A hostile army rapidly approaches Moscow from the south. No one knows its leader’s true intentions. Defenses are uncertain. The future of the Russian lands appears haphazard. The hostile force crosses the Eurasian Steppe and reaches the fortress town of Elets, just 250 miles south of Moscow. Then, all of a sudden, the enemy advance is broken off and the invading army retreats.
This scenario from over 600 years ago sounds a lot like the situation in the summer of 2023, when elements of the Wagner Group, a paramilitary formation commanded by Russian businessman and President Vladimir Putin’s former intimate Yevgeny Prigozhin, broke from its positions in Ukraine and marched on Moscow. In the modern version of the story, the hostile commander was demanding a reckoning with the Russian Federation’s military leadership, bitter rivals of Prigozhin whom he has vociferously accused of incompetence and negligence. His prompt was a Kremlin directive from June 10th that moved to integrate his troops into the regular armed forces.
Upon reaching Elets, a deal was brokered between the Kremlin and Prigozhin that allowed him to go into exile in Belarus; the elements of his forces who had not participated in the march were to be integrated with the regular military as planned.
The story’s meta version could, however, equally describe events in the summer of 1395, when the Central Asian conqueror Timur, better known in English as Tamerlane, marched toward Moscow along the same route. Claiming descent from Ghenghis Khan, Tamerlane was preparing to wage war against Muscovy, the contemporaneous incarnation of what we now know as Russia. From his powerbase in modern Uzbekistan, he had subdued much of the South and West Asian territory that had fallen to previous generations of nomadic conquerors and begun to encroach on the Golden Horde, the Islamicized remnant of the vast Mongol Empire which ruled over much of Eastern Slavdom as tributary vassal states.
Muscovy’s ruler, Grand Prince Vasily I, assembled his forces and marched south, sending to the historic capital of Vladimir for that city’s Mother of God Icon to be brought to the battlefield in an act of devotion. Orthodox Christian lore holds that once it arrived, Tamerlane dreamt a vision of a Majestic Woman who commanded him to leave Russia, and he then decided to give up on his campaign and retreat. He may have had his mind on other conquests farther south, or he may have wanted to avoid northern Eurasia after the end of the summer campaign season. Nevertheless, his withdrawal was thought so miraculous that Orthodox Christianity still observes the day of his departure, August 26th, as one of the icon’s feast days. The icon’s ceremonial removal to Moscow, where it still resides today, symbolically added to the new capital’s primacy over Vladimir and its predecessor, Kyiv, as the sacred capital of Eastern Slavdom. It also cemented religious bonds with Constantinople, whence it had arrived as a gift two centuries earlier.
Today’s analysts of Prigozhin’s insurrection, including Putin himself, have sought out historical parallels to try to explain what happened over the 36 bizarre hours that the episode lasted. In a nationally broadcasted video message, Putin compared it to the Russian Revolution of 1917, claiming that scheming and deceit “behind the back of the army” threatened the Russian state now, as he believes it did then, and risked the prospect of civil war. The route of advance common to Tamerlane and Prigozhin was evident then, in 1919, when anticommunist White Russian General Anton Denikin’s forces stopped a short distance beyond Elets. The British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore compared Prigozhin’s insurrection to the palace coups that toppled the disfavored Russian Tsars Ivan VI in 1741, Peter III in 1761, and Paul I in 1801. Others have looked to the uprising led by the disaffected Cossack officer Emelian Pugachev against Catherine the Great in 1773-1774, the attempted coup organized by elite army regiments against Tsar Nicholas I in December 1825, and the August 1991 putsch against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
None of these comparisons is either correct or exact, but all hold strands of insight into how instability affects Russia and manifests in tumultuous military and political action.
Perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn is that Prigozhin’s attempted insurrection originated in the borderlands of Eurasia rather than at the Muscovite core of the Russian state. Devoid of firm geographic boundaries, the Russian heartland has been, and remains, highly vulnerable not only to foreign invasion, but also to localized resentment and instability. Almost every power struggle in Russian history, including all of the examples observers have cited in relation to Prigozhin, evolved largely in response to troubled military or foreign policy challenges on Russia’s periphery. Tamerlane’s campaigns, like those before and after him, disputed control of Kyiv’s and Muscovy’s steppe frontier areas.
