When Vladimir Putin awoke from a restless sleep on Saturday, he found himself transformed into Tsar Nicholas II on his bed. He was lying on his stiff back, wrapped in a tight jacket; As he raised his head, he saw his breastplate laden with Imperial medals and epaulettes trembling before his eyes, but in dull splendor. Stretching out his arms, he realized that this vision was nothing more than the fleeting wake of a Kafkaesque nightmare and he breathed a sigh of relief, convinced that everything was going according to plan.
Between yawns, he mentally reviewed the speech he was to give to a nation into which he had inoculated two decades of apathy. The script would be the usual one: pressing the key of the most convulsive periods in the memory of the Russians. Thus he compared the Yevgeny Prigozhin mutiny with what happened in 1917 and, with it, he drew three alarming parallels.
The first was to put himself in the shoes of the unpopular Nicholas II, whose weakness caused a bloodbath. The second, with World War I in mind, was the admission that Russia was not achieving the objectives of the "special operation." The third is that the conditions were in place for a civil war.
He had to show the same determination with which in his day he sent behind bars those who dared to protest in the street, even holding a blank piece of paper. The rebels would receive severe punishment, he assured. And behind all sabotage, you know, there is always the West. Putin does not want to be measured by results on the Ukrainian battlefield, but by his role in global politics. Changing the focus of events is his strategy. But, as a report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) states, "internal repression and external war [of Russia] are connected by a communicating tube."
If there is one thing Putin hates, it is being taken for granted, something intolerable by mafia logic, a world he has known well since his early days in politics as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Already well installed in power, it is said that he asked his courtiers who had been the greatest traitors of the country and, before they had time to respond, he himself cited Nicholas II and Mikhail Gorbachev, for him two ousted puppets who led the demolition of great Russia. And he added: "I will never abdicate."
However, hours after the threatening declaration regarding the rebellion, with the mediation of the Belarusian dictator, an agreement was reached with Prigozhin. As the title of an essay by Peter Pomerantsev on Putin's Russia says, nothing is true and everything is possible. Including the generous state funding of Wagner's murderers, now publicly acknowledged after being repeatedly denied. The eloquent Lukashenko has recounted how the negotiation went and reproduced snippets of talks with Putin, in which he brought up the underworld jargon that both share.
Since the Wagnerada lasted just over thirty hours, we no longer know what would have happened if the column bound for Moscow had not stopped dead. What is clear is that more than a march for justice, as Prigozhin described it, it was a reckoning, no longer with Putin, but with the Defense leadership.
Every end of the season seeks the opportunity to shine one last time in all its splendor before the curtain falls. For Nicholas II, it took the form of an ostentatious masquerade ball in the halls of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg for two nights in February 1903. Fascinated by the first Romanovs to come to the throne, he decided that the ball would be a journey in the time, the seventeenth century.
The event became one of the most dazzling moments in the social history of the old Slavic regime, as well as its swan song: roses brought from the Crimea, caviar and champagne in abundance, period costumes made for the occasion with luxurious jewels and brocades, as well as performances by the tenor Fyodor Chaliapin and the dancer Anna Pavlova.
But a new hostile Russia was already slipping through the windows. Who knows if the former chef has not given Putin an invaluable gift by suddenly connecting him with reality, a wake-up call that has allowed him to flourish with pomp and pageantry. On Tuesday, the Russian newspapers showed a victorious Putin in his address to the forces of order in the square of the Kremlin Cathedral. Yesterday, those here collected the bombing-punishment against a restaurant in Kramatorsk.
