2023-07-02 21:00:00
A new era of turmoil hits Russia
(British Economist July 1, 2023 issue)
Will there be turmoil in post-Putin Russia?
A faction close to the Russian president ponders a “post-Putin” way of life.
After being appointed acting president of Russia in late 1999, Vladimir Putin likened the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union to “Smuta Vremya.”
In Russian history, it refers to the period from the end of the 16th century to the beginning of the 17th century, when uprisings, famines, and invasions from outside led to the rise of the Romanovs.
Putin said Russia’s first democratically elected president, Boris Yeltsin, was Boris Godunov, the “tsar” of the troubled times, and that he was the beginning of a new lineage of tsars.
He also promised national stability, prosperity and reconstruction.
Wagner’s armed uprising
Fast forward to June 24, 2023, when a group of armed militias approached Moscow at breakneck speed, and that promise — albeit broken long ago — was stronger than ever. looks like it’s broken.
Wagner’s mercenaries, led by the brutal warlord Evgeny Prigozhin, shot down several helicopters and a military plane after leaving Russian-occupied Ukraine.
As many as 20 Russian soldiers may have been killed.
An enraged Putin again brought up history, referring to the return of soldiers from the battlefields of World War I in 1917 and the “tragedy of the civil war” that followed.
However, perhaps because he has awakened the specter of the Bolshevik Revolution, he seems to be the last emperor of the Romanov dynasty, rather than the first emperor.
Mr. Prigogine was in many ways a creation of Mr. Putin.
After getting out of prison, he ran a restaurant in St. Petersburg, where Putin served guests.
Before long, he got into the business of collecting mercenaries.
So that the Kremlin could send soldiers across Africa and Syria with plausible denials that it had nothing to do with them.
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