The Power of a Failed Revolt

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I'm Hannah Rosen.

This is Radio Atlantic.

Over the weekend, something wild happened in Russia.

A man named Yevgeny Progozhin seemed to start a rebellion.

His private army, the Wagner Group, fights alongside Russian troops in Ukraine.

But this weekend, they turned their guns against Russia itself.

They took over a major southern city called Rostov and then pledged to march march on Moscow, making it hundreds of miles before turning around.

Was this a mutiny?

Was it a failed coup?

People are debating Progozhin's motives and whether he thought he had internal support.

Zooming out, though, what it means is that one man, a guy who was in prison, then became a hot dog salesman and then rose up to become a loyal protégé of President Vladimir Putin, turned on Putin, humiliated him, and somehow survived.

We've been told that Progozhin is now in Belarus.

Anyway, the news is moving quickly, and there's been a lot of speculation.

Two people I trust to ground us are Atlantic staff writers Ann Applebaum and Tom Nichols.

So, Tom, the past week's events in Russia have been called a coup and a mutiny.

However, you referred to it as a falling out among gangsters.

What did you mean by that?

Well, the problem is that the Russian state is a conglomeration of power players who are much like the five families, you know, in the old godfather movie, that these are mobsters and Putin is the gangster in chief, but he has capos under him.

And there was some issue there about control with Progozhin and his forces, who were going to be pulled in under another one of Putin's cronies, the Minister of Defense.

And

things got out of control.

So how does Progozhin fit into that picture?

Sort of where is he in the gangster taxonomy?

Well,

he's got his own crew.

He's a powerful captain.

He's got his own army.

He has 25,000 well-armed, battle-hardened men who answer to him.

And another capo was threatening to take that away from him, and he wasn't going to stand for that.

So you see it less as a geopolitical battle than just an internal fight for power between two people.

People have multiple motivations for doing things.

I think a lot of what Progozin's tapped into is real.

People are both in the military and back home, are fed up with the way that the guys in Moscow have run this war and taken immense casualties and pretty much gotten nowhere.

I mean, that's a real thing.

It's a real problem.

But it's also, in part, a struggle for power among these players.

So it's, um, there are multiple things going on here, and and not all of them I think are clear to us over here right now.

Right.

So and looking towards the real motives that Tom brought up, Progozhin has for a long time been openly criticizing the war in Ukraine and the motives for the war in Ukraine.

What types of things has he been saying and why do you think they struck a chord?

For the last several weeks and months, really, Progozhin has been blaming the leaders of the army, the leaders of the military, for failing to provide leadership, failing to provide equipment.

He's focused in particular on the Minister of Defense, Shoigu, and the Army Chief of Staff, Garasimov, Chief of the General Staff.

He talks about them using very insulting language.

He talks about Shoigu, you know, living a luxury life and Garasimov being a paranoid, crazy person who shouts at people.

You know, these are very personal, you know, anecdotal descriptions of them,

which may well ring a bell among people around them as something that's true.

More recently, right before his strange ride to Moscow, he came out with a much more substantive critique.

In other words, he began talking about the causes of the war itself.

He said, Well, the war was the only reason we're fighting this war is because Shoigu wants to advance, he wants to be a marshal, you know, he wants a better rank,

and because lots of people in Moscow were making money off of the 2014 occupations of Ukraine, the territories in the east that they gained at that time, and they want more.

They got greedy and want more.

In other words, it's not a war for empire.

It's not about the glory of Russia.

It's not about NATO.

It's not about any of the things that Putin has said it's about.

It's just about, you know, greedy people wanting more.

The appeal of this narrative is that it's very comfortable for Russians to hear that there's a reason why they're failing, you know, that there are specific people to blame.

And you mean failing in the war in Ukraine?

I mean failing in the war in Ukraine in that you know they were supposed to conquer the country in three days and you know that didn't happen.

There's been massive casualties, losses of equipment.

I mean it may also have an echo among people who want someone to blame for general misery.

I mean the economy hasn't been going well for a while.

