Frontline, July 11, 2023: "Putin's Crisis" (WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, aired July 11, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards PBS showed a Frontline episode called “Putin’s Crisis,” which was ostensibly about Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group (his private army of about 25,000 fighters) and their march on the Russian military command city of Rostov-on-Don. Prigozhin had been a long-time ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his work as caterer to the Russian government had earned him the nickname “Putin’s chef.” So the world was startled when Prigozhin pulled his crack troops out of Russia’s war against Ukraine and marched them towards the Russian capital, Moscow – only to halt the operation 120 miles from Moscow and stand down as part of a deal supposedly worked out between Prigozhin, Putin and Alexander Lukashenko, president of Russia-aligned Belarus, by which Wagner’s forces wouldn’t directly challenge Putin, Prigozhin would receive asylum in Belarus, and Wagner troops would be offered the chance to enlist in Russia’s regular army. Almost no one knows what happened after that; there have been reports that Prigozhin is back in Russia, and the two people in Putin’s government that Prigozhin directly accused of essentially stabbing him in the back – Defense Minister Sergei Shiogu and General Valery Gerasimov, head of Russia’s general staff (essentially their equivalent of the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) – are still in Putin’s good graces. It’s not even clear whether Prigozhin is alive or dead – though Putin generally eliminates his enemies in blazes of glory rather than surreptitiously – and for now Putin seems to have things back under control. The emphasis there is on “for now,” for the makers of this Frontline show suggest that by coming as close to a direct challenge to Putin as he did (even though he disclaims any anti-Putin attempt himself), Prigozhin dangerously weakened Putin’s aura of invincibility. Most of the Frontline show was about Putin himself, giving a capsule version of his rise to power following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and kicked off the surprisingly rapid collapse of Soviet power, Putin was a KGB station chief in Dresden, East Germany (oddly also the birthplace of composer Richard Wagner, after whom the Wagner Group was named). When the government of East Germany melted down and the East Germans voted to merge their country with West Germany and join its functioning democracy, Putin frantically called Moscow for instructions – and got nothing. The analysis of this Frontline show was that this was his “Rosebud,” the key event in formulating his political priorities. Putin determined never to look weak, but to keep control of events and intimidate actual or potential political opponents with maximum ruthlessness and displays of force. This took him on a lightning political career that enabled him to become Mayor of St. Petersburg, prime minister to Russian President Boris Yeltsin and ultimately Yeltsin’s successor as President of Russia. This show presents Yeltsin as a democratic good guy and completely ignores his corruption – both his personal corruption and the extent to which he allowed and encouraged the corruption around him – and other sources have indicated that Yeltsin got Putin’s backing as his successor by promising that Yeltsin would never be prosecuted for his corruption. Throughout its history Russia has had periodic “Times of Troubles,” as the Russians themselves call them; the most infamous was the decade or so in the early 1600’s between the death of Czar Ivan the Terrible and the emergence of Mikhail Romanoff as Czar in 1613 – which kicked off the dynasty that ruled Russia until the 1917 Revolution. The second Time of Troubles was between the revolution of 1905 – which, though it failed to bring down the monarchy, revealed the cracks in the autocracy – and that of 1917, sparked by (among other things) Russia’s pathetically weak showing in World War I. In some battles the Russian soldiers were sent to the front lines with wooden guns, and they were mowed down en masse by the enemy Germans, who had real guns. There were actually two Russian revolutions in 1917, one in March in which the Czar abdicated and was replaced by a centrist government of a party called the Constitutional Democrats (“Cadets,” for short), and one in November in which the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the provisional government of the Cadets and established the Soviet dictatorship that would last until 1991.

