Russia: What Do 1905, 1917, 1991 & 2022 Have in Common? (Hint: Catastrophe)
Putin is channeling Nicholas II in leading Russia to collapse.
Putin’s Quagmire
Just as Vladimir Putin declares “annexation” of four regions of eastern Ukraine amid faux fanfare following gun barrel referendums, the Ukrainian army recaptures yet another chunk of the so-called annexed territory. Meanwhile, some 300,000 military-age Russian men — the number Putin has ordered to be drafted — head for the exits, fist fights break out at military induction centers as some 20 others are torched, and a recruitment officer is critically shot. Finally, a top Russian economist predicts, “The Russian economy is going to die by winter.”
What’s wrong with this picture?
Well, everything. It’s just that Lt. Col. Putin isn’t paying attention. Let’s hope his thug-laden siloviki are, and act to remove him before Russia collapses — or he orders tactical nuclear missile strikes.
We’ve seen this movie before. If history doesn’t quite repeat itself, in Russia it comes closer than most places. In the space of three generations, 1905 through 1991, Russia suffered three major political disruptions following devastating defeats in war. It will soon, I predict, incur a fourth as a shaken and cornered Putin faces imminent challenges to his power from an increasingly fissured power elite and restive population.
As I write this, Ukrainian forces have liberated the Donbas city of Lyman and are closing in on the major southern hub of Kherson — cities the residents of whom Putin just days ago affirmed, were now “Russians forever.”
Unfortunately for the Russian president, Kyiv has a different view, declaring the sham referendums, “null and worthless.”
Moreover, demoralized Russian troops, of whom up to 80,000 are estimated to have been killed or wounded in Ukraine, are reporting the truth to friends and loved ones back home, as evidenced by this phone conversation of a son with his mother recently intercepted by Ukrainian military intelligence:
“We’re just standing here, getting f*cked everywhere.”
“What kind of special operation is this? They’ve f*cked up 50,000.”
“No one understands what’s in his (Putin’s) bald f*cking head.”
And this from another son to his mother:
“Remove him from the post of the president. Nobody needs this war.”
Ukraine reports some 2,000 Russian men have called their hotline with instructions on how to surrender.
“What we might be at here is really at the precipice of really the collapse of the Russian army in Ukraine. A moral collapse,” former U.S. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster told CBS.
“No amount of shambolic mobilization, which is the only way to describe it, no amount of annexation, no amount of even veiled nuclear threats can actually get [Putin] out of this particular situation,” said retired Army Gen. David Petraeus on ABC on Sunday. “He is losing, and the battlefield reality he faces is, I think, irreversible.”
Beyond Their Peter Principle Threshold: Putin Channeling Tsar Nicholas II
One almost gets the sense that Vladimir Putin is channeling Tsar Nicholas II. Both held power undemocratically and way too long. Both were out of touch with their people. Both presided over an empire of rot. Both proved to be feckless, galactically incompetent and venal. Nicholas met his comeuppance before a firing squad. Putin’s ultimate fate is still being written. I’m no Nostradamus, but Creedence Clearwater Revival captures the moment: “I see the bad moon a-risin'.”
An avid believer in “alternate facts” history, Putin, naturally, is learning nothing from Nicholas’s disastrous handling of Russia’s wars with Japan in 1904-1905, nor the Central Powers in World War I. On the contrary, he seems to be doing his best to replicate it in his mindless “special military operation” against Ukraine.
Rejecting diplomacy out of hand, in 1904 Nicholas blundered into conflict with the upstart Japanese, whom he derided as “Asian small yellow monkeys.” In the same vein, Putin dismissed diplomacy to launch a war of aggression against Ukraine, which he insisted was “not a country.”
Nicholas doubled down after the Japanese destroyed the Russian Far East fleet, sending his Baltic Fleet to battle the Japanese, who promptly sank it too. The Ukrainians have sunk Russia’s Black Sea flagship Moskva, along with 14 other vessels. Putin is doubling down with his ill-fated mobilization of at least 300,000 largely unmotivated men, a move Ukraine President Zelensky derided as a “mobilization to graves.”
As the Russo-Japanese War dragged on, the tsar called up over a million undisciplined, unmotivated and under-trained reservists, whose brawling resulted in 123 major outbreaks of violence, ranging from simple “mob disorders” to all-out riots, looting, assaults on police and military personnel, refusals to board troop trains, and destruction of infrastructure. In 1904, regular troops were deployed 67 times to subdue rioting reservists. Initial popular support for the war evaporated.
