Fear of retribution, the iron that held together the Russian Imperial army, had begun to dissolve in a strange ferment. “The lives of the officers has become impossible,” read a prophetic intelligence report issued in September 1918. “In the 470th Regiment, for example, the regimental soldiers’ committee passed a resolution to interrogate each officer on his political convictions. In the 731 Regiment, a huge crowd gathered and a soldier-orator declared that all commanders were counter-revolutionaries. The Second Pskov Dragoons put all their officers under house arrest.”
The historian Orlando Figes famously observed that Russian President Vladimir Putin sees himself as heir to the imperial tsars—their magnificence, their total power, and their territorial ambitions. Like a child, he has shown himself an enthusiast for period sets and pantomime, but a poor student of history.
Warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny over the weekend proved brief—but it has irretrievably shattered the illusions on which Putin’s authority is built. Irrespective of what happens next, it is clear the bodies Putin had sacrificed were not the foundations for Russian glory.
That realisation—not a stab in the back, as Putin claims—would lead tsar Nicholas II, known in the Russian Orthodox Church as Saint Nicholas the Passion-Bearer, to his execution at the merchant Ipatiev’s modest house outside Yekaterinburg, together with his entire family.
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The revenge of the lambs
From the summer of 1914 to the end of 1918, imperial Russia mobilised some 5,100,000 men into its standing army of 1,400,000. The next summer, another 2,300,000 were drafted. The overwhelming peasant conscripts, contemporary racial cliché held, were made up of semi-human simpletons, who would march like lambs as the tsar held up his jewelled sceptre. “The Russian soldier,” Times of London journalist Stanley Washburn gushed in 1915, was the most good-natured, child-like, playful creature.”
The carnage was neither playful nor good-natured. By 1917, 587,357 had been killed outright, or died of their wounds. A staggering 2,720,000 others were taken prisoner or otherwise lost.
The Russian General Staff—like many military commanders across Europe, and Putin’s own Generals—believed the war would be short. Everything from transport to ammunition to clothing was in short supply in 1914-1915. Even though the production of munitions improved by 1916, the logistical infrastructure needed to get it to the front did not.
Like all modern wars, the First World War demanded sophisticated assembly-line planning. The Tsar discovered in 1914, Mike Hayes notes, Russia possessed no plan for a partial mobilisation against Austria-Hungary. Even though imperial Russia had an excellent network of spies—which famously succeeded in blackmailing the head of the Austrian intelligence service—there was no centralised intelligence network, capable of assessing enemy plans and no system to respond to the escalation of a regional dispute to a global conflict.
The minister of war, Alexander Krenski, embarked on a tour of the front in May 1917, attempting to convince soldiers of the need for the last, massive push against Germany that its Allies were demanding. The reformist leader did not get gentle treatment from the lambs. “You tell us we must fight the Germans so that the peasants can have the land,” Nicholas Werth records. “But what’s the use of us peasants getting the land if I am killed and get no land?”
General Alexei Brusilov, Russia’s commander-in-chief told frontline soldiers Germany had destroyed some of France’s best champagne-producing vineyards. The soldiers became enraged: “You want to spill our blood so that you can drink champagne!”
Large-scale desertion preceded Russia’s final campaign in 1917—which ground to a halt because of ammunition shortages, and troop reluctance, in just four weeks. The Germans counter-attacked, killing 200,000 Russian soldiers.
Failure in Ukraine, as Putin came to realise, involved almost identical elements: material shortages, incompetent leadership, and conscripts willing to risk the tender mercies of Kazakhstan to avoid fighting for an unpopular regime. Like the Tsar he venerates, though, Putin refused to heed the evidence
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The mutiny as dialogue
The mutiny is not just a feature of Latin American or African despotisms. Troops from the Sikh Regiment serving in Bihar killed their commanding officer, Brigadier RS Brar, and sought to head to Amritsar after Operation Bluestar. Ethnic Bengali soldiers joined the insurgency against the Pakistan Army. The United States naval carrier Midway was sabotaged by personnel opposed to the Vietnam War, and racial conflict caused casualties on its sister ships Constellation and Kitty Hawk.
In a magisterial study of mutinies in western and central Africa, Maggie Dwyer observed that the coup served as a means of political communication, signalling larger social grievances where no political means existed to voice them. The collapse of the Manipur Police along ethnic lines, or the disintegration of the Haryana Police during caste violence in 2016, is true to this pattern.
The scholar Jacklyn Johnson observes, in a thoroughgoing study of modern mutinies, the most intense mutinies are likely to take place in authoritarian systems obsessed with coup-proofing themselves.
Governments willing to learn often realise that less repression—not more—offers better results. A prescient Central Intelligence Agency study noted, in 1987, that India would now seek to counter Khalistan terrorism by using carefully-targeted intelligence and policing rather than the military—precisely the strategy that led to eventual success by 1993.
French soldiers mutinied just like their Russian counterparts in 1917, Bentley Gilbert and Paul Bernard write, but the country’s more open political system succeeded in containing the shock.
Ever since at least 1915, Alex Marshall records, Russian military censors had documented the feelings their peasant soldiers had for officers. Among other things, officers were cowardly, and goods and money were being stolen. Even though few soldiers had any idea what communism was, they wanted to go back home to lands free of feudalism. The imperial Russian system wasn’t willing to listen to truth-telling military intelligence officers, though.
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The curtain falls
Following the German counter-offensive, Kerenski appointed the hardline General Lavr Kornilov as commander-in-chief, hoping harsh measures would snuff out communist revolts which had broke out in Petrograd. The death penalty was restored on the frontlines, soldiers were banned from holding meetings, and a large-scale campaign launched to arrest deserters. Finally, in September, General Kornilov sought to mount a coup d’etat. His effort failed. Hundreds of officers were lynched by mobs of soldiers.
“Between us and them is an impassable gulf,” one young officer wrote to his parents in March 1917, describing his relationship with his men. “No matter how well they get on with individual officers, in their eyes, we are all barins [lords].”
Allan Wildman, among the great chroniclers of those years, wrote: “A virtual tidal wave, fist covert, then open and powerful, of self-assertion by the soldier mass in behalf of peace regardless of consequences or conditions, which now effaced all previous distinctions of behaviour and affected all types of units whatever their previous history, including cavalry, cossacks, and artillery, engulfed literally the entire front.”
Finally, Imperial Russia was forced to end its war. The decision was made too late. The Bolsheviks emerged from the chaos, and though they would have to fight for a decade to make the Soviet Union, the fate of the Tsar and his family was sealed.
The script Vladimir Putin is playing to seems increasingly likely to have a similar ending.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)