Understanding the enigma of Russia has always fascinated Churchill. There is no power that has defeated eternal Russia from the outside. Changes have always occurred from within, either through a coup d'état or the replacement of power by a group of soldiers or an internal struggle to replace one faction with another. A power vacuum never occurs in a State. No one knows what may happen in Russia or what will be the fate of Putin and the fleeting coup leader Prigozhin, Wagner's leader, and the thousands of his soldiers who have fought on the front lines in Ukraine.
Everything that has happened in the last 15 months has an air of improvisation and a lack of strategy in the Kremlin. If it was intended to annex Ukraine, it will not be achieved even if they occupy the entire territory, because the feeling of belonging and patriotism is greater than at the beginning of the war. NATO had to be weakened and it is stronger than ever, with the incorporation of Finland and Sweden when Erdogan's veto is overcome. Europe is more cohesive today than before the invasion. The war has been lost by Putin, even though he suffocates Wagner's paramilitaries, who for a few hours headed for Moscow without encountering resistance.
In his little book on the technique of the coup, Curzio Malaparte describes the strategy of Trotsky and Lenin for the coup that succeeded in October 1917 in Saint Petersburg. Lenin maintained that the masses were essential, while Trotsky needed a thousand men to seize the State. Trotsky's tactic triumphed, with a few hundred agitators and technicians who trained unnoticed for a few days through the streets of Saint Petersburg to, in a few hours, on the indicated day, control the train stations, the telephones, the bridges over the Snow and storm the Winter Palace. The masses are useless, a few are enough, said Trotsky. Wagner's column tried without success.
Yeltsin's coup against Gorbachev in 1991 dissolved the Soviet Union and the hegemony of the Communist Party. Power passed to the oligarchs protected by Yeltsin, who enriched themselves with the privatization of part of the State. When Putin was appointed prime minister in 1999, he became interim president after Yeltsin's resignation and president-elect in 2000. The oligarchs who had plundered the state were replaced by the elite of the old KGB, which is the hard core that has ruled Russia in this century.
One of Putin's objectives has been the annexation of all possible ex-Soviet territories, resorting to the myths and romantic readings that he has made of eternal Russia. In his magnificent history of Russia, Orlando Figes says that unless he stops soon, Putin will destroy the best of Russia: those parts of its culture that for a thousand years have contributed to the enrichment of Europe.
The Russia that emerges from the war, Figes claims, will be poorer, more unpredictable and more isolated in the world. All this shows how dangerous myths can be when used by dictators to reinvent an unattainable past.
It has been an unnecessary and useless war. One observation: neither the European extreme left nor the extreme right have clearly condemned Putin's recklessness. Western governments, including Spain, have stood up to it. The ineffectiveness of a national army replaced by mercenaries has been shown. Putin's fate is uncertain, although Russia will always be essential.
