Thread by @KuldkeppMart

A thread about Russia's stability 🧶

Yevgeny Prigozhin's Bonapartist adventure last week once again highlighted that anything can happen in war-weakened Russia. We cannot rule out an actual coup d'état or outbreak of civil war, (1/17)

and recent events have undoubtedly increased the likelihood of something like this happening. In the end, even the parties involved must have realised the dangers of destabilisation: Putin, (2/17)

who had initially vowed harsh retribution against the mutineers moving towards the capital, dropped the criminal case almost as soon as it was raised. Prigozhin and his Wagner cutthroats, on the other hand, (3/17)

moved meekly into their Belarusian exile and abandoned their earlier angry demands for the removal of Shoigu, the Minister of Defence and Gerasimov, the Chief of the General Staff. As of now, both sides are pretending that in fact nothing much has happened, (4/17)

and the foundations of the Russian colossus are still stable and strong. Perhaps the families of the Russian pilots who lost their lives during the uprising are not entirely happy with this solution, but they, too, will certainly be kept quiet. (5/17)

All of this is perfectly understandable, because it is essential for Russia to maintain the myth of its stability. This is needed both domestically – to reassure the Russian people – and also externally to reassure the West. (6/17)

For both Russians and Westerners fear the prospect of any 'Time of Troubles' in Russia like wildfire. This is why the West allegedly asked the Ukrainian armed forces to refrain from attacking Russian territory during the putsch attempt, (7/17)

and the same argument is also being used to keep military aid to Ukraine on the level of a trickle that allows it to survive, but not to win the war quickly. Because who knows what Putin might do if he’s 'backed into a corner'!

But what the West does not see, (8/17)

or does not want to see, is that the Time of Troubles in Russia may well have already begun, that it is ultimately not in the West’s power to prevent power struggles between its various political and criminal factions from going ahead, (9/17)

and that trying to use the victims of Russian aggression as levers to somehow save Russia from itself is a strategy that is both immoral and ineffective.

For Russia's neighbours, this is all very reminiscent of the situation during the end of the Cold War, (10/17)

when the West remained firm in its support for Gorbachev and the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union, even when Gorbachev was already a political corpse, and the territorial integrity of the USSR was obviously no longer sustainable. (11/17)

There is no more notorious example of this than George Bush Sr's 'Chicken Kiev' speech in Kyiv on 1 August 1991, in which Bush exhorted the Ukrainians to support the new union treaty and cautioned them against 'suicidal nationalism'.

145 days later, (12/17)

the Soviet Union was no more.

This is not just about nuclear weapons either. What happened between 1989 and 1991 was a reprise of the events of 1917-1920, (13/17)

when various 'suicidal nationalists' in borderlands of the former Russian Empire were in very similar ways being lectured by the Entente allies for allegedly trying to dismantle Russia – even when the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd and the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty had (14/17)

made this accusation absurd. Even the military aid at the time, including to the Baltic states during their Wars of Independence, was only limited emergency aid to keep Bolshevism from spreading further to the West until Russia could be helped back on its feet again. (15/17)

And yet, a territorially intact, politically stable and (in the long run, perhaps) democratic Russia remained as much of an unattainable Western pipe dream as it is today. (16/17)

END.

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