Letter to Putin

Abstract

This letter sets out to provide helpful advice to President Putin following the recent mutiny of the Wagner Group. It suggests he has made a catastrophic mistake in invading Ukraine and needs to read the history of previous Russian mutinies to understand how they happen and what is likely to happen next. This is a story that starts in Ukraine and ends in chaos.

Dear President Putin,

I’m replying to your letter of last week concerning the Special Mutiny Operation that emanated from Ukraine and was heading your way at speed. I apologize for the delayed response. Our company has been inundated with calls for help from various ex-heads of state, some of whom you know well and have significant financial relationships with.

Like many authoritarians that have been ensconced in power too long and somehow believed you have been reincarnated as Peter the Great or Catherine the Great or Vladimir the, well Not so Great, in fact, pretty bloody awful, you seem to have got yourself and your country into a veritable mess. You are not alone in this. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of an existing political leader (with some notable exceptions) who hasn’t screwed his (it’s almost always a man) country up. Just to compound the problem, it’s obvious that you are a great admirer of Prozac Leadership (Collinson, 2012), in which the leaders like you have skins so delicate that even the merest hint of dissent or bad news is dismissed, only good news is tolerated, and the nauseating sycophants that are encouraged to approach you do so with their eyes down. Now, despite our company’s affiliation with tyrants and oligarchs around the globe, I personally just do our tax evasions and don’t normally bother writing to narcissistic megalomaniacs but since there are so many around today and you seem to be causing more damage than most, the company insisted that I lend a hand and so I thought I’d start with you.

It looks like your ill-conceived and appallingly executed attempt to swallow Ukraine has gone from bad to worse and resulted in the totally unnecessary deaths of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians as well as the displacement of millions. You are, of course, not the first nitwit to come a cropper in Ukraine and you probably won’t be the last. Nor will you be the last to unwittingly sow the seeds of your own demise at the hands of your own military forces. Hubris, of course, is probably the number one cause of leadership implosions and yours is likely to be a spectacular one (Asad and Sadler-Smith, 2020). You are, no doubt, mightily relieved that Prigozhin proved to be as bad a strategist as you are, which is not surprising given that he started out as a hot-dog seller and ended up in prison (Atkins, 2023). More bizarrely, and despite working for Bashr al-Assad in Syria as part-time butcher, Prigozhin cannot have read Kebshule’s (1994) article which suggests that these kinds of mutinous coups often fail because their leaders make all kinds of tactical mistakes. For instance, first they assume early successes (like taking Rostov-on-Don, the HQ of the Southern Military District, without firing a shot) mean that the rest will be just as easy, and second, because fundamentally, Prigozhin didn’t know what he was doing but thought he was a genius. As he said, just before stopping the advance on Moscow, ‘Now is the moment when blood can be shed. Therefore, realising the full responsibility for the fact that Russian blood will be shed ... we will turn our columns and go in the opposite direction to our field camps.’ I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want someone with such a bad memory in charge of an army unit (after all, he shot down one of your Ilyushin IL-22M aircraft, as well as about six helicopters, just before proclaiming he didn’t want any Russian blood spilt) (Horton, 2023). Moreover, look again at the contorted logic of his proclamation about where his units were going next: ‘we will turn our columns and go in the opposite direction to our field camps.’ If he’s turning his army around then its heading towards his field camp not in the opposite direction! No wonder your war in Ukraine is going so badly: it’s not just that the Ukrainians are more motivated and Zelensky is a better leader than you are, it’s because the Ukrainians know which way they are heading (Spector, 2023; Zachara-Szymańska, 2023). It’s lucky for you that Ukraine doesn’t have the rapid response units capable of taking advantage of this calamity otherwise it wouldn’t have been Russians at the gates of Moscow, it would have been Ukrainians. You might also want to write Alexander Lukashenko a note to thank him for saving your arse.

However, do not believe for one moment that it’s all over, because mutinies have a terrible habit of setting trains in motion that cannot be stopped (well unless it’s a British train which often don’t even get started). So, I hear you ask, what is this thing called mutiny and how can I stop more of them happening? Well, I’m not interested in stopping them but I’m happy to explain to you how and why they happen, then explore some of your own history that you may have forgotten, then finally I will finish off with some sage advice.

