Why Kornilov’s Ghost Haunts Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin—visibly shocked, pallid, and quivering—barked out a warning to the Russian people as Wagner Group troops headed north from Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia toward Moscow. A mutiny in 1917, he declared, had brought unimaginable misery upon Russia. In the ensuing chaos, civil war erupted and the state disintegrated and had to be rebuilt. Hardship and instability befell the country.

The historical mutiny in question was one of the most fumbled of the many that Russians experienced in the 20th century. Indeed, Russia had more coups than any other great power in those decades. What happened was that Lavr Kornilov, the commander-in-chief appointed by the Russian Provisional Government’s Minister-Chairman Alexander Kerensky, decided that Kerensky lacked the nerve to confront the workers’ soviets, or councils, that were obstructing the will of the government. (Tsar Nicholas II had already abdicated, following the February Revolution.)

The Provisional Government grappled ineffectually with economic difficulties and social unrest. The Great War was going badly for Russia, and the sole solution, according to Kornilov, was to bring back order. This meant capital punishment for rebellion. The then-capital, Petrograd, needed to be brought to heel. A seizure of power by Vladimir Lenin and the communists had to be prevented.

The Kornilov Affair fizzled out almost as soon as it started, and the march on Petrograd—really a train trip—ended with his arrest in late August. War-weary Russian soldiers were not of mind to follow a commander-in-chief who seemed to be dragging them into a civil war; Kerensky survived in office for a couple more months. But the collapse of his administration continued. He had allowed the Communist Party to function openly in exchange for its help in opposing Kornilov. The communists intensified their propaganda against Kerensky’s “bourgeois” and “imperialist” government. By October 1917, they had sufficient authority inside the soviets to carry out a coup against the Kerensky cabinet.

But what most media analysis of the weekend’s events has missed is a fact of some importance: namely, that Putin felt compelled to point out to Russians that a mutiny, even an ineffectual one, can have appalling consequences.

It was as if he understood that beneath the surface of Russian social life there simmered a deep cauldron of sympathy for some of the criticisms Prigozhin the mutineer levelled at the ruling elite in his video post to Telegram, a social media app. Mostly, Prigozhin focused his ire on the high military authorities, but his remarks also cut into other segments of public affairs. He denounced the oligarchs who have profiteered from the Russia-Ukraine war. He raged against the incompetence of generals. He deplored the needless loss of lives at the front line.

Most spectacularly and unprecedentedly, Prigozhin questioned the need for any such war in the first place. As he pointed out, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky won office in 2019 as the candidate who promised to negotiate a way out of the impasse in relations between Russia and Ukraine. Surely, Prigozhin argued, a peaceful solution could have been attained through better diplomacy.

Exile to Belarus is light punishment for a mutiny that led to the deaths of scores of members of official Russian forces. Whether Putin will really leave it at that remains to be seen.

This was the nearest Prigozhin came to outright rejection of Putin’s record of statesmanship. He was likely hoping to effect a coup by stealth, perhaps retaining Putin as president if only Putin could be persuaded to follow Prigozhin’s preferred line in policy.

There are echoes of Kornilov in Prigozhin’s story. Back in 1917, Kornilov, while advocating a muscular restoration of order and a suppression of soviets and other truculent non-governmental organizations, was far from wanting to overturn the effects of the February Revolution. He was an officer who had made his way in the armed forces without benefit of family privilege. Taken prisoner by the Austrians earlier in the war, he had made a daring escape across the mountains and become feted as one of Russia’s military heroes.

He prioritized action, offensive action, over succumbing to the idea that the Russians were on the brink of complete defeat. He put his faith in Russian patriotism and the Christian faith. He had reason to suppose that the political parties of the center and the right would congratulate him if he could overturn Kerensky.

Kornilov had gotten too confident for his own good. As would-be dictator he did not even rule out denying a ministerial post to Kerensky. But about one thing his self-belief was justified. This was that the entire high command shared his horror at the decline in Russian military capacity and wanted to impose traditional methods of training, indoctrination, and discipline. He wanted Russia to win the war on the side of Great Britain, France, and the United States. He thought that a German victory would result in the disintegration of the whole Russian state.

Prigozhin offered a wholly different option on Friday last week. Above all, he was contending that the official rationale for the Russia-Ukraine war was a lie. Ukraine in February 2022 was not plotting a campaign of aggression. NATO was not instigating a military offensive. The Ukrainian people simply wanted to be left alone, and Russian propaganda was deceiving Russian public opinion. The Russian armed forces, far from making territorial gains, were on the retreat. The war itself was going from bad to worse. Kremlin spokesmen and TV bulletins were purveying a dangerous optimism.

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Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Private Military Company and responsible for atrocities in Libya, Syria, and the Central African Republic, is a master of hypocrisy. Everyone who has followed his career is aware of his malign behavior at home and abroad. Wherever he has acted, mayhem and butchery have followed. Russia would have been a better place if only his old friend Putin had not encouraged, indulged, and exploited him,

But just as Putin’s frantic TV appeal for public support Saturday was a stunning disruption to his long political supremacy, so Prigozhin’s social media rant on the previous day crossed a line in public discussion.

As Kerensky found in 1917, the Russian public is likely to withdraw its support from Putin when wars go badly.

For the past 16 months it has been an arrestable offence in Russia to refer to the war as a war and not as “the special military operation.” People have been taken into custody even for holding up totally blank placards. Now a true oligarch, Prigozhin, has called a spade a spade. Coming back from the war and entering Rostov-on-Don, he rejected entirely the need for Russians to fight in eastern Ukraine.

Prigozhin’s fate is unpredictable. Exile to Belarus is light punishment for a mutiny that led to the deaths of scores of members of official Russian forces. Whether Putin will really leave it at that remains to be seen.

Kerensky in 1917 was similarly gentle with Kornilov in the weeks after the collapse of the mutiny. Conditions of confinement were lax at Bykov prison, and Kornilov quickly succeeded in plotting his escape to southern Russia—fleeing to the Don region surrounding Rostov-on-Don, which, a century later, was the first city Prigozhin took over in his short-lived coup attempt.

From there, Kornilov helped to assemble an army of ex-Imperial officers with the intention of fighting the new Red Army; they did not prevail. He perished in action against enemy forces near Yekaterinodar, now Krasnodar city.

In 1917, Kerensky was so popular that he was known as the first love of the revolution. Similarly, opinion polls for most of the decades of Putin’s rule put him unnervingly high in the affections of the Russian people.

But those same polls always drew a distinction between Putin as a political leader and the ineffectiveness of his government in rooting out corruption and criminality. Russians endorsed his military campaigns when they were successful in Syria and Crimea. But as Kerensky found in 1917, the Russian public is likely to withdraw its support from Putin when wars go badly. Indeed, social media in Russia has become awash with disturbing messages for Putin after Prigozhin daringly sounded his bell of alarm.

Russians are not living through another 1917, when the powers of state control were negligible and Russia was a free but chaotic country. Putin retains immense capacity to intensify repression. But the ruling elite and its agencies have suddenly displayed an extraordinary divisiveness, which no appeal to the nation by its president can any longer disguise.