply for calling Putin's inadvertent, kind of, special military operation a war. The repression is pretty savage, except apparently if you're Prigozhin.

So that's certainly a part of the story. I think it's more complicated than that, though. And I do think that life experiences and different expectations of life plays into this. Commentators need to stop comparing Putin's regime to the Soviet Union and talking about, well, you know, the Russian army and the Soviet army in the Second World War took millions of casualties and kept on fighting, kept on fighting. That was a very different generation with very, very different life experiences. It had only known turmoil for much of its lives, for pretty much all of its lives. From 1905 onwards, there is pretty much continual turmoil in Russia and broadly then the Soviet Union right up until 1952.

broadly then the Soviet Union, right up until 1952. So this is a generation which has only known violence, has only known turmoil. For sure, Russia went through a period of turmoil in the 1990s. But for many Russians, and especially Russians in the big power centres, the last decades have been decades of peace, decades of relative prosperity, decades of building up Western capitalist expectations, which will be familiar to you or me or listeners in general. So the idea that there is some innate willingness of the Russian people to accept extraordinary hardship and also to go out on a limb and revolt and risk what they have. It's historically illiterate in my view. This is a very, very different Russia and a very, very different generation from the Russians of the early 20th century. And I think that's also a reason why we haven't seen much overt protest against the war. And I think it's also a reason why we're not seeing Russians taking sides, but simply waiting it out.

Of course, as I said earlier, what's the point of taking sides? No one is offering an improved ideological future here. You've got Putin, who is offering simply more of the same and digging his heels in while things are getting worse and sanctions getting stronger. Or you've got Prigozhin, who's an ex-crook with 25,000 ex-cons and brutal military men. I mean, what's to support? You talked eloquently there about how we just don't know what's going to happen. Is that the key lesson from history here? As a leading historian of Russia and Eastern Europe, is your job now just telling everyone, you know, forget your 5,000 word articles and your tweet

threads about everything you think is going to happen next. Just be ready for anything. So I think that's the big lesson of history, actually, that history does tell us about the future, but it tells us about possibilities, plausible possibilities for what could potentially happen. And looking back at the past, thinking about what was done, what's similar, what's different, and understanding the historical assumptions that Putin or Prigozhin or the Russian elites are bringing with them can help us understand how they're interpreting this weakness of the Russian state, these crises, and perhaps give us some sense of what is plausible and what is less plausible.

But yeah, absolutely, prepare for anything. If Russian history more than any other country's history tells us that, prepare for anything. If Russian history more than any other country's history tells us that, prepare for anything. And what happened over the weekend kind of demonstrates that. Although we're also incredibly blind. This is the other thing, you know, Prigozhin has been saying that we're going to launch a coup for the last six months, and no one's taking him seriously. And then he launches a coup. It's astounding. I'm just interested in that you talk about the historical assumptions. So, it's a stand-in.

I'm just interested in that you talk about the historical assumptions. What do we not understand about how Prigozhin and Putin and many members of the elite think about history? I think, as I said before, the big mistake is to view today's Russia through the prism of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was much more powerful in material terms than today's Russia is in economic terms it was far bigger than today's Russia is and people keep talking about how especially before the invasion you know Russia is this this great power today's Russia very much lives off the legacy of the Soviet Union in its image of power it's's still got that seat on the UN. It's still got those nuclear weapons. That historical background is what gave, in the past tense, Russia its status and its power before February 2022. But Putin's Russia isn't the Soviet Union. In fact, it's very little like the Soviet Union, not just in terms of its actual capabilities, but also in terms of its ideology. And if we want to

understand Putin's Soviet Union, his ideology, as I said when we last spoke, Dan, harks back far more, in fact directly, to the ideology, the ultra-nationalist ideology of the late imperial Russian state, which attempted to use Russian nationalism to prop up its failing popular legitimacy. And there is a direct parallel there with today. So if we want to understand Putin's Russia, skip the Soviet Union, go back to the pre-1917 period. And that helps us understand where Putin is coming from and what the calculations are. And that's, I guess, where we have to sort of remind ourselves that Russia is this extraordinary multi-ethnic, it's a gigantic state and it covers so many time zones, but also many different peoples. And therefore, I guess you're

sort of trying to mould that into one coherent entity. If you can't use all sorts of language around workers, the world uniting and all that kind of communist stuff, what you just tried to fall back on some kind of, you try and find some nationalist legitimacy for that state, do you? Absolutely. Yeah. Thinking about those cultural trends and the appeal of patriotism and nationalism and expansionist nationalism, you know, this is also a political playbook that goes back to the 19th century.

But I think we don't want to get too hung up at the same time on the Russian people and Russian culture insosofar as I've already said, they don't seem to be playing a major political role. These are elites fighting each other and struggling for influence. And the Russian state is in trouble. You can see that. We could already see that as soon as Wagner took a key role in the Bakhmut offensive, in the Ukrainian war. Russia doesn't have the army and it doesn't have the quality or the quantity of the army. It was really interesting as well, just to go off on a slight tangent, when these Russian anti-Putinists, whoever they are, who appear to be supported by the Ukrainians, went over the border

earlier last month. And the Russians didn't have anything for it. You know, I mean, they were using conscripts in order to try and do something to seal the border very, very ineffectually. And that was a big sign that Putin doesn't have the forces at home. When the Russian Revolution breaks out in February 1917, for sure, the Russian army proves unreliable. But there's still a couple of 100,000 Russian troops around what today is St. Petersburg, the Russian capital, theoretically ready to defend the capital and defend the Tsar. Putin clearly didn't have that over the weekend. Wagner just simply rolled to Moscow, you know, where are the troops? And that too just shows

how fragile the situation is. And you can see the elite seeing that as well. And this is an elite issue. So if we want to understand what's going to happen, I would suggest that we don't just look at Russian history, we should look at Russian history, we should think about what you've been talking about, Dan, about Russian experiences, Russian culture, even thinking about 1917. But we also need to think about military history specifically. And we need to think about how non-state military actors like Wagner PMC, or like the Freikorps in Germany in the 1920s, are able to challenge the state and the dangers of these non-state military actors and the possibilities these non-state military actors and the possibilities these non-state military actors

have in actually potentially overturning governments. And I think that actually shows both the danger of Wagner, and it does give us some sense as well about why Prigozhin failed and backed down. Because there's, at the same time, what Prigozhin has done, he could only get so far. He couldn't get further without mass support from the army or from the people. And he simply didn't have that. He hasn't got any compelling ideological vision or offer to make. But what he has done nonetheless, and what the Freikorps helped to do in 1920 with democratic Germany ultimately, is undermine the current regime, undermine its stability, undermine its standing, make it look weak. And when regimes, and especially when dictatorships are in that state, generally they don't last long. Yeah, and if I was on the periphery of Russia,

and if there's a famous Chechen unit, obviously, which is playing its part on the stage at the moment, but elsewhere, or various other perhaps want to be, or republics or groups with aspirations to be independent or to exercise more autonomy, it's been a hell of a weekend for all those people, hasn't it? Oh, yeah, yeah. And the silence at the moment of those people was remarkable, you know, neither supporting Rogozhin, but also not supporting Putin. So the question is, what next? That silence doesn't have to stay silence. What is space? Well, Alex, if you'll very kindly come back on in a few months' time and we can keep reviewing what the history is telling us or suggesting. Thank you very much for taking the time to come on.

Thanks, Dan.