People can see corruption all around them.

I mean it's not like it's a big secret.

And pinning it on specific people, people, saying these guys are responsible for failure, might be something that a lot of Russians want to hear.

I can see as you guys are talking how it can be both a gangster war and something that is sincere and taps into a true vein of discontent.

Like it can be both of those things at the same time.

Now, this question is for either of you.

We are getting news trickling out this week about the possibility that Progozhin had some kind of support in the Russian military.

If that's true, and I know that's a big if, what does that change about how we should understand the situation?

So I assumed he had some kind of support in the military, both because of the way he behaved in Rostov, where he seemed chummy with the generals at the head of the southern military district, and where his soldiers were tolerated and almost welcomed in the city.

He couldn't have done that and he couldn't have kept going without somebody being on his side.

And it seems like he expected more or he thought there would be more support.

So that doesn't surprise me at all.

I mean, there's precise names of who it was and what their motives were.

I don't think we really know that yet, although there have been concrete names mentioned in the press.

But he clearly expected something more to happen.

Yeah, I agree with Anne.

I don't think you march on Rostov and then turn north toward Moscow and think that you're on your own.

There may have been some specific people that he had spoken to, but I think too, there was also a larger expectation, because remember, Progozhin's pretty arrogant guy, and there is a lot of discontent in the Russian military, that he was just expecting that there would be units that he would just pick up along the way, or that around Moscow would get word of this and say, we're on your side.

And I've been curious about Putin's tentativeness, his procrastination and all this.

And I wonder, given these reports, whether he had concerns himself about which units, if he ordered an attack or if he wanted to do something more demonstrative, which units would actually obey his orders or which units would actually stay with him or join the mutiny if they were forced to make a choice.

But again,

we can't know that for sure, but it certainly makes a lot of sense that Pergoshin wasn't going to do this without having spoken to somebody in Moscow and in Rostov.

Right.

So the reason this continues to be a live issue is because it matters who supported him.

It matters because it speaks to the degree of insecurity on Putin's side, and it speaks to sort of how strong the discontent is.

It matters because it says that the Russian government and the Russian high command have serious stresses and cracks that are now obvious, that had been either smaller early on and hidden or that had somehow been papered over.

But the idea that somehow Putin is completely in charge and invulnerable to challenges, that's gone.

Yeah, and that's important.

Now, Anne, if Progozhin, as you say, was aiming for something bigger and it didn't quite work out or technically failed as we talk about it, we still have to grapple with what happened on the other side, which is that he arrived in a Russian city and the citizens kind of shrugged.

What did that tell you?

So I thought that was quite significant.

You know, we've all all read many times these, you know, kind of somber analysis of so-called polling data from Russia saying that people support Putin.

What this showed was that, you know, the citizens of Rostov weren't particularly bothered that a brutal warlord showed up in the city, said he wanted to change some things and get them done.

You know, maybe he was going to go and take Putin's people down.

Maybe he was going to go and take Putin himself down.

And they applauded him and they were taking selfies with them.

And they started chanting when the Wagner group was pulling out of Rostov on Saturday evening.

They were chanting, you know, Wagner, Wagner in the streets.

And so that shows that

the support for Putin is pretty weak.

I mean, it's,

you know, it's passive.

You know, okay, he's the guy there and we don't see any alternatives.

But the instant an alternative emerges,

well, you know, that might be interesting.

I mean, Progozhin is not exactly an attractive figure, but maybe from their point of view, you know, he's more honest, you know,

he seems more effective.

And as I said

in the beginning, he's offering them an explanation that's psychologically comfortable.

So why is this war going so badly?

Why haven't we won?

Why is everything so corrupt?

Why is the army so dysfunctional?

Why are so many people dying?

Okay, well, he just gave us a reason.

Because there are these corrupt generals in charge and they're doing a bad job.

And that's something that people would like to hear.

They want an explanation for this, you know, this strange war that doesn't seem to be going anywhere and is only causing damage.

Now, Tom, in the aftermath of all this, Putin has given a statement talking about treason, not naming Progoshian explicitly.

