What Will Prigozhin’s Rebellion Mean?

What happened in Russia last weekend? What will it mean for the world? I remember the words of a veteran American diplomat years ago: “Avoid premature joy.”

We look at Vladimir Putin and think: That man has been rocked and exposed. He didn’t think an erstwhile ally was going to take arms against him and declare a march on Moscow. He couldn’t have imagined Yevgeny Prigozhin’s advance would be smooth, that town to town he’d meet no resistance, that the locals would stand around and watch, that Mr. Prigozhin’s forces would shoot down a half-dozen helicopters. This does deep damage to the dictator’s mystique—the sense that he’s the only man, the inevitable man, the strongman.

But he survived. He ended the rebellion with dispatch. He’s still here. And survival has its own mystique.

As this is written he’s back to business as usual: in meetings, making a speech at a Moscow technology fair. Wednesday he greeted happy crowds on the streets of Derbent, in southern Russia. The New York Times notes he broke with his longtime stringent Covid protocols to mix with the crowd and kiss a little girl. One of Mr. Prigozhin’s criticisms was that Russian leadership had been isolated throughout the war, not meeting with military leaders, doing everything by phone.

But we learned things about Mr. Putin. There is every sign he misjudged the situation and wasn’t confident of his position. This was telling. In his speech to the nation last Saturday, he looked scared, talked hot and drew a stunning historical parallel. He invoked 1917, when Russian troops threw down their arms during World War I and went home to join the revolution. That produced turmoil—“the collapse of the state and the loss of vast territories,” followed by civil war. “We will not allow this to happen again.” At war again, anything that weakens Russia is “a knife to the back of our country and our people.” “Those who staged the mutiny and took up arms against their comrades—they have betrayed Russia and will be brought to account.”

And yet before the weekend was out he’d essentially tell Mr. Prigozhin: It’s OK, never mind, go your way.

Mr. Putin’s problem: He didn’t know who’d be loyal to him. What are called the elites—the influential and prosperous, those holding secondary seats of power—weren’t going to back Mr. Prigozhin and weren’t going to back Mr. Putin; they were going to back the winner who emerged. Early this week the Center for Strategic and International Studies hosted a conversation on the still-unfolding events, and a comment by CSIS fellow Maria Snegovaya captured this. “The public, the society, the elites, they have all taken a pause while all this has been unraveling,” she said. “Particularly stunning is the silence of Margarita Simonyan, the notorious editor in chief of RT, who just disappeared from Telegram for a couple of days and then resurfaced saying that ‘Oh well, sorry guys, something happened—I was away, I’m sorry, on holiday, vacation.’ ”

Beyond that and more important, I think Mr. Putin looked so scared during the crisis because he didn’t know and could not know who his military would back under pressure. After 16 months of a demoralizing, embarrassingly unwon war, would the brass be loyal to the boss of 23 years or the supposedly competent mercenary commander in from the field?

The military probably didn’t know themselves. I suspect events would dictate their loyalties—whether Mr. Prigozhin’s forces grew and proved competent in fighting, or whether his column would be bombed, stopped and scattered.

That is probably why Mr. Putin made his unprecedented deal—stop, leave now, and I won’t hold it against you. And I suppose it’s why Mr. Prigozhin stopped and fled the field. He didn’t know if he could pull off something serious. He’s not Alexei Navalny,

It would be nice to think the past 10 days will leave Mr. Putin wondering if he’s pushed the war too far, made a terrible mistake, and must begin looking for the least humiliating path out. But I don’t guess he’s doing Putin Agonistes. I think he’ll conclude what he needs is more victories. And he’ll do anything to get them.

Here is a wholly imagined scenario that wouldn’t shock me in the least. Mr. Putin will not only publicly forgive Mr. Prigozhin and what remains of the Wagner Group; he will, in line with a great man’s magnanimity, privately befriend him. Mr. Putin will order Mr. Prigozhin to take some city. Mr. Prigozhin, his safety dependent on victory, will rouse his men and make some breakthrough. And after he wins the tragic news will spread—Mr. Prigozhin died heroically on the field. No one will mention the Russian colonel who calmly took him out with a pistol shot to the head and was overheard muttering, “Clean him up and ship him to Moscow for the state funeral.” Where Mr. Putin will deliver a eulogy about reconciliation in the greater, mystical cause of the endurance of the Fatherland.

I close with the one bit of lasting damage Mr. Prigozhin really did.

In the audio clips he posted on Telegram at the beginning of his adventure, he said things that have been said before in Russia but not by someone so prominent. Russia is losing in Ukraine: The cost in blood and treasure has been greater than the military admits. The army is “retreating in all directions and shedding a lot of blood. . . . What they tell us is the deepest deception.”

The war, Mr. Prigozhin said, was launched under false premises. Ukraine wasn’t the aggressor. President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted agreements. Russia’s Defense Ministry “is trying to deceive society and the president and tell us a story about how there was crazy aggression from Ukraine, and that they were planning to attack us with the whole of NATO.” This was “a beautiful story.” But “the special operation was started for different reasons”—chiefly to enrich the oligarchs and the ruling elite. “The task was to divide material assets” in Ukraine.

“The oligarchic clan that rules Russia needed the war,” Mr. Prigozhin said. “The mentally ill scumbags decided: It’s OK, we’ll throw in a few thousand more Russian men as cannon fodder. They’ll die under artillery fire, but we’ll get what we want.”

Russian elites want stability. They’d like progress, a better Russia in a better world, though after the last century they’d be forgiven for equating regime change with meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

But it will surely mean something in the execution of the war that Mr. Prigozhin described the entire effort as a cynical and cruddy little blunder.