Putin’s Fear of Strong Generals Is as Old as Russia Itself

Putin celebrated with a military parade in the Kremlin, attended by Shoigu, while several senior officers were dismissed for criticizing the conduct of the war. Some, apparently including his most competent fighting general, Sergey Surovikin, disappeared, possibly arrested for acquiescing in Prigozhin’s plans. At the time of writing, Shoigu and Gerasimov remain in command of the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, at a meeting with Wagner officers at the Kremlin on June 29, Putin received Prigozhin, whom he had called a traitor less than a week before. Perhaps it was a recognition that Wagner had fought so well for the motherland.

We outsiders know little of the real intrigues of a personalized autocracy in which a vast state is ruled by a tiny clique under a single despot. There are many ways to analyze the Prigozhin mutiny and the strange maneuvers since. In this, history can be usefully revealing—but never the final word.

This certainly was the old story of a mercenary captain demanding gold and guns for his warriors. On the political spectrum, the mutiny reveals the dissident pressure from nationalist-imperialists within the elites who believe Putin has not waged war fiercely enough. More broadly, it exposes the eternal problem in dictatorships: In a system where real opposition is forbidden, conspiracy is the only way to register protest or promote change.

In terms of factional conspiracy, this represents a stage in the perhaps gradual crackup of an autocrat’s system of playing his magnates against each other. It undoubtedly exposes the creaking of an entire corrupt, incompetent klepto-bureaucracy faced with the brutal and brutalizing stress of a terrible, unnecessary, and atrocious war.

In the court politics of an embattled, isolated tsar, this revolt heralds the betrayal, both hurtful and hazardous, of a friend and protégé who had been promoted and enriched at the ruler’s whim and had proved more efficient, more loyal, and more ferocious a warrior than many of the ruler’s bureaucratic cronies.

Autocrats hate to lose favorites, for they are creatures created by the ruler and therefore meant to be blindly loyal: Such loyal outsiders are hard to find and to replace. But when they cease to be that, they lose their purpose. They are ultimately dispensable.

Though dictators have few friends, and Putin is not famed for his sentimentality, many of his favorites are childhood friends, or like Prigozhin, people he met in the early 1990s in St. Petersburg. Putin has not lightly dropped or liquidated such characters, and that may explain the extraordinary meeting with Prigozhin in the Kremlin after the mutiny—and why Prigozhin is still walking the earth.

The other reason is the war, Prigozhin’s unique role in it, and the historically perilous relationship between Russian rulers and their paladins. The bizarre tale of Prigozhin is best understood through the prism of how tsars relate to their military leaders.

On the first point, it is clear by now that Putin is no general. Every stage of his planning during the invasion of Ukraine has gone horribly wrong, from the first blitzkrieg to take Kyiv in a week to the southern push to seize Odesa. He has repeatedly promoted, undermined, backed, and sacked ministers, commanders, spymasters, and warlords; Putin has meddled clumsily in every detail, high and low, at a terrible cost.

The conventional wisdom, repeated in the Western press, is that Putin is just inexplicably a micromanager, obsessive control-freak, and omnipotent meddler.

But it is much more fundamental and institutional than that. Like most of his predecessors, Putin sees it as his mission and his duty as Russian ruler to command in battle. The reason is not just the poison fruit of Putinesque vanity and obstinacy. It a role that is deeply ingrained within the founding myth of Putin’s regime and even deeper inside the creation of modern Russia: Putin believes that a Russian autocrat is not just a political ruler, but also must be a military commander. He aspires to be the presidential emperor and supreme commander who reconquered Crimea and Ukraine and restored the Russian imperium.

This can be traced to the founding charter of modern autocracy. In 1613, when the Romanov dynasty was raised to the throne, Russia was a failed principality, the Grand Duchy of Muscovy. Since the extinction of the Rurikid dynasty in 1598, it had been carved up by carnivorous neighbors: Sweden, Poland, and the Tatar khanate that ruled southern Ukraine and Crimea.

This was the Smuta, or Time of Troubles, the first of the three traumatic spasms of chaos (the others are the civil war of 1918-20 and humiliations of the 1990s) that have justified resurgent autocracy in Russia. The first Romanov tsar, effectively elected by an assembly of different interests, was a sickly teenager named Michael whose family was linked to the old Rurikids, but the dynasty came to power promising to restore the kingdom and expel the invaders.

As the Romanovs succeeded in their mission and rapidly switched to expansion, their court developed as a military headquarters. The third Romanov tsar, Peter the Great, took this even further, dressing in Germanic military uniform and mastering the details of artillery, infantry, and shipbuilding—and abortively attacking both the Ottomans and Tatars in southern Ukraine and the Swedes in the north.

From left: Russian Tsars Nicholas II and Alexander I and Russian lawyer and revolutionary Alexander Kerensky, all dressed in military garb.Getty Images

Faced with first defeat and then invasion by the Swedes, he reformed his army and then actually commanded it in battle to rout the invaders at Poltava in 1709. Peter was far from a military genius: When he personally led an expedition against the Ottomans in July 1711 he was defeated and very nearly destroyed. But he succeeded in the north, defeating the Swedes, conquering the Baltic, and founding St. Petersburg and a Russian fleet, victories he celebrated by granting himself the Roman title imperator, or commander, and rebranding Muscovy as an empire that he renamed Roosiya.