Mutiny is usually defined as the refusal by two or more individuals to obey a legitimate order within a military organization. Mutiny only really applies to those organizations or states that have sovereign power in Max Weber’s (2004) sense that the state has the sole legitimate use of force. In the case of a mutiny, that implies that a part of the state itself deploys force against another part of the state, and this is why mutiny is considered so dangerous to those in authority. In effect, mutiny and leadership are the opposite sides of the same coin. If conventionally ‘whoever says leadership, says resistance’, because resistance is endemic to any form of leadership, then in the case of a military organization, ‘whoever says leadership says mutiny’. Usually, unhappy subordinates in an organization either take Hirschman’s (1970) famous Exit, and find another job, or find their Voice and try to improve their situation, perhaps by forming or joining a trade union. But the Voice of trade unions is conventionally illegal in military organizations and Exit from a voluntary military contract is only possible under specific circumstances, while Exit from a compulsory military scheme makes you a ‘wrong un’. Nor does the absence of overt dissent imply consensus: people may decide that dissent is too dangerous to articulate and wait until a better opportunity arises, so just because Russians didn’t pour on to the streets to decry the mutiny does not mean they’re happy with your performance. You may have noticed that yourself when the local population of Rostov-on-Don (the city ‘liberated’ by the Wagner Group) seemed happier to see the mutineers than they were seeing your police officers back in charge (Roth, 2023). Naturally you, being a classics’ scholar of international repute, will recall how easily Caesar took Rimini after he crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE – a mutinous act - and began his advance on Rome. You might also recall that Caesar was, if anything, more brutal to his enemies than Prigozhin, and though Caesar ended up as dictator perpetuo, the title didn’t say how long his life was to be (spoiler alert – about another 5 years). Now, you might be thinking that I’ve got the wrong character here, because Prigozhin was the mutineer like Caesar, not you. Alas, you will also be aware that the result of the assassination of the mutineer Caesar was not the restoration of stability in Rome but the descent into civil war. It’s not looking great, is it?

That also implies that leadership in mutinies is often extremely dangerous and very difficult to predict. Thus, when you launched an airstrike on the Wagner Group (or realised that Prigozhin just fabricated that to provide a legitimation for what he was about to do), you must have known something was going to happen (The Economist, 2023). Don’t you watch your own news? Given the threat posed by mutiny, the authorities are seldom prepared to give mutineers much time to change their minds, and usually crush mutinies without mercy, if only to signal to hitherto loyal military personnel that joining this mutiny, or starting another, is not likely to end well. You may recall your rather contradictory statements at the beginning and end of this mutiny when you first said, ‘What we are facing is precisely treason,’ it was a ‘grievous crime… blackmail and terrorism’ (Kirby, 2023). Then you threatened everyone involved with the full vengeance of the state after ‘the stab in the back of our country’, and then, when that didn’t stop them, and they were within 125 miles of Moscow and most of the army was back in Ukraine, you decided that perhaps a holiday in Belarus for the nasty mutineers might be enough. We both know how that kind of holiday ends: stuck at the airport without your passport while dodgy men in dark glasses usher you into a nice ‘taxi’ for the ‘trip of a lifetime’. Ironically it was lucky the mutineers were on the Russian M4 because if they’d been on the British M4 then first, that junction around Reading is always mayhem and they wouldn’t have made much progress beyond there, and secondly, the British M4 doesn’t go to Moscow, it goes to London (when it’s open). But like the current political administration in London that crawls from crisis to crisis, yours is due to terminate in 2024, so neither you nor Rishi Sunak has long to stem the haemorrhage of confidence nor even the haemorrhoids that you both probably sit on. Time (and analgesics) are of the essence. Indeed, most mutinies don’t end well for the mutineers and they don’t last as long as piles. And if they do succeed, it’s often because the numbers involved are so large that it would be practically impossible to restore order without negotiating a face-saving deal for the authorities, or because the mutiny occurs in a place so isolated that the authorities cannot rely upon loyal forces arriving to put down the mutiny. Thus, in the first category we can place the 1946 British Royal Air Force mutiny, when 50,000 RAF personnel refused to comply with orders, while in the second category we can place HMS Bounty, lost in the Pacific Ocean as far as the British Royal Navy was concerned (Grint, 2021).