One of the confounding questions in European history is how Germany was able to rise above its authoritarian past and set up a functioning democracy since 1949 (just four years after the death of Adolf Hitler) while Russia remains mired in autocracy. The period between the collapse of the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991 and Putin’s ascension to power in 2000 was in essence a third “Time of Troubles” in which the weak, buffoonish Yeltsin (an alcoholic who broke with Mikhail Gorbachev largely over Gorbachev’s desire to raise taxes on vodka) gave Russians a bad taste of so-called “democracy” and, I think, made Putin seem like a far more desirable alternative. At least he ran an autocracy that, at first, actually seemed to work, and by a combination of ruthless attacks on real or potential political opponents, use of Russia’s oil resources to buy influence on the global stage, and high-profile events like the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Putin enjoyed success for over 20 years until his obsession with bringing Ukraine back into the Russian fold (the show quotes Alexander Soltzhenitsyn’s famous line that “Russia without Ukraine is a country; Russia with Ukraine is an empire,” but it doesn’t attribute it to him) led him to the catastrophic “special military operation” Putin began in February 2022. For decades Russia had sold itself on the world stage as a country where, no matter what else may or may not have worked, the military was capable and fully modern; partly due to incompetence in their own commanders, partly due to fierce Ukrainian resistance, partly due to the success of U.S. President Joe Biden and European leaders who came together to support Ukraine with weapons even while avoiding actual combat, and partly due to low morale among Russian soldiers who (like the Americans who invaded Iraq at President George W. Bush’s insistence) expected to be greeted with flowers as “liberators” and instead found themselves bogged down in fierce fighting, Putin’s “special military operation” turned into a full-fledged war that Russia was more or less losing.

The Frontline documentary misses the obvious parallels between what the U.S. did wrong in Iraq and what Russia is doing wrong in Ukraine – when narrator Will Lyman said that Russia used the Wagner Group for the dirtiest assignments to maintain plausible deniability about Russia’s own atrocities (they could always say, “That’s the Wagner Group, not us!”), I talked back to the TV, “Does the name ‘Blackwater’ mean anything to you?” The show avoided mentioning Wagner’s role in the Central African Republic that was a key issue in the MS-NBC documentary on them shown last Friday, July 7 – which gave the group a source of income (from gold and blood diamonds extracted at gunpoint) that Putin and the Russian government couldn’t touch. One of the most interesting interviewees was Masha Gessen, who along with her brother Keith fled from Russia and has been writing about Putin and Ukraine since the start of the war for The New Yorker, and on June 26 she published a dispatch on The New Yorker’s Web site (https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/prigozhin-showed-russians-that-they-have-a-choice) headlined, “Prigozhin Showed Russians They Might Have a Choice.” In the article she wrote, “What would the Russian people think of this? In general, the Putin regime, like all totalitarian regimes, aims to prevent people from thinking. But this past weekend Russians — not just the Russians who consume independent media but all Russians who watch any TV or read or watch anything online — saw something extraordinary. They saw real political conflict. They saw someone other than Putin act politically and — even more important — wield force. Can all the propagandists and censors make them unsee it? They will try. … The specifics of what [Prigozhin] said matter little. What’s important is that he tapped into a reservoir of bitter suspicion: Russians always suspect that they are being lied to, yet they have no choice but to support those who lie to them. Prigozhin gave them a choice, by driving tanks through the streets of Rostov.”

And another New Yorker contributor, Joshua Yaffa, amplified the point in a dispatch from June 24 (https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-wagner-group-is-a-crisis-of-putins-own-making), in which he pointed out that autocracies look invulnerable until moments before they fall. “In his address, Putin cited a historical analogy that should bring little comfort. ‘Such a blow was dealt to Russia in 1917, when the country was waging the First World War,’ he said, referencing the notion of stolen victory and ‘a stab in the back of our country and our people’,” Yaffa wrote. “But that story of revolutionary subterfuge during wartime did not end well for the Czar. Not only did Nicholas II fail to reconstitute his power and continue to rule, he lost control of the country, setting up the disintegration of the Russian Empire and the rise of the Bolsheviks. Wars abroad have a way of unleashing uncontrollable political processes at home. Power everywhere, but especially in an autocracy such as Putin’s Russia, is ultimately a myth — a kind of collective agreement, often subconscious, to acknowledge and abide by the authority of a given individual. Putin, at least for now, appears to have put down the Prigozhin coup, but the myth that undergirds his rule will have taken its most serious hit yet, and the echoes of 1917 may prove far closer than Putin would like to imagine.”