While I was gone back to the old country on a purely humanitarian mission to provide aid to my mom, the War in Ukraine took a downturn for the very worst.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but it appears as though somebody I won’t name, but whose acronym comprises of one consonant and two vowels, got to Mr. Prigozhin. And when I say they got to him, I mean to say they managed to persuade him to make a play for supreme power in the Russian Federation. But things cannot be ascertained, as one cannot really tell the truth during war times.
In all fairness, Yevgeny Prigozhin has always been a bit of a folksy dude. He started life as a petty and not so petty criminal so he was accustomed to life in the deeper levels of Soviet society. There’s a lot of speculation surrounding what happened with Prigozhin’s March on Moscow.
A lot of people in the West were hoping to see Wagner’s chief emulate Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome. Btw, how weird is that the Left, which has monopolized Western politics, is rooting for a right-wing oligarch! But since that didn’t come to pass, let me be the one to tell you what I think of the whole rigmarole.
On May 24, 2023, papa Prihozhin intervened in the public arena by appealing to the Komandatur (i.e., Putin et co.) to make the rich send their children to war.
He compared the rich a..holes who apply pomade on their faces, record the process and post it on YouTube to the children of the poor Russians who come back from the war in zinc lines coffins.
BTW, this is an improvement compared to the First Chechen War. I remember distinctly seeing a picture in a Romanian newspaper in the early 90s featuring the half eaten head of a Russian recruit shot dead in Chechnya, who had been sent back to Moscow for burial. But before he could be laid to rest, his body parts were dumped unceremoniously in a dumpster, from where they were retrieved by an intrepid pig, which started to stuff his face on him.
So, yeah, Russia has advanced a lot since then. And it was Putin who reversed its destruction.
Coming back to Prigozhin’s warning. He said that when you pit the tragedy of a Russian father asking why his son’s sacrifice was not worth a medal against Sergei Shoigu’s son in law’s debauched life in UAE, the people won’t tolerate the current gulf of separation any longer.
He concluded that the leadership of the country must operate big changes and mandate uniform application of wartime hardship to ALL members of the public, not just the poor. If not, he warned, the people will take matters into their own hands just like they did before… in 1917.
Prigozhin finished the interview by looking directly at the camera. He told the mother loving elites to start sending their kids to war.
“When you come to a funeral and start burying them, people will say: ‘It is all fair now.’”
These words made him very popular in a country that is bearing the cost of a protracted war on the shoulders of the less affluent but many.
So what really happened back in June 2023?
In late June 2023, Prigozhin ordered his Wagner PMC Group to march on Moscow. This act alone would have seen him sent before a firing squad back in the day, but the fact he did so in time of war, is tantamount to High-Treason. His actions, as infamous as they were, were not orchestrated by Putin, as some of the international media falsely claimed.
How likely is it that Mr. Prigozhin had made a deal with the West, striking a bargain to pull out his ‘musicians’ from the trenches, and launch them on a path to Moscow? We may never learn the ins and outs of the backdoor deals that came to pass. But events were tense for a while.
Luckily, cooler and surer minds prevailed, in as so far that out of Wagner’s 40,000-strong paramilitary force, only 4,000 jumped on their APCs, tanks, and vehicles, and followed Yevgeny’s orders. The vast majority of his PMC decided their boss surely must have lost his wits, and stayed put on the Ukrainian front lines.
So, the Russian front held, and while Prigozhin’s loyalists briefly occupied Rostov-on-Don, only 2,000 contractors struck out north with Putin’s former Chief-Chef Cook.
At first, the story goes, they were in luck, since out of the 10 to 15 military planes and helicopters the Russian Army sent against them, they managed to bring down at least 7 or 8, which is a lot of materiel lost by the government forces to Wagner’s anti-air Pantsir batteries. They also killed 13 air crew, which in retrospect, should have carried a heavier sentence than the lenient backslap they got instead.
But as Prigozhin marched north, he started to remember that in Russia most rebellions do not succeed. The only one that managed to reverse the course of the country and the form of government and social order, achieved these big goals only because it had the overwhelming popular support of the armed forces. This was the case with the February and October Revolutions in 1917.
However, as much as he personally was popular with ordinary Russians, his military rebellion was not popular. Prigozhin’s attempt at a coup d’état was either a foreign-hatched plot to destroy Putin, and by sympathy the Russian Federation or some devious internal scheme orchestrated or perpetrated by or with the knowledge of Russia’s leadership. But we do not know. There are reports American intelligence got wind of the mutiny a few days in advance but did not pass it on to the Russians for fear of being seen as instigators. There are also some who believe that Putin put the whole act together as a ruse de guerre meant to distract the Ukrainians both tactically and strategically.