So, what is the place of leadership in both successful and failed mutinies? Both examples above, indeed, almost all the examples of mutinies, occur when one or more individuals take it upon themselves to channel the generalised discontent that exists into a specific set of demands with a strategy that looks like it might work. We know that much discontent simply persists across time without much coming from it if there is no perceived chance of successfully addressing the complaints. So, the existence of discontent, in and of itself, is insufficient to generate a mutiny; that requires leadership. And, given how often mutinies fail and the leaders of mutinies are punished, either through imprisonment or execution, it is little wonder – and lucky for you - that mutinies are not an everyday occurrence. So, what happened to you recently?

In the case of the mutiny by the Wagner Group, led by your good friend and ex-chef, Yevgeny Prigozhin, it would appear that he refused to obey an order to demobilise his soldiers and embed them directly into the Russian Army. Now to the outsider, that order might look like it was issued by you, or at least ‘the Kremlin’ on your behalf. After all, Prigozhin has become something of a thorn in your side but he did what you asked him to do, except he failed to sacrifice himself for Mother Russia like so many of his soldiers. But to be fair to him, he did what he promised, and took Bakhmut at the cost of thousands of his mercenaries, many of whom appeared to have been recently released prisoners, so I doubt whether either of you were up all night wrestling with your conscience about that (BBC News, 2023). Let’s hope Prigozhin is not familiar with Machiavelli’s Prince, where, you may recall, he warned about relying upon mercenaries for the safety of the state. As Machiavelli (1984) says in Chapter XII,

If a prince holds onto his state by means of mercenary armies, he will never be stable or secure; for they are disunited, ambitious, without discipline, disloyal… The reason for this is that they have no other love nor other motive to keep them in the field for a meagre wage, which is not enough to make them want to die for you… Mercenary captains are either excellent soldiers or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, since they will aspire to their own greatness either by oppressing you, who are their masters, or oppressing others against your intent.

We know that your officials ‘discovered’ around four billion roubles in their search of the Wagner Group’s offices but since you admitted giving them 86.262bn roubles ($1 billion) in 2022–2023, that kind of cash looks like small fry, especially when we know Prigozhin made millions from selling gold, gas, timber etc., and has (like you) his finger in several dodgy pies in Africa, especially in the Central African Republic and Mali. Moreover, since the group’s mercenaries (all 50,000 of them) are each paid about 240,000 Roubles a month, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that means a lot of money is needed to pay them, or at least pay the ‘coffin money’ to the relations of those who were unfortunately killed in operations – ‘the heroes of Russia’, as you unfortunately referred to them a few weeks ago (Rainsford and Armstrong, 2023).

The second warning Machiavelli gives, which you also seem to have failed to understand, concerns the punishments handed out to those regarded as disloyal, for ‘If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.’ Will Prigozhin settle for the life of anonymity in exile? Will you allow that, or, take Machiavelli’s warning to heart and send your agents to eliminate the threat? Either way you’re weakened by this because if he does have an ‘accident’ while walking in the park and falling onto a poisoned umbrella spike, then the next leader of a mutiny will not be so easily persuaded to surrender. And if you don’t send your brolly brigade then the world will know how weak you are. Indeed, I hear on the grapevine that Gen. Sergei Surovikin, whom you replaced as head of the Special Military Operation in January this year, may have been involved in the Special Mutiny Operation – which makes you wonder who else knew about it. I see Surovikin’s deputy, Colonel-General Yudin, has also gone missing, so I’m guessing Yudin and Surovikin already have had, or are about to have, a tour of those high buildings with unsafe windows your military police have to use (Van Brugen, 2023). If you’re so paranoid about safety, why don’t you invest in those child-proof windows that don’t open fully?

Like you, one of your eminent predecessors, Josef Stalin, was convinced that most of his senior military staff were plotting against him most of the time, which is why he had so many killed (Whitewood, 2023). That was doubly unfortunate because they might have been able to stop Hitler a little earlier in 1941, but probably the best thing I can advise on this point is for you to send ALL your military officers on holiday somewhere nice. That way, you can be sure that there won’t be any more mutinies (well at least none involving officers, obviously).

Prigozhin claimed he supported the war but ‘the clowns’ in charge were simply not up to the job. Moreover, he insisted that you were going to integrate his Wagner Group into your army on 1 July this year, against his wishes, and all he wanted was the heads of the Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu, and the armed forces minister, Valery Gerasimov. But because you didn’t sort Prigozhin out properly and early enough, he went on social media and ranted that you lied about the real cause of the war, and that a ‘small group of scumbags’ were just using it as a cover to secure promotion and enrich themselves. That may well be true, and probably is, but you don’t want your own side saying that in public, do you? Why don’t you read more papers then perhaps you might learn something?