And given what Anne just said and what you just said about how strong a challenge this actually is,

what is this hesitation about?

I mean, this whole incident could have ended up with Progoshian dead, but instead he's in Belarus, or we think he's in Belarus, and he's alive, or we think he's alive.

I think both of them are feeling about to figure out who their allies are, and they're both making appeals to society that are meant to isolate, in Putin's case, he's just isolating Progozhin without naming him and saying, hey, all you

heavily armed, you know, again, crack commando.

mercenary guys,

I understand that you were led astray and it's okay to come home.

So when he talks about traitors, I mean, this isn't Stalinism.

He's not saying, oh, that whole unit, we're just, they're all dead.

He's trying to play internal divisions there, as is Progozhin, who has been really careful not to say, look, I'm not trying to overthrow the president, not trying to overthrow the government.

But these two guys at the top, Shoygu and Garasimov, the Minister of Defense and the Chief of the General Staff, they got to go.

And if I have to march to Moscow to get them out, then that's what I'm going to do.

So they're both being very careful not not to proliferate more enemies in society or among the other elites than they need to.

Now, for Progozhin, that's just, you know, that makes sense.

For Putin, that's very revealing.

I mean, he's the president of the country.

And here he is, you know, kind of tiptoeing around,

trying not to aggravate thousands of

armed men who were part of a mutiny.

So I think while they're both doing the same thing, I think it's really revealing that one of them happens to be the president of the country.

Yeah.

And as much as I understand, the iconography of Putin is important.

Like, you know, who's weak, who's strong is a unit of analysis.

Strongman, shirtless on a horse, does not necessarily want to lose out to hot dog salesman, ex-prisoner.

Right.

He actually appeared in public the first two times.

He looked awful.

I mean, it was just, you know, looked like a bunker video where he's standing in front of a desk and he's kind of raging to the camera.

He finally came out again with all of the pomp and all the trappings of his office, you know, coming down the big staircase and the honor guards snapping to attention and addressing the troops, the officers, and saying something really interesting.

He said, you prevented a civil war, which is not true.

That nobody actually did that.

It's certainly not true that the army put down a civil war in the offing.

Nothing like that happened.

And to make that appeal is to try to pull the military closer to the president to say, You're my heroes.

I know you saved the country and you will keep saving the country, which to me was a really striking thing to do.

You know, again, as you and everybody's been pointing out, you know, that Walprogoshin is still, at least we think, still alive and running around and issuing statements.

So, what comes next?

After the break, we speculate, but with restraint.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest-paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Now, because both of you have studied the situation so closely, my natural temptation is to lob a lot of future prediction questions at you, like, what does this mean for Ukraine?

And what does a week in Putin mean for a global order?

Is it just too hard to speculate?

I feel there are so many missing pieces of this story and so many oddities about it that don't add up that I would need to know more before I would be confident about telling you that, you know, at seven o'clock on September the 1st, X or Y will happen next.

Almost everything we know about this story, I mean, it's like the shadows on Plato's cave.

We're seeing the reflections of activities.

You know, we see, you know, there are these Russian military bloggers who you really have to follow in order to understand any of this.

And of course, they're telling the story from their point of view.

State television is telling it from Putin's propaganda point of view.

It's not as if we have a reliable source of information who will, you know, lay it out for us and give us the facts.

Even the story, as we're speaking, I mean, this may even change before this podcast comes out, but you know, as we're speaking, we've been told by several very unreliable people that Progozhin is in Belarus, you know, by the by the Russian spokesman and by the by the Belarusian.

And, you know, those people have lied so many times that until I see a photograph of Progozhin, I don't believe it.

You know, he's got to have a photograph of him in Minsk, and I need to know that it's not, you know, photoshopped.

And then I, and then I'm sure it's true.

And so that's why I think it's very hard to, you don't want to make too many sweeping conclusions yet.

I mean, we know what we saw on Saturday, and what we saw on Saturday was a mutiny, and it did demonstrate far more weakness in the state and unpreparedness than anybody, you know, was certain was there.

