I agree; my point was the Russians have shown in the past a great ability to learn how to fight, so if they haven't started seriously learning by now, they probably won't. Stalin had to loosen his grip for awhile in WWII in order to let men of merit run industry and the military, whereas I don't see Putin doing that as it will put his power too much at risk. I agree that the Ukrainians likely know what they are doing and are expecting the current Russian reaction.
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Europe under extreme duress
- Thread starter Randy Daytona
- Start date
He’s already traded jobs with Medvedev twice. It’s likely he would get his own robust, hand-picked security apparatus in a retirement role/ different role.
The impression I always had was that was just theater--that even with Medvedev in power, Putin was always the real guy in charge.
Possibly. Russia is more nuanced than we think. There’s a chance Putin will live to old age and die of natural causes. He may want to give up power while he’s still alive and able to have some influence, as a way to measure or ‘trial run’ whoever is replacing him. Putin knows what happened after Stalin, where the all powerful leader died with no clear succession plan in place.
Maybe. The regime hasn't shown much sign of nuance or sophistication, but I suppose it’s possible.
Autocrats like Putin don’t really want designated successors though. Whenever things start going badly, you don’t want your underlings to get it into their heads that maybe it’d be better if General So-and-so were in charge now. What they prefer to do, and what Putin’s done, is to make your inner circle compete among themselves for influence and the Leader’s favor. So long as they’re scheming against each other, they can’t conspire against you. Hitler and Stalin did the same thing.
What Putin did learn that Stalin did wrong is not to shoot or imprison your generals when they fail. A sufficiently popular general who thinks he’s about to catch a bullet might decide since he’s got nothing to lose, may as well try to take the Big Guy down. Putin’s already had one mutiny. Instead, generals who’ve failed (or been scapegoated) have just been retired or shuffled off to some meaningless do-nothing command. Instead of two in the head or a decade in the gulag, facing a quiet job without much work means they’ll go quietly.
Putin’s way too controlling and paranoid to ever simply hang it up and go home to St Petersburg. His retirement plan, if he has one, is probably not unlike what he did 2008-12, and put a toady like Medvedev in the seat while keeping all actual power for himself. That’s what Qaddafi did - for most of his last 20-ish years in power, he insisted he was retired and only an informal advisor to the head of government. Which of course was bullshit and everyone knew it.
Thing is though, Stalin was possibly poisoned to death by Lavrenti Beria, the head of the NKVD. Then Khrushchev and other leaders had Beria arrested and shot. Then later Brezhnev overthrew Khrushchev. And Russia is today a mafia state. So I can't imagine Putin just giving up power and trusting to be left to a quiet retirement.
(And the autocorrect on my pad here corrects "Beria" to "Jesus," how royally effed up is that (!) )
I’m just saying, some of you seem to think Putin will meet some dramatic and sudden fate, but history is sometimes slower and more boring.
I still don’t understand why Prighozin turned around. Once the mutiny was launched, he had to know there was zero chance Putin would let him live.
I mean, I’m inclined to agree with you, at least insofar as I don’t think Putin’s rule ends with a mob storming the Kremlin and him strung up by his heels. Hasn’t usually worked like that in Russian history (1917 was the exception).
If it makes you feel any better, nobody knows why Prighozin turned around. Best guess anyone has is that whatever he thought was going to happen, wasn’t happening, and he just plain chickened out.
What I still don’t understand was why, having done that, he didn’t get the hell out