Talking of the tough old days, as you no doubt know, this is not the first mutiny to challenge the ‘modern’ Russian state. There have been at least five significant ones before yours: the Potemkin in 1905, the Army in 1917, Krondstadt in 1921, the FFS Storozhevoy in 1975, and the one that saw off Gorbachev in 1991. Each has a different cause and consequence and you might do well to recall them, but I’m sure you’re very busy hunting down the current mutineers so let me remind you briefly of each.

The Potemkin mutinied in 1905 for two main reasons. First, and very specifically, the state of the relations between officers and sailors on the ship and the appalling quality of the food. But the wider background was the disastrous war with Japan in 1904/05 – which Tsar Nicholas II continued even when it was obvious to all that Russia would never defeat the Japanese. The Tsar was desperate to avoid what he called a ‘humiliating peace’ so he ignored any attempt to resolve the dispute through diplomatic means. That led, ultimately, to Bloody Sunday in St Petersburg, a rash of mutinies cross the armed forces, and the 1905 revolution, which Lenin called a ‘dress rehearsal’ for 1917. Does this all sound familiar?

The second mutiny worth recalling was that in 1917, which occurred after 3 years of stalemate across the battle lines with Germany and the loss of two million Russian soldiers. That time, as every time, the conscripted soldiers were treated like expendable cannon fodder by their aristocratic officers – the most senior of whom had to be addressed as ‘your most high radiance’, but you probably wanted to bring that back before your own mutiny. Indeed, by the end of the first year of the war half of the Russian army was either dead, wounded or captured and their replacements were often short of weapons and ammunition. One consequence was the Tsar authorised ‘penal companies’ for all those involved in any form of dissent, and it was this that started the long road to mutiny in 1917. Not much changes in the Russian Army, does it? But fear not, the constant disciplining of dissenters in the army meant that the primary political opponents to the authorities (the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks) were kept under relative control, at least until the battles on the western front revealed the total ineptness of the Russian Army and its logistical supports in 1917. This is not looking good, is it?

The third mutiny was, of course, at Krondstadt in 1921, where the new Bolshevik state had reneged on its promise to introduce Soviets as a democratic forum and replaced them all with Soviets under Bolshevik authoritarian control. Yes, I know that was originally just for the period of so-called War Communism, and once the western imperialists had been defeated then the democratic Soviets would be back, along with the cornucopia that Comrade Lenin had promised. But we both know that was never going to happen. So, when the sailors at Krondstadt tried to hold the Bolsheviks to account and mutinied, they were mercilessly hunted down, driven into exile or imprisoned. Now it’s obvious that while the Wagner Group of mercenaries turned on you for attempting to ‘incorporate’ them into the Russian army, they were hardly the kind of utopian idealists that some of the Krondstadt mutineers were, but that makes them even more dangerous to you, doesn’t it?

The fourth mutiny was on the Soviet Missile ship, the FFS Storozhevoy in 1975, which, if you remember, was an attempt by yet another idealist to take the Soviet Union back to its roots by exposing the corruption at the heart of Brezhnev’s regime. You probably recall the political commissar on the ship that led the mutiny, Valery Sablin, because you started your KGB career at the same time that this occurred, and Sablin was interviewed by the KGB before admitting treason, in exchange for his life. Nevertheless, after his front teeth went inexplicably missing, Sablin was sentenced to death and subsequently died. I’m sure Prigozhin will be comforted by this example.

The last one, excluding the one we are talking about today, was in August 1991 after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Quite why you didn’t use proper concrete to keep it up is beyond me, but that’s for another letter. You will know that the end result of all the liberalization in Eastern Europe and the old USSR was the beginning of a democratic system and eventually the hard-liners in the Communist Party led a mutiny that forced Gorbachev out and Yeltsin in. By Christmas Day 1991, ye old Hammer and Sickle flag was replaced by the Russian tricolour that you wave about all the time; are you are trying to detract people’s attention from something?

