Putin’s Russia isn’t finished. It may just have become even more dangerous
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Since the fall of the Soviet Union, two doomsday scenarios have come to capture the imagination of the West. One is that, thanks to climate change, our planet will explode into a retributive blaze reminiscent of the Book of Revelation. The other is that we are on the cusp of inventing an artificial intelligence that will opt to destroy humanity after performing some impenetrable cost-benefit calculation.
Our attitude to the threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, by contrast, borders on the flippant. It is striking that the Wagner Group’s abortive coup was greeted with neither trepidation nor a sober assessment of the potential fallout. Much of the West looked on with a kind of awe, as pundits confidently pronounced the end of Putin’s reign. This was swiftly followed by a scratching of heads when Yevgeny Prigozhin called his rebellion off.
This speaks to a strange blind spot in the West. We have become hopelessly complacent about the existential threat posed by an enigmatic and dangerous country that is in many ways beyond our ability to comprehend. Hollywood is more interested in psychopathic robots than exploring the Russian “soul”. Despite the war in Ukraine, there is strikingly little interest in the Russian elite’s long-standing self-conception as the bringer of the apocalypse, traceable back to the medieval era and a recurring theme in the country’s philosophy and literature.
Even despite the eruption of the Ukraine war there is remarkably little interest in the Russian elite’s distinctive brand of apocalyptic messianism. Whereas the Western apocalyptic tradition dreads humanity’s extinction at the hands of an external threat, the Russian elite has, since the medieval era, ambivalently imagined Mother Russia itself as the anti-Christ and bringer of End Times in philosophy, film and literature. Consider the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev’s insistence that Russians are narod kontsa (‘people of the end’) or Vladimir Solovyov, who in his famous works on the universal end of history (92 years before Francis Fukuyama’s), warned that a diabolical new superman – a sort of photographic negative of Jesus Christ – would emerge from the place where East meets West.
The fascist Russian regime’s bizarre railing against Ukrainian “Nazism” thus seems not merely ironic, but a chilling fulfilment of the homegrown prophesy that Russia is doomed to become the very thing that it fears; the outbursts of Moscow TV pundits who demand “why should a world without Russia exist?” are part of a deeply entrenched nihilistic tradition.
It has become easy to dismiss the idea that nuclear-armed Russia might still pose a super-catastrophic threat to humanity. Rudimentary analysis of recent events would suggest Putin’s position has never been weaker. Wagner’s mutiny has demolished Putin’s authority. Military morale has been seriously damaged, and Putin may have no choice but to redirect resources to stave off further rebellions at home. The view that the Russian spectre that haunted the West for much of the 20th century is set to be vanquished in a final deranged act of self-immolation seems not to be an unreasonable one.
But are we really so confident that the threat is essentially over? Are we so certain that the Kremlin has been neutralised by its own incompetence? Or could Saturday be a turning point of a far more dangerous sort?
The first worrying scenario is that Putin knows that his political status is terminal – and that this tempts him into escalating the Ukraine war in a manner that truly does risk triggering another world war. It has been asserted that what Putin fears more than anything else is coming to a grisly end akin to Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gadaffi. He is believed to have gone mad with fury at the death of the latter, watching footage of his violent death on a loop. With restive warlords threatening his authority, and the International Criminal Court having issued a warrant for his arrest, one can’t help but wonder whether such an end has taken on a new vividness for Putin.
If so, he could well be tempted to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine in a desperate bid to change the dynamics of the war in his favour. Indeed, we ought to take his transfer of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus and pursuit of upgraded and new ranges of nuclear missiles extremely seriously. We should also be open to the theory that the Kremlin has fundamentally altered its nuclear strategy from basic deterrence to a regional aggressive stance. Nor can we ignore the risk of the Kremlin shifting its red lines over Western assistance to Ukraine – not least in its heightened paranoia that foreign agents could be encouraging its leaders on the battlefield to go rogue.
But Putin is not the only factor here. A second potentially devastating scenario involves Russia’s warlords running amok. The Russian president has sought to run the country like a mafia corporation, keeping the capitalist barons who seized control of its resources and infrastructure in the Yeltsin era in check, by guaranteeing their protection against each other while threatening them with kompromat. But his permissive attitude to the privatisation of security means he now risks being held hostage by rebel armies over which he has little control.
While these militias are just as wealthy as oligarchs (Wagner, which offers African governments security in exchange for resource contracts is a good example), they also have serious military power. And many want to escalate Russia’s war in Ukraine. Both the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, and Alexander Khodakovsky, a Russian militia commander in Donetsk, have called for the Kremlin to use nuclear weapons against Kyiv.
What if Putin hangs on, or is even strengthened by Saturday’s events? History teaches us that leaders who survive coup attempts and mercilessly crush opponents can go on to enjoy long and terrifying reigns (Hafez al-Assad’s 18-year stint after ending a failed coup in 1982 in Syria comes to mind). The Russian middle class’s revulsion for the likes of Prigozhin is quite probably stronger than its horror towards Putin. Although the Russian media has been more outspoken than usual, lecturing the Kremlin that it has put military expedience before domestic stability, ordinary Russians who are terrified of a re-run of the civil war of 1917 to 1923 seem keen for armed units that are not part of the official security forces to be disarmed.
The risk in this scenario is that Putin carries on leading Russia down the path of slow physical and psychological disintegration – only to delay a final point of explosive reckoning further down the line. Unable to terminate the conflict, he may seek to endure a war of attrition as long as possible, in the hope that there is a change of administration in Washington. He may look to continue anaesthetising a frustrated middle class with corrosive myths of Dionysian Russia’s manifest destiny to destroy an Apollonian liberal order in which Russia can never exist. In other words, he will continue to preside over a ticking time bomb scenario in which nothing is resolved.
The West’s enemies will be preparing for all eventualities. We can be certain that a disintegration of the Russian Federation will be exploited by China. Beijing is already heavily invested in Russia’s easternmost republics. It may feel emboldened to increase its influence in places like the republic of Buryatia, a Siberian region on the border with Mongolia, which has long harboured ambitions of independence.
The West cannot afford to bury its head in the sand. Whatever happens as a result of the Wagner coup, there are few outcomes which would seem to be positive for peace or stability. It’s time to take the threat to civilisation seriously.