The 18th-century coups arose in significant part from opposition to unpopular military and foreign policy engagements with bordering states. Pugachev’s rebellion (1773-1775), began in a steppe frontier region where new imperial policies clashed with local priorities. The Decembrist uprising (1825) was rooted in elite exposure to Enlightenment-infused European ideologies at odds with Russian autocracy; it sought to restructure Russia’s constitutional order in harmony with European constitutionalism and develop a liberalized approach to international relations. The Revolution of 1917 arose from Russia’s disastrous defeat in the First World War, which, contrary to Putin’s assessment, caused—rather than resulted from—high-level scheming and deceit over the country’s political future and resulting civil war. White Russian opposition to the incipient Soviet state ultimately found its most fertile ground in frontier areas where central authority and revolutionary conditions were at their weakest. The putsch against Gorbachev was a desperate attempt by hardliners to prevent vital border regions, then structured as Soviet republics and including Ukraine, from achieving independence from the Soviet Union.
In that sense, Prigozhin’s episode—acting out against contentious handling of yet another frontier war over Ukraine’s post-Cold War political disposition—is a perfect fit. He does not object to Putinism, “managed democracy,” or any other term one might use to describe Russia’s turn to authoritarian government. A deeply conservative nationalist, he despises the West, worked hard to influence the U.S. presidential election of 2016 (for which he is under indictment in the U.S.A.), and has long favored a multipower world centered around a Russian-led or influenced confederation of illiberal Eurasian powers. Although Prigozhin has criticized the oligarchs who dominate Russian economic life as subject to political passivity, he owes his position to his own participation in the radical state-led economic transformation of the 1990s that created them and enriched him. He has consistently lionized Putin, deliberately leaving him out of direct criticism even at the height of the insurrection. Prigozhin thereby echoed the traditional trope under which ordinary Russians could revere and seek justice from a distant and blameless ‘Tsar-Father’ while despoiling the corrupt world of officers and officials who they believed were thwarting the ruler’s wise and just will.
Time may yet tell what Prigozhin was thinking when he launched his insurrection. But he probably did not expect it to end with his flight from the country, the loss of his militia, and extreme personal vulnerability to Putin’s vindictive hand. His nation’s past, however, holds ample illustrations about how unstable borders can perpetuate civil strife. And in this, the Russians are not alone.
Ride of the Valkyries: Prigozhin’s Insurrection in Historical Perspective
“Prisoner before Tamerlane,” illustration by I. Bajazet from p. 388 of Life on the Bosphorus. Doings in the city of the Sultan. Turkey, past and present, including chronicles … by William James Joseph Spry.
A hostile army rapidly approaches Moscow from the south. No one knows its leader’s true intentions. Defenses are uncertain. The future of the Russian lands appears haphazard. The hostile force crosses the Eurasian Steppe and reaches the fortress town of Elets, just 250 miles south of Moscow. Then, all of a sudden, the enemy advance is broken off and the invading army retreats.
This scenario from over 600 years ago sounds a lot like the situation in the summer of 2023, when elements of the Wagner Group, a paramilitary formation commanded by Russian businessman and President Vladimir Putin’s former intimate Yevgeny Prigozhin, broke from its positions in Ukraine and marched on Moscow. In the modern version of the story, the hostile commander was demanding a reckoning with the Russian Federation’s military leadership, bitter rivals of Prigozhin whom he has vociferously accused of incompetence and negligence. His prompt was a Kremlin directive from June 10th that moved to integrate his troops into the regular armed forces.
Upon reaching Elets, a deal was brokered between the Kremlin and Prigozhin that allowed him to go into exile in Belarus; the elements of his forces who had not participated in the march were to be integrated with the regular military as planned.
The story’s meta version could, however, equally describe events in the summer of 1395, when the Central Asian conqueror Timur, better known in English as Tamerlane, marched toward Moscow along the same route. Claiming descent from Ghenghis Khan, Tamerlane was preparing to wage war against Muscovy, the contemporaneous incarnation of what we now know as Russia. From his powerbase in modern Uzbekistan, he had subdued much of the South and West Asian territory that had fallen to previous generations of nomadic conquerors and begun to encroach on the Golden Horde, the Islamicized remnant of the vast Mongol Empire which ruled over much of Eastern Slavdom as tributary vassal states.