Upon deployment in Manchuria, Russian troops engaged in looting, murdering civilians and rape. Russian officers were at a loss to control their men, who often disobeyed orders. Add to this: inferior technology, bickering commanders, poor combined arms coordination and supply chain blockages that held up provision of men and matériel. Having not adequately prepared for their long distance, imperialist war, the tsar and his military leadership had failed to build the apparatus needed to manage the great numbers of mobilized men, who lacked food and equipment once deployed. This all repeats itself today in Ukraine.
There were at least 211 mutinies toward the end of 1905, another 202 in 1906. One-third of the infantry regiments the tsar used to quash civilian unrest mutinied. (Pay close attention. Should mutinies by Russian troops break out in Ukraine, the writing is on the wall.)
By the time Nicholas sued for peace in 1905, Russia had lost an estimated 34,000 to 53,000 men, with a further 9,000–19,000 having perished from disease and some 75,000 captured.
Nicholas’s needless war of choice with Japan sparked turmoil in Russia. The economy deteriorated, resulting in food shortages. Russia was viewed internationally as a great power in decline. Popular unrest led to the massacre of hundreds of protesters by the tsar’s Imperial Guard in January 1905.
The resultant outrage brought on limited reforms, notably creation of the Russian Duma. But the imperial regime was severely weakened. Nicholas limped along in power until he was given yet another chance to display his incompetence in World War I. What Russia was able to achieve in sheer manpower, it largely squandered with poor leadership and egregious systemic inefficiencies in that war.
The Russian economy, blocked from Europe’s markets in the First World War, came under great strain, with soaring inflation and food shortages, leading to popular unrest followed by severe government crackdowns, including massacres of civilians. The rot at Russia’s core extended to the undersupplied and poorly led armed forces, demoralized by major military defeats, encompassing 2 million dead. Mutinies broke out, starting with the Petrograd garrison. Officers, many incompetent, risked losing their lives to their own disgruntled troops as much as to the enemy. Nicholas’s taking direct command of the armed forces only exasperated matters. (Putin reportedly is overriding military leaders in issuing direct orders to army field commanders.) Many of the tsar’s own previously dependable Cossacks, whom he used to suppress protesters, defected to the Bolsheviks.
British historian Edward Acton writes that “Nicholas undermined the loyalty of even those closest to the throne [and] opened an unbridgeable breach between himself and the public opinion.” The tsar had lost the support of the elites as well as the Russian people, setting the stage for his overthrow.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Moscow’s Blunder into Afghanistan
And history, again, repeated itself in yet another ill-chosen conflict undertaken by Kremlin leaders, one which occupied years of my diplomatic career: Afghanistan. The Soviet Union’s ten-year military quagmire in that country resulted in some 15,000 killed-in-action and over 50,000 wounded as well as public malaise and a failing economy that hastened the downfall of communism and the breakup of the USSR in 1991, two years after Moscow withdrew its forces.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev described the war as “bitter and painful.” Public disapproval of the conflict had increased from 25 percent to 40 percent in three years, according to a declassified CIA analysis. Some 48 percent of party and government apparatchiks and 66 percent of the intelligentsia “disapproved of the war.”
The CIA further reported that the Afghan war had sparked “at least 15 major demonstrations” in the previous four years. Most touching for me were those by the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, women who courageously protested to the authorities the loss of their sons. One mother wrote, “The Afghan War is not the Great Patriotic War, such as it was for our fathers. That was a people’s war, everyone understood it. But in this war I didn’t find any logic or commonsense, and so it was doubly hard.” Similar sentiments are being expressed by mothers of Russian soldiers today.
The Costs of Not Heeding History
Revise the dates, change out the characters, make a few other tweaks, and the above historical scenarios broadly lay out Vladimir Putin’s inevitable demise, and, potentially, the geographical breakup of Russia. The main variable is not if, but when. In each of the disastrous interventions I’ve described, Russian leaders’ hubris and incompetence, and the military’s failures, reflect forward on Putin’s own shambolic decision-making. Conflating his all-knowing person with the state (“l'état, c'est moi”), facing imminent defeat in Ukraine, he now risks laying bare before the Russian people his own misrule. This then invites challenges to his leadership by those who, thus far, have kept him in power. He must now realize he faces an existential quandary, with the question: Is it too late to avoid Nicholas’s fate?
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.
Another collapse of Russia is imminent. This time there is even less control of their vast stockpile of likely poorly maintained nuclear weapons. There is also little sign of any significant power base of reformers, just more Putins eager to continue the rot. There are interesting times ahead.
Putin is taking his lessons from Stalin and WW II, which you skipped over. Not that it's helping him very much, but it helps to explain a lot of the choices he is making in the course of the war, which are not the same as those of Nicholas II and the 1980s Kremlin.