Op-ed - "The next civil war in Russia may begin under conditions reminiscent of a hundred years ago" featured in Czech media, Hospodarske Noviny
Další občanská válka v Rusku může začít za podmínek, které připomínají situaci před sto lety
"The next civil war in Russia may begin under conditions reminiscent of a hundred years ago"
As this article is for paid members (of the news media agency) and is in Czech, below I provide the original English text:
June 24 turned out to be one of the most significant and unanticipated days in modern Russian history. A private military contracting company, Wagner, staged a takeover of the Southern city Rostov-on-don. Its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin declared the Wagners are seeking regime change and aimed to take out the Minister of Defense (Sergei Shoigu), the head of the Russian Army (Valeri Gerasimov), and eventually remove the incumbent president from power. In entering the city, Wagners were not met with any significant resistance from the Russian army nor from the civilian population. By afternoon of June 24, a column of Wagner military vehicles and soldiers were making their way north towards Moscow on the M4 highway. For the first time since August of 1991, the future of Russian political order was in doubt. As time moved on at an extremely slow pace, this story was trending on all social media networks and live updates were being circulated every minute. When the Wagners moved closer to Moscow, they shot down a Russian military plane and an estimated dozen or more military servicemen from the Russian army were reported to have been killed. Prigozhin proclaimed that the incumbent Russian government and Ministry of Defense were purposefully botching the military operation and war in Ukraine, that the government is endemically corrupt, and that the fatalities from the war were being under-reported. By the end of the day of June 24, civil war had been averted as Belarussian President A. Lukashenko mediated talks between the Kremlin and Wagner. Although clear cut details on these negotiations is still not available (and likely will be classified for many years), Prigozhin and the Wagners abandoned their attempt to overthrow the incumbent government and were granted safety and exile in Belarus.
Russia is no stranger to revolution and coup attempts. Vladimir Lenin famously said that no revolution can be triumphant in absence of the help of a portion of the armed forces that sustained the old regime. The Russian civil war of 1917-1922 was one of the most brutal in modern history – it resulted in an estimated 7 to 12 million fatalities and brought about the first communist state. In its beginning portions, mutiny, widespread traitorship, and defections from agents and actors who were previously Tsarist loyalists was rampant. Academic scholarship on coups and coup attempts has blossomed over the last two decades, and more statistical and quantitative inquiries have been carried out on this topic than ever before. It has been revealed that from 1950-2010, there were 475 coup attempts – 145 in the Americas (48.3% of which were successful), 12 in Europe (33.3% of which were successful), 169 in Africa (51.5% of which were successful), 72 in the Middle East (45.8% of which were successful), and 59 in Asia (55.9% of which were successful) (Powell and Thyne 2011, p. 255). Although there is variance to how coup attempts are executed because the number of actors that execute a coup has differed, the aims of a given coup have also differed, there is a bold commonality inherent to the general nature of coups which entails that a political or military group seeks to over throw an executive incumbent governor(s) and seize power. A key factor that can explain whether or not coups will occur in a given country is referred to as defection. Defection involves either military commanders or subordinates failing to respond to their duties or leaving their posts. This phenomenon has arisen during revolutions, during civil war, and during war.
In previous research, I observed how defections arose during protests in the 1989 revolutions across Warsaw Pact states and in the dissolution of the USSR, including the August 1991 putsch attempt. The events that arose on June 24 substantially differ from those of 1989 and 1991. Political instability was palpable in 1989 and 1991, but there was no major military conflict. June 24 shares much more similarity with November of 1917.
From what has been revealed thus far, not all Wagner forces agreed to the coup attempt. In terms of the Russian Army, it has been reported that there were units in the Russian Ministry of Defense that were at the very least, sympathetic to Wagner. Other reports even claim that units belonging to the National Guard were supportive of Wagner and Prigozhin claimed that border guards greeted Wagner with positivity. Time will reveal what other actors joined, or were on the verge of joining Wagner’s attempt to go to the Kremlin. Likewise, there is a latent factor at play here in terms of actors and groups that did not carry out any preventive actions in 1) stopping Wagner from overtaking Rostov-on-don; 2) preventing Wagner from moving North up the M4 highway. Generals of the Russian Army that were stationed in regions that were effected by these events clearly did not respond to Wagner and what’s more, it appears that there was a complete lack of preparation by the incumbent government from stopping the potential advance of Wagner towards Moscow. Civilian equipment was drawn upon to create makeshift blockades on roads, parts of the highway, and to disrupt bridge-based traffic towards the city of Voronezh.
That Wagner was able to take both of these areas in the course of one day indicates that the incumbent government had a mixture of both unpreparedness and likely defection on part of different institutions and actors who should have prevented these events from occurring as fast as they did. The events of June 24 indicate that there is a serious split within Russian society – a split that is very complicated because it involved both civil society and armed groups and military actors. It is clear that Wagner received positive public support when it arrived in cities (from civilians), and no challenge arose from the part of other armed groups or civil dissenters. Meanwhile, apart from Putin who publicly stated that the coup attempt was indicative of treason, Shoigu and Gerasimov did not show their face in any capacity. The Russian civil war of 1917 began in November of 1917 while World War I ended on November 11, 1918. Students of history have always been told that history tends to repeat itself, albeit with different names and identities. Recent events indicate that the start of another civil war in Russia under might arise under circumstances that resemble those from one century ago.