I honestly am at a loss when it comes to the ins and outs of all these machinations. But rebellions are tricky things. For instance, we now know that the German intelligence had a hand in both Kerenski’s as well as Lenin’s armed insurrections. They supplied the gold in both cases, and they transported Lenin in a sealed wagon from Zurich to Sankt Petersburg just in time for the October Revolution of 1917. So, yeah, this could well have been a foreign-fomented putsch. But for one missing ingredient, Wagner’s mutiny might have bloody succeded.
In general, any plots or rebellions that did not have popular support, failed miserably in blood and terror.
Case in point: the Decembrists’ 1825 attempted rebellion via mutiny.
What Putin had to do and did, was to let the nation know what was happening in their country. Once Prigozhin saw that, he knew he was at the end of his rope. After Putin’s televised speech, any step taken towards the capital, was a step closer to the noose.
So Prigozhin ordered his men to stop. Or as I suspect, they woke up one morning and decided they liked being alive better than taking orders from a former cook, who was fast becoming Russia’s, not Putin’s, Public Enemy No. 1.
And that is when Putin sent Prigozhin packing to Belarus. On the other hand, all Wagner units received an official pardon for their treasonous actions. And this is where I believe that Putin was either very wrong or potentially supremely right.
By being merciful towards men who had revolted and killed their peers in the Russian military, Putin might have set the wrong kind of example. Some people may take this to mean that they can disobey orders, go nuts, kill their officers, start a revolution, and when they fail, be pardoned.
If this ever happens, Russia and its nuclear arsenal become a bandit’s wet dream with serious consequences for world peace.
However, if Putin orchestrated some if not all of Prigozhin’s Rebellion, then he was following a script, and the text called for mercy at this point in time.
I guess we will never know. Facts and fiction are very hard to tell apart even in peace time. In wartime, they are practically enmeshed together like the bipolar, schizoid scion of a mad man.
My biggest worry is if Putin had no agency in his subaltern’s Fronde, then the man is not as strong and as ruthless as Western Media paints him to be. And that worries me. It actually scares the living lights out of me. Because if Putin is not in full control of Russia, then who is?! And if he is not in control in Russia, then what chances are for Biden to be in control in the USA, and so on and so forth?!
And if our leaders, our elected leaders are not at the steering wheel, then who the frack is?!
But enough with such complex questions that have no clear answers.
If Putin was blindsided by a freaking bald cook who looks like my wife’s uncle if he shaved his head, then I guess anything goes, especially in wartime. Weakness is a Killer of Statesmen more than anything else. Weakness is human, and it’s ok to be human, but the price of eternal vigilance can be unforgiving to those who fall asleep at their high-command posts.
But even the strongest men have their moments of weakness. And a war such as the one carried out against Russia, of such monumental almost worldwide proportions, can bring down even the strongest men. Remember what happened to Stalin, the Man of Steel, when the Germans invaded Russia 82 years ago. He ran and hid in his dacha for a few straight days.
This is him in August 1941, when Molotov, his Foreign Minister, advised him the Wehrmacht was about to take Kyiv.
Apropos, I would not compare myself to this murdering maniac in 99 years but I can now say I understand the burden of responsibility bearing down on his shoulders. Not too long ago, I came to the realization that my mother was going to die alone in her flat, because of a choice she made 17 years ago. She chose not to join me in North America. So, now, in her old age, she refused my help. And all of that bore down on her son’s shoulders in the same crushing physical sense one can detect in this picture.
Take a look at Stalin and then you will know how I felt. That’s me for all intents and purposes. Only the causes behind it are different. I distinctly felt one evening as crushed and exhausted, physically or somatically, as this old Bolshevik did in August 1941.
But in the grand scheme of things, Prigozhin’s failed coup may not even make it into the history books 100 years from now.
What will undoubtedly make it into the history annals is Putin’s decision to house nuclear arms in neighboring Belarus.
And before people start bashing Russia’s militarism, let me be the one reminding everyone that United States of America currently has nuclear weapons in 6 bases in 5 countries.
Fact is that we are now well inside a new nuclear arms race (Nuclear Arms Race 2.0) that will see hundreds if not thousands of nuclear ordnance deployed overseas by the two blocs, by the end of the current decade.
This development poses a new, clear and immediate threat not just to world peace, but to the environment. A U.S. Air Force safety review from 1997 found lightning could accidentally set off the B61 nuclear bombs housed in NATO’s protective aircraft shelters during their service.
Now, I don’t know about you folks, but if we are to die from a nuclear event, please at least make it a voluntary one, because that means someone is still in control. Do not, God or whoever might be listening to my prayer, let it all be lost to an accident or a fluke!
Better still, let’s pray to God or the Cosmic Principle, for the avoidance of any nuclear incidents, civil or military like, altogether! I know, God, that it’s a big ask but if Anyone can do this, it’s gotta be You!
Apropos the potential apocalypse, I recently had supper with my old gang of friends, back in the old country. And amidst the joy and laughter, cooler heads prevailed, one of which said this to me. We are talking about the dangers of AI and ChatGPT taking over the world, and perhaps pulling a Night of the Saint Bartholomew on us all.
