David Remnick writes:

When I asked [Mikhail] Zygar [former editor-in-chief of TV Rain] what was the most striking aspect of the uprising, he said, “Putin is weaker. I have the feeling he is not really running the country. Certainly, not the way he once did. He is still President, but all the different clans”—the factions within the government, the military, and, most important, the security services—“now have the feeling that ‘Russia after Putin’ is getting closer. Putin is still alive. He is still there in his bunker. But there is the growing feeling that he is a lame duck, and they have to prepare for Russia after Putin.”

In ideological terms, Zygar said, “Prigozhin combines two ideas. The first is anti-corruption and anti-oligarch. Despite his own wealth, which is immense, he always portrayed himself as the oligarch-fighter. At the same time, he is super illiberal. He hates the West, and he claims to be the real protector of traditional values. He probably has more supporters beyond the Wagner Group; there are people in the Army, the F.S.B., the Interior Ministry, who could be his ideological allies.”

Ironically, Prigozhin learned to out-Putin Putin. In the early days of his reign, Putin was known in the West mainly for his background in the K.G.B. But his popular appeal also had to do with his ability to exploit the street swagger and the language of his days as a kid who played and fought in the poorer courtyards of his home town. Putin was not afraid to make cutting jokes or use profanity in public appearances. He promised to kill enemies in their “outhouses.” This distinguished him, back then, as a man close to ground, close to the narod, the people. But, as Putin has grown more distant and preposterously wealthy, Prigozhin, often dressed in full battle gear and strutting before the cameras next to his troops in front-line Ukrainian cities like Bakhmut, has taken on the populist mantle.

“Prigozhin has a distinct background,” Zygar said. “He speaks the way prisoners speak. He is the average guy. He went the same way that Putin did twenty years ago when politicians, in 1999, were very old and looked dead and Soviet. They couldn’t speak the language of the people. Putin spoke like a gangster, like a gopnik, like someone from the Leningrad slums. That was a cultural coup—a guy who knows the problems of the simple people. Prigozhin has come along and has followed that pattern in an even more brutal way.” [Continue reading…]

Anne Applebaum writes:

Democratic politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage people and persuade them to vote. But a certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all. The propaganda used in Putin’s Russia has been designed in part for this purpose. The constant provision of absurd, conflicting explanations and ridiculous lies—the famous “firehose of falsehoods”— encourages many people to believe that there is no truth at all. The result is widespread cynicism. If you don’t know what’s true, after all, then there isn’t anything you can do about it. Protest is pointless. Engagement is useless.

But the side effect of apathy was on display yesterday as well. For if no one cares about anything, that means they don’t care about their supreme leader, his ideology, or his war. Russians haven’t flocked to sign up to fight in Ukraine. They haven’t rallied around the troops in Ukraine or held emotive ceremonies marking either their successes or their deaths. Of course they haven’t organized to oppose the war, but they haven’t organized to support it either.

Because they are afraid, or because they don’t know of any alternative, or because they think it’s what they are supposed to say, they tell pollsters that they support Putin. And yet, nobody tried to stop the Wagner group in Rostov-on-Don, and hardly anybody blocked the Wagner convoy on its way to Moscow. [Continue reading…]