Every one of Peter’s successors aspired to command in war, and most of them spent all of their time in uniform, often personally drilling soldiers.

Russia was founded as an expansionary empire; its tsar remodeled as a conqueror. Every one of Peter’s successors aspired to command in war, and most of them spent all of their time in uniform, often personally drilling soldiers. But the role is both a mixed blessing and poisoned chalice: It is essential, and yet to fail at it can be catastrophic.

Peter’s female successors promoted favorites to command in battle since they could not do so themselves: Catherine II’s romantic and political partner, Prince Potemkin, the greatest statesman of the Romanov centuries, secured new conquests—southern Ukraine and Crimea, and a protectorate over Georgia. Her son Paul was a disastrously inconsistent commander in chief, while his son Alexander I made a fool of himself against Napoleon at Austerlitz, then yielded command, humiliatingly, to the popular Gen. Mikhail Kutuzov; the emperor then commanded the Russian army all the way to take Paris.

Even Nicholas II lived in uniform, aspired to be commander in the Russo-Japanese War, and took command in World War I—so calamitously that it led, in part, to revolution. Yet Russia’s new rulers aspired to this tradition as much the old: The provincial lawyer Alexander Kerensky was never out of military uniform; the Georgian cobbler’s son and Bolshevik activist Joseph Stalin believed from youth that he was born to command.

During World War II, Stalin controlled every military detail of the Soviet war against Hitler, even to the extent of keeping a notebook with a tally of individual tanks during the Battle of Moscow. He lost millions of men in the first year of the war, many of these deaths caused by his ignorant bungling. But ultimately, at the terrible cost of 27 million people, Stalin fought all the way to Berlin.

That victory of 1945 ensured the Soviet Union survived for another 40 years and intensified the military pretensions of Russian rulers.

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A man holds a red Soviet flag near a placard depicting former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as he participates in the annual Victory Day military parade at Red Square in Moscow on May 9, 2006.Oleg Nikishin/Pressphotos/Getty Images

In 1698, when he was in London on his Grand Embassy mission, Peter the Great faced a mutiny by the Kremlin musketeers that he crushed brutally, breaking up that obsolete force and creating his own regiments of new-model guards that remained the Romanov dynasty’s praetorians until the end of the regime. Yet the guards, like their Roman equivalents, regularly backed their own candidates for tsar, as they did on his death in 1725 with his widow Catherine I. Later they overthrew tsars, most famously in the coups of 1741, 1762, and 1801.

In 1825, elite officers launched the Decembrist rebellion against autocracy itself, only to be crushed by Nicholas I, who created the organs of secret police in part to investigate and prevent military revolts. In February 1917, while a spontaneous uprising seized the streets in Petrograd, it was the generals who forced Nicholas II to abdicate. Later that year, his successor, Kerensky, was almost destroyed by his commander Gen. Lavr Kornilov.

Russia’s modern rulers inherited that distrust of military esprit and Bonapartist ambition in their generals, whom they feared might build a Napoleonic-style military regime with popular support—using political commissars and special military sections of their new security organs, the Cheka, NKVD, KGB, and today’s FSB—to terrorize and surveil military officers.

As early as 1930, Stalin was mulling a blood purge of top military officers that he enacted in 1937 when he executed more than 40,000 officers and three of the five marshals, including two of the most brilliant, Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Vasily Blyukher, who were tortured and murdered savagely. Instead he promoted inept cronies from his civil war days, led by Marshals Kliment Voroshilov and Grigory Kulik.

Only later in the war did Stalin sack these bunglers and promote a brilliant team led by Georgy Zhukov, but he never fully relaxed his military terror: He allowed his secret police minister, Lavrentiy Beria, to investigate and arrest generals while building up a separate phalanx of special NKVD military forces—his own praetorians. Some of his generals, most famously Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, literally came from prison to Stalin’s headquarters when the war required talented officers—and had to sit in the dictator’s office with Beria, who had personally tortured him.

Georgy Zhukov (right) and and Joseph Stalin in Moscow in 1945.Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

After the war, Stalin demoted Zhukov to command the Odesa and the Urals military districts while deliberately promoting political hacks to military rank. (Beria and Nikolai Bulganin were marshals.) After his victory at Stalingrad, Stalin himself never appeared in public out of his marshal’s uniform. On Stalin’s death, Zhukov turned the tables on the secret police when he backed Nikita Khrushchev’s arrest—and later, execution—of Beria.

In 1957, he again backed Khrushchev against Stalin’s grandees Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich. But Khrushchev also feared Zhukov, sacking him and accusing him of Bonapartism. Later, Khrushchev tried to arrange his own promotion to marshal of the Soviet Union—and when his equally unmartial successor, Leonid Brezhnev, secured his own promotion to that rank, he danced to celebrate it.

