Mutiny provided glimpse into a post-Putin Russia
For a millisecond, it seemed possible.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian caterer turned warlord — armed with tanks and a private army— showed Russia and the world what an alternative to President Vladimir Putin might look like.
It was only the second time in Putin’s 23 years in power that a rebelling leader with populist appeal had flashed a vision of a conceivable Russia after Putin. The other was in 2011, when Alexei Navalny led a pro-democracy uprising on the streets of the capital.
By the time Prigozhin’s mercenaries were marching on Moscow, he was trying to draw his firepower from the same core grievance as Navalny’s: that Putinism is a system with no accountability, run by a cabal of corrupt officials who are more interested in enriching themselves and pleasing the boss than in doing what’s right for the country.
The similarities end there. The extraordinary events of last weekend demonstrated not only Putin’s vulnerability to a power grab, but also the prospect that whatever comes next could grow out of the extreme and unpredictable forces that Putin has unleashed during his costly war against Ukraine. Prigozhin made clear that those forces could be equally, if not more, grim.
“Wars are incredibly destabilizing. This is how history changes all the time,” said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It leads to a cultural backlash — you don’t quite know how that will manifest. I think we don’t know what direction Russia is going to head.”
In that short window of turmoil and uncertainty, what was once unthinkable was briefly more than theoretical.
Western governments pointed to cracks in Putin’s autocratic leadership. A senior member of his own party, Konstantin Zatulin, acknowledged that Putin had let the risk posed by Prigozhin fester far too long, and that the episode “didn’t add to anyone’s authority.” Power centers in Russia — the military, the oligarchs, Putin’s inner circle — were analyzed for potential successors.
No credible names emerged, and within a few days, Putin had reestablished at least a veneer of equilibrium in Russian politics, with a series of appearances designed to convey a firm grip on power and enduring popularity.