We know that Putin was the first to start using the language of civil war.

He did it on Saturday morning.

And so that indicates that he at least thinks something very serious was happening, which is an indication, again, that there may be more, you know, more to the story to come.

But making clear predictions about what will happen, certainly to the war in Ukraine, I mean, I'm not sure yet that it has affected the war in Ukraine.

I mean, maybe it will affect Russian troop morale.

Maybe it will, you know, lets us know that there will be more trouble with the military command, but it hasn't had a specific effect on the ground yet that we can see.

And until that happens, I'm just reluctant to make too many predictions.

Yeah, I think when it comes to the war in Ukraine, too many people have had this idea that all the Russian forces are going to stop and say, no, wait, we're not going to fight until we get this sorted out.

They're still fighting.

The situation at the front is the situation at the front, and that doesn't really change because of this.

So, what Ukraine has to do and the support we need to give them, that doesn't change.

The other problem, of course, you know, when you talk about the reluctance to prognosticate, well, you know, there were a lot of people who said the Soviet Union couldn't fall.

You know, people that study Russia have figured out that you can get burned on these predictions in part because

when you're predicting stuff, you tend to be predicting the behavior of institutions writ large because you know how they operate.

This is all contingent on individuals.

And trying to predict the behavior of these, you know, kind of mafia-like characters is really difficult to do because that could all change in a moment when they decide to shift alliances or one of them runs afoul of another of them.

So, you know, I'm with Ann here.

I don't want to get too detailed about what's going to happen next week.

I mean, I think it's fair to say the things we know for sure that going into the future are true.

This definitely wounded Putin, and he is in a different situation than he was.

I mean, I don't think there's any going back to sort of pre-June in Russian politics right now.

Yeah, I mean, that's important enough.

As you were talking, Tom, I was thinking: if you write the histories of a lot of mutinies and coups, they do start with an action by someone who seems like a gangster and seems to be behaving in a ridiculous way.

Like, coups can start in ridiculous ways.

It's also true that coups and mutinies that don't succeed can have an impact on politics too.

And there's some famous examples from Russian history.

There's a revolution that doesn't succeed in 1905, but it had a profound impact on the state.

It forced the Tsar Nicholas to pass a constitution and create a Duma, a parliament.

It very much changed the way that he was perceived.

And then in the run-up to the Russian Revolution in 1917, there were also a number of strikes and moments, you know, and other different kinds of events that happened.

And some of them were unsuccessful.

The Bolsheviks had a march that was unsuccessful.

But ultimately, there was a revolution.

They did take power.

And those earlier events, you know, looked retrospectively more important than they may have seemed at the time.

It's too early to say whether that's what this is.

But it's clearly the case, though, that a failed event can have political consequences even beyond those of the immediate moment.

The 1991 coup was a complete clown show.

And it failed.

The guy that was actually supposed to step in as president and replace Gorbachev was like drunk all the time.

And the whole thing was just a complete mess.

But it had a profound impact on the final days of the Soviet Union and on the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the emergence of the countries of the post-Soviet space.

Most mutinies and coups don't succeed, but as Anne pointed out, they can have an immense impact just because they happened at all.

Now all I want to do is ask you guys to speculate because now it's very interesting.

Now I'm thinking, okay, so which directions does it go?

You know, is there a future for Progoshian?

Is he making a play to replace Putin one day?

Are there other Progoshans out there?

I mean, are any of those answerable questions?

I mean, I think you can talk about options.

You know, again, you can look at the past.

I mean, it seems to me, you know, in the case of Putin, you know, one possibility is that now that there's been a challenge that I mean, it didn't succeed, but it revealed weakness, will there be more challenges?

And so you might say, well, that's clearly now an option in a way that it wasn't before last week.

You could also guess that Putin might now try another crackdown.

So, right, what do leaders do who have been weakened, leaders like him, dictators?