Muscovy’s ruler, Grand Prince Vasily I, assembled his forces and marched south, sending to the historic capital of Vladimir for that city’s Mother of God Icon to be brought to the battlefield in an act of devotion. Orthodox Christian lore holds that once it arrived, Tamerlane dreamt a vision of a Majestic Woman who commanded him to leave Russia, and he then decided to give up on his campaign and retreat. He may have had his mind on other conquests farther south, or he may have wanted to avoid northern Eurasia after the end of the summer campaign season. Nevertheless, his withdrawal was thought so miraculous that Orthodox Christianity still observes the day of his departure, August 26th, as one of the icon’s feast days. The icon’s ceremonial removal to Moscow, where it still resides today, symbolically added to the new capital’s primacy over Vladimir and its predecessor, Kyiv, as the sacred capital of Eastern Slavdom. It also cemented religious bonds with Constantinople, whence it had arrived as a gift two centuries earlier.
Today’s analysts of Prigozhin’s insurrection, including Putin himself, have sought out historical parallels to try to explain what happened over the 36 bizarre hours that the episode lasted. In a nationally broadcasted video message, Putin compared it to the Russian Revolution of 1917, claiming that scheming and deceit “behind the back of the army” threatened the Russian state now, as he believes it did then, and risked the prospect of civil war. The route of advance common to Tamerlane and Prigozhin was evident then, in 1919, when anticommunist White Russian General Anton Denikin’s forces stopped a short distance beyond Elets. The British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore compared Prigozhin’s insurrection to the palace coups that toppled the disfavored Russian Tsars Ivan VI in 1741, Peter III in 1761, and Paul I in 1801. Others have looked to the uprising led by the disaffected Cossack officer Emelian Pugachev against Catherine the Great in 1773-1774, the attempted coup organized by elite army regiments against Tsar Nicholas I in December 1825, and the August 1991 putsch against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
None of these comparisons is either correct or exact, but all hold strands of insight into how instability affects Russia and manifests in tumultuous military and political action.
Perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn is that Prigozhin’s attempted insurrection originated in the borderlands of Eurasia rather than at the Muscovite core of the Russian state. Devoid of firm geographic boundaries, the Russian heartland has been, and remains, highly vulnerable not only to foreign invasion, but also to localized resentment and instability. Almost every power struggle in Russian history, including all of the examples observers have cited in relation to Prigozhin, evolved largely in response to troubled military or foreign policy challenges on Russia’s periphery. Tamerlane’s campaigns, like those before and after him, disputed control of Kyiv’s and Muscovy’s steppe frontier areas.
The 18th-century coups arose in significant part from opposition to unpopular military and foreign policy engagements with bordering states. Pugachev’s rebellion (1773-1775), began in a steppe frontier region where new imperial policies clashed with local priorities. The Decembrist uprising (1825) was rooted in elite exposure to Enlightenment-infused European ideologies at odds with Russian autocracy; it sought to restructure Russia’s constitutional order in harmony with European constitutionalism and develop a liberalized approach to international relations. The Revolution of 1917 arose from Russia’s disastrous defeat in the First World War, which, contrary to Putin’s assessment, caused—rather than resulted from—high-level scheming and deceit over the country’s political future and resulting civil war. White Russian opposition to the incipient Soviet state ultimately found its most fertile ground in frontier areas where central authority and revolutionary conditions were at their weakest. The putsch against Gorbachev was a desperate attempt by hardliners to prevent vital border regions, then structured as Soviet republics and including Ukraine, from achieving independence from the Soviet Union.
In that sense, Prigozhin’s episode—acting out against contentious handling of yet another frontier war over Ukraine’s post-Cold War political disposition—is a perfect fit. He does not object to Putinism, “managed democracy,” or any other term one might use to describe Russia’s turn to authoritarian government. A deeply conservative nationalist, he despises the West, worked hard to influence the U.S. presidential election of 2016 (for which he is under indictment in the U.S.A.), and has long favored a multipower world centered around a Russian-led or influenced confederation of illiberal Eurasian powers. Although Prigozhin has criticized the oligarchs who dominate Russian economic life as subject to political passivity, he owes his position to his own participation in the radical state-led economic transformation of the 1990s that created them and enriched him. He has consistently lionized Putin, deliberately leaving him out of direct criticism even at the height of the insurrection. Prigozhin thereby echoed the traditional trope under which ordinary Russians could revere and seek justice from a distant and blameless ‘Tsar-Father’ while despoiling the corrupt world of officers and officials who they believed were thwarting the ruler’s wise and just will.
Time may yet tell what Prigozhin was thinking when he launched his insurrection. But he probably did not expect it to end with his flight from the country, the loss of his militia, and extreme personal vulnerability to Putin’s vindictive hand. His nation’s past, however, holds ample illustrations about how unstable borders can perpetuate civil strife. And in this, the Russians are not alone.
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