After Putin: how nervous should we be?

The brief mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries represented the most serious shock yet to Vladimir Putin’s 23-year reign. No wonder alarmed western governments are considering nightmare scenarios. Yet the outlook may actually be rather more optimistic.

When news of the mutiny broke, there were fears of mass defections to the side of Prigozhin, a man who has sanctioned the murder of prisoners and even suggested that Russia ‘needs to live like North Korea’ to win its war with Ukraine. Rishi Sunak convened a Cobra meeting to consider possibilities apparently including a Russian collapse and nuclear proliferation. The concern is that a serious challenge to Putin risks pushing Russia into anarchy and so poses an even more intractable security challenge to the West.

The irony is that visions of a nuclear arsenal being divided between warlords and rival armies clashing on the European Union’s borders have helped Putin, discouraging some who would otherwise want to see a more assertive approach to the ageing autocrat. Putin himself invoked the smuta, the ‘Time of Troubles’ that followed the death of Ivan the Terrible. Characterised by dynastic crises, foreign invasion, hunger and revolt, this was a clear attempt to push the ‘better the devil you know’ argument. This pernicious sentiment rests on a deterministic sense that imperialism and despotism are somehow encoded into the Russian psyche and ignores the degree to which there are practical and institutional safeguards preventing the end of Putin’s reign.

The septuagenarian Putin has surrounded himself with a clique of individuals with very similar backgrounds. Almost all are also in their seventies, veterans of the KGB, and also arrivistes, the first in their families to break into the nomenklatura, the Communist party chosen. They had finally made it, just in time for that system to collapse around them.