Russia’s Accidental No-Good, Very Failed Coup

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

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🗓️ 3 July 2023

⏱️ 22 minutes

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Summary

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow last weekend, which killed more than a dozen Russian soldiers, fizzled as quickly as it began, but its repercussions are just beginning. The Wagner Group commander issued a video from Belarus claiming that he did not attempt a coup against Putin but a protest against the Defense Ministry. Mutiny may be the more accurate description, but Prigozhin “was strictly staying within this mythology that Putin makes all the decisions in Russia, and if he makes bad decisions, it’s because somebody has given him bad information,” the staff writer Masha Gessen says. “He was marching to Moscow to give Putin better information.” David Remnick talks with Gessen and the contributor Joshua Yaffa, who has written on the Wagner Group, about what lies ahead in Russia. Both feel that by revealing the reality of the war to his own following—a Putin-loyal, nationalist audience—Prigozhin has seriously damaged the regime’s credibility. If an uprising removes Putin from power, “there will be chaos,” Gessen notes. “Nobody knows what happens next. There’s no succession plan.” And whatever the West may wish, Ukraine may be better off with the current regime. “Whoever comes to power after Putin, it’s not going to be anybody who articulates liberal values. It’s going to be some sort of Putin-ism without Putin.”

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0:42.5	Yeah, eBay. Things people love.
0:49.2	This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnick.
1:10.3	30-some years ago in August 1991, as a Russia correspondent for the Washington Post, I watched a coup unfold with tanks on the
1:13.9	streets of Moscow. The coup was plotted by Soviet hardliners in the KGB and the military,
1:19.7	and it aimed to force Mikhail Gorbachev from power. After three days, it failed. But history
1:26.1	was made. The coup itself became yet another nail in the coffin of the old Soviet Empire.
1:33.4	So a lot of things were going through my mind a week ago as we watched
1:37.1	a rogue commander's tanks seized control of a southern Russian city, a major city, and then race north from Moscow.
1:45.6	Then it was over as quickly as it had begun.
1:48.5	But its repercussions are just beginning to be felt in the Kremlin and throughout Russia.
1:53.5	And to understand those repercussions, I'm talking with two of our contributors,
1:57.8	Masha Gessen, who has written deeply about Putin's autocracy in Russia,
2:01.7	and Joshua Yaffe, who's been covering the war in Ukraine.
2:05.3	Josh has written on the Wagner Group, the mercenary army that was headed by Yvgeny Pregozhen.
	...

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