Well, one of the things they do is they lash out and they try and reestablish their preeminence or their dominance, and they do that by arresting people or purging people or I don't know what that would be in the case of modern Russia, cutting off the internet or shutting the borders.

I mean, you can sort of imagine scenarios because he will now need to make up for the fact that he is seen to be weaker.

And so, I mean, I think you can, I'm not saying either one of those will happen, but those are things that based on how these things have played out in other times and other places, you can guess at.

Yeah, and as you look at this,

I'm trying to put myself in your head.

You're sort of looking at the dictator's playbook, like watching how he rewrites the story of what just happened in real time and trying to see what other dictators would do or have done in the past.

Is that how you track these events?

Yes.

I mean, that, and I'm also thinking of Russian history.

The history of the Soviet Communist Party was, it was like every time there was a failure or a disaster, then they would try to re-up the ideology and sort of restart the project and crack down.

You know,

it goes in waves, you know, all the way from 1917 up to 1991.

And you can imagine a similar pattern working itself out here, yes.

Yeah.

I feel like I'm going back to the toolbox of the old school Sovietology that I learned back in the 80s.

And so rather than prognosticate, I'll just say the things I'm looking for.

I'm literally like now looking at video of who's sitting next to whom at these meetings, who's still in, who might be out.

So I'm looking for personnel changes.

And does the Minister of Defense survive?

Does the Chief of the General Staff get replaced?

But this now becomes kind of a game of trying to follow all of these people in their portfolios as some kind of indicator of what's actually happening behind the scenes.

And Tom, what's the larger through line you're tracking?

Like you're tracking the little chess pieces and who's going here and who's falling off the board, but what's the bigger story?

I think it's going to be, is Putin trying to shore up his power base or is there an alternative base forming against him?

I think that's the thing to watch.

You know, we've lived with Putin for 23 years, except for, you you know, when he first arrived in power and then when, again, when he had a serious challenge around 2011, you know, we've kind of internalized his narrative that he's untouchable and he can stay forever and that he reigns supreme.

That's gone.

And so, yeah, I think, you know, it's a pretty natural thing to wonder, hmm, you know, if he's not that powerful and if he doesn't have that kind of support, you know, how long can he remain in power?

Because until now, he has made sure that there were no alternatives to him.

And I think what Progoshin did was to say, well,

there could be at least some alternative, maybe not good ones, but that you can, in fact, oppose this guy and criticize his team and get away with it.

Yeah, basically, Russians, you might have a choice.

That's as much as we can say.

Not a great choice, but a choice somewhere.

Yeah.

And this may be a strange way to put it, but is there a sense that this incident exposes how alone or kind of lost in his own head Putin is.

It's like he conceived of this war in isolation.

The military was never necessarily enthusiastic.

Now we have a vision of him not exactly sure who his allies are and who's on his team.

And I just got this vision of dictator alone.

So we've had intimations of that for a couple of years now.

In fact, Progozin himself has hinted that, you know, Putin doesn't really know what's going on.

You know, they're lying to him.

And many others have said that too.

So the idea,

we've had already this idea that he doesn't really know what's going on on the battlefield.

And this incident did make it seem like he also didn't really know what was going on at home.

I mean, he, you know, for someone who's now saying, you know, they had foreknowledge of this, he didn't react like somebody who was confident of the outcome.

The speech he gave on Saturday morning was panicky.

You know, it was about the Civil War in 1917 and this is our nation is at stake.

He didn't give off the impression of someone who was staying in charge.

And so there very much is the impression that he somehow lives in this, you know, by himself surrounded by security guards, you know, in some bunker.

And that feels more and more like an accurate description of his life.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, I guess a lot more to come this week.

this year for a while but thank you both for helping us understand what just happened thanks thank you

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend.

It was edited by Claudina Bade, the executive producer of Audio at the Atlantic.

Engineering is by Rob Smirziak.

Fact-checking by Yvonne Kim.

Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance.

Our podcast team includes Jocelyn Frank, Becca Rashid, Ethan Brooks, AC Valdez, and Van Newkirk.

We'll be back with new episodes every Thursday.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.