So, let’s go back to the Wagner mutiny and see what else we can learn and whether there’s a way of avoiding Armageddon. First, you need to be wary of encouraging cuckoos: the youngsters that look like your loyal followers but are actually your nemesis. Perhaps a better metaphor is a Strepsiptera (or stylops if you can’t spell it), one of those parasites that lives within the body of the host and eats it from the inside. So, here is the first piece of advice for the future: if someone looks like a Trioxys complanatus (parasitic wasp) then it probably is one and you shouldn’t employ it, let alone give it a position of authority in your military.

Second, retaining power as an authoritarian requires you to be good at Command, Management and Leadership. It isn’t sufficient to be good at shouting at people from 500 miles behind the front line: you have to make the effort and shout at them in person now and again (preferably when the fighting has died done or your troops have managed to secure another bungalow or cowshed in the ‘Free Ukrainian Children (Kids) Military Engagement.’ I don’t know what the Russian for that is, but the acronym in English is not a good look, so you need to rethink that. Moreover, some people are claiming that you disappeared when your troops needed you; and suddenly discovered you hadn’t done the washing up at your palatial residence near Lake Valdai, just as Prigozhin appeared on the horizon; trust me, that is not command. Leadership, defined here as getting the collective to engage in Wicked Problems, that is problems that either cannot be solved or might, at best, be ameliorated, is something that you might think you’re effective at, but coercing people to fight in a war they’d rather avoid is not really Leadership in this sense (Grint, 2022). If you want to see what Leadership looks like on the ground when faced with your lot of leaderless and legless reprobates, have a read of Harding’s (2023) book about how the Ukrainians defended Voznesensk with a few soldiers and about 30 male and female volunteers (including pensioners) in the Home Guard. To misquote Bjørge Lillelien, when Norway beat England in a football World Cup qualifier in September 1981, ‘Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Tsar Nicholas, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Vladimir Putin, your boys took a hell of a beating!’ Finally, there’s management, which is essentially about securing the logistics and making sure the systems work, and all that. I’m afraid to tell you, your management is appalling. Indeed, the absence of ammunition and heavy weapons is the one thing that Prigozhin constantly complained about.

Third, I know you have recently blamed the west for fomenting the mutiny against you and called on all Russians to defend the state, but we both know the west has little to do with this, and you trying to distract Russians by looking for external scapegoats is frankly laughable. We have enough of our own self-inflicted wounds to have the skill or resources to initiate a mutiny in Russia. We Brits are suffering from Brexit (thanks for that) and can’t even get our two aircraft carriers to work properly at the same time, nor does the equipment used by the British army look good in its original 1980s colour schemes, or in the case of their armoured reconnaissance vehicle, its 1973 colour scheme (Nicol, 2023). Indeed, General Sir Patrick Sanders, head of the British Army said all this last week. No wait, he’s just resigned – see, that’s how you deal with dissent (Jarvis, 2023). Sure, the Americans look better equipped, and they are, but they’re more worried about the Chinese coming after them than your lot. If there’s one thing good that the west has taken from your debacle in Ukraine and the recent mutiny, it’s that your military forces are the paper tigers of the east and, strangely enough given your propaganda unit, even being led by a horse-riding, bare-chested, judoka doesn’t compensate for having a crap army. I mean come on, even Kim Jong Un looks better on a white horse than you do, and his soldiers and people actually love him. I know because I’ve seen their adoration on North Korean State TV.

Fourth, the abandonment of the mutineers by Prigozhin is not necessarily a win for you. There are now about 50,000 disillusioned and armed fighters wandering around, wondering why they bothered listening to their boss and why they should trust another with a different uniform on? If the leaks from the Telegram channel used by 200,000 followers of the Wagner Group are anything to go by, then many of them not only feel betrayed by Prigozhin but under immediate threat from you. So why would they bother to go back to fighting Ukrainians in the meat mincer? They didn’t in 1917 when facing a German offensive and that forced Russia out of the war and initiated first the February (Provisional Government) and then the November (Bolshevik) Revolution. I don’t mean to be funny but you need to keep your passport handy and keep a wad of cash stuffed up your jumper (preferably in currencies other than Russian).

Good luck with the rest of your life (however short that may be), and say hello to Sergey Lavrov, he’s such a card, isn’t he? The way he keeps a straight face when he lies directly to the camera is already being used by politicians and corporate chief executives here as a training video.

Regards

Robe S. Pierre (Head of Accounts, holding dictators to)