During the 1990s, President Boris Yeltsin, whose prestige was ruined when the great Russian army was defeated by ragtag Chechens in the streets of Grozny, was forced temporarily to turn to an overmighty paratrooper, Gen. Alexander Lebed, who had run against him in the 1996 election. Lebed, too, was accused of Bonapartism and sacked.

To avoid potential rivals, Putin promoted Shoigu and Gerasimov, his own version of Stalin’s inept cronies.

Zhukov and Lebed are the examples who would be on Putin’s mind in the more than 500 days of the Ukraine war. To avoid potential rivals, Putin promoted Shoigu and Gerasimov, his own version of Stalin’s inept cronies.

Every Russian ruler must exist in a perpetual state of ferocious vigilance, paying paramount attention to personal security. Stalin constantly purged and shuffled his security grandees, always keeping his personal security under his own control. His successors, even Yeltsin, did the same: Yeltsin’s devoted bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov, was promoted to general and top aide until he overreached. Putin has studied these lessons, recalling how Fidel Castro, the long-serving Cuban dictator, told him how he had survived many assassination attempts by always keeping personal control of his security.

Putin has promoted his former bodyguard Viktor Zolotov to command the huge National Guard (Rosgvardiya) that is his shield against military threats. Yet at the same time, the failure to take Kyiv or Odesa and hold Kherson has revealed the cloddish incompetence of his chosen military leaders.

Putin’s entire system, not unlike that of the tsars and general-secretaries before him, resembles a court in which magnates are rewarded and promoted, then played against one another. The ruler is the supreme adjudicator. Even though Russian despots seek and reward loyalty above all other qualities, they still value and promote competence too.

Every Russian ruler has to deal with the knowledge that their bureaucrats are often cautious, corrupt, and incapable of initiative. To get things done, rulers turn to dynamic favorites, former outsiders who become intimate insiders empowered to exert pressure on vested elites. That is where Prigozhin came in.

Putin observes a launch at Russia’s Plesetsk Cosmodrome on Feb. 8, 2004. Maxi Marmur/AFP via Getty Images

Prigozhin reflects Putin’s nature, too—but he was, for all his criminal record, his rise in catering, and his brutal nature, a doer: When Putin wanted to create troll farms to undermine Western democracies, Prigozhin did it; when he wanted a deniable, cheaper military force, Prigozhin created the Wagner Group that helped achieve victory in Syria and push Russian interests in Africa.

When Putin made the dire decision to attack Ukraine, Prigozhin enthusiastically embraced the war, and shaming the venal bureaucrats and military pencil pushers Shoigu and Gerasimov, he shaped Wagner as a Russian storm force. Putin’s promotion of an independent unit and its warlord was itself a sign of state weakness—and lack of confidence in his own military.

The failure to promote an effective general to fight the Ukraine war is one of Putin’s most egregious lapses. Indeed, one of the chief duties of the war leader is to select generals who can win victories and remove those who can’t. Even Stalin, after many defeats, backed Zhukov and other talented generals. Putin has either never found that talented general, or more likely, so fears the threat of one that he has preferred stalemate to the peril of a victory won by someone else. Gen. Sergey Surovikin, for example, was promoted to commander in Ukraine, then removed.

Fearing that a successful rival general could provide an alternative potentate around whom his courtiers could rally, Putin instead empowered Prigozhin to promote himself and attack the military hierarchy as slothful and crooked while he emulated Stalin’s penal battalions of World War II by recruiting criminals from Russian prisons; Prigozhin flaunted his devotion to the motherland, having deserters executed with his trademark sledgehammer. Tempered and bloodied by the cruel battles at Bakhmut and elsewhere, and possibly liberated by his own struggle with cancer, Prigozhin started to believe himself a Russian paladin hamstrung by deskbound cowards and a sclerotic autocrat.

Putin now finds himself the prisoner of the conundrum of despot as supreme commander and security sentinel.

Prigozhin was serving in a classic role as a way to intimidate the military command, but unlike Stalin’s Beria, this ferocious, loudmouthed military amateur was also winning admiration from some generals, possibly including Surovikin.

But ultimately, it was unlikely that Putin would choose an amateur condottiero and his small force of Wagnerians over the huge Russian army. In the end, he was always going to back the army. And he did so, allowing his officials to cut off Wagner’s ammunition and its budget. But Putin failed to perform his essential role of balancing his magnates, apparently refusing to talk to Prigozhin—who turned to desperate measures.

Putin now finds himself the prisoner of the conundrum of despot as supreme commander and security sentinel. His dream of imperial greatness has become a fatal trap. His weakness now means that any retreat from command could lead to a hemorrhage of power.

Every autocrat competes with gilded and titanic ghosts of imperators past. In 1945, when U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman congratulated Stalin on taking Berlin, the dictator replied, “Yes, but Alexander took Paris.” Putin could not hold Kherson.

Few autocrats can be Peter or Stalin, but Putin dreams of such victories. His dilemma—a tsar’s inability to balance his roles as military commander and political survivor—is also Ukraine’s tragedy. When dictators aspire to empire, many innocents bleed; when they fail, they take whole, innocent peoples down with them.