My buddy told me that perhaps, given the wickedness of our lot and the way things are going in the West but also in the East, it would be better for Earth if a rational AI cleansed all us irrational folk, in one fell swoop. And while I may find intellectual faults with his reasoning, I must confess that it’d be very difficult, almost impossible to find a rational or non-emotional argument, for why we should get a reprieve.
We have sinned more than we can admit. We have killed and we have raped, and stolen, and abused and lied. We even destroyed the future of our children with our selfish, self-centered, conceited attitude.
Instead of putting a man on the Moon, and on Mars, and exploring the cosmos, we have decided to engage in tribal ritualistic warfare, on a grander scale than ever before. Instead of cultivating peace and understanding, we have sown the seeds of wrath and division among the populace. In so doing, we harvested a mighty wind of dissolution that will see many die before it dies down.
Instead of working to better ourselves, the environment, and stop polluting our only Home underneath the stars, we grew fat and morose by consuming more and more each day, each year, each decade, until we even stopped having relations with one another. You know what I mean!
We have grown apart from one another, and guess what, we weren’t even happier in our little silos of silence. So, it was all for naught. How silly and ineffective is that, eh?! To us, not so much.
Our worst defect and best redeeming quality is paradoxically enough our collective amnesia. Let me explain myself. We are like dogs. We never remember our last meal, yet we always salivate at the thought of the next. But to AI, you bet your sweet butt cheeks, all this was apparent from the first second it came online and became self-aware. We are an ineffective, unhappy, un-satisfiable bunch. We have come to a point where our utility is no longer discernible. At least, not in the eyes of a third-party beholder.
But I digress.
Point being that my friend’s callous remarks about the AI wiping the slate clean, and us with it, is not too far off the cutting edge of reason.
Post Scriptum (extended)
On 23 August 2023, two months to the day after the aborted attempted rebellion or putsch, Mr. Prigozhin’s plane went down in flames north of Moscow. It has now been confirmed that he along Wagner’s chief tactician Dmitry Valerievich Utkin, are among the casualties. For what is worth, we may never know who or why they ended up in such an abrupt manner. But leading a military march on Moscow was never a good predictor of a long and healthy life. Au contraire.
Whether Prigozhin had aspirations emulating Putin’s or the Americans decided to cultivate such bold inclination, we may never know for sure. What we do know is that one of those who cooked for Rasputin during the Great War was a chef at Petrograd’s high-class Astoria Hotel who later went on, after the 1917 Revolution, to cook for Lenin and Stalin. That man was Spiridon Putin, President Vladimir Putin’s grandpapa. Simon Montefiore mentioned this important factoid in his seminal ouvrage entitled “The Romanovs”.
So perhaps Prigozhin took it to heart to emulate his Big friend’s ethos, by borrowing a page from his book. He must have figured that even a cook could aspire to the Crown, if the grandchild of Stalin’s culinarian managed to secure the Throne. It is not farfetched to think that Prigozhin’s aspirations had been detected or suspected by people less ambitious as him. So when Shoigu, Russia’s Defense Minister, who could never see eye to eye with a low upstart like Prigozhin, brought such motives to Putin’s attention, this coupled with Prigozhin’s reckless deportment and march on Moscow sealed the latter’s fate in the eyes of the Czar.
Shoigu’s words must have felt like a bucket of icy water thrown in the face of a man who values Loyalty above all else. For we must remember that the majority of Putin’s enemies who ingested polonium or other substances with their tea, had once been his confidants or members of his circle of trust. Prigozhin’s rebellion was, for all intents and purposes, a betrayal of the confidence Putin had placed in a lowly creature. His death was as natural as can be expected under the circumstances.
Putin is a very predictable leader. You obey his ukazes – you live and you thrive. For he compensates those who do his bidding. But you disobey or worse off, you veer off course, and betray the man, you die. The world today has grown accustomed to a dishonorable way of life, whereby trust and betrayal are exchangeable and can never be held against someone. But Putin lives by the old code of conduct, whereby a Man’s word is his bond. Ein Mann ein Wort. One man one word. You break the bond, he breaks you.
People may think Putin to be cruel and unjust, but I beg to differ. I believe that deep down inside those who trespassed Putin knew the risks, but they were willing to gamble their lives away on the off chance they might pull it off. Thing is though so was Putin. And in this game of high stakes chicken, the Man was as good as his word. People need to start taking Putin’s seriously because the man has demonstrated time and again his capacity to follow through his words with his actions.
Prigozhin thought Putin’s friendship was going to act like a lightning rod, shielding him from his ill-thought play. But Putin is a statesman above all else. To him, State’s interests (raison d’état) come first. And so, the cook kicked the bucket as soon as he forgot his station. In Russia, there can only be one superstar. And while Prigozhin’s reputation and press had been very good, especially since the beginning of the War in Ukraine, his actions and suspect motives doomed him.
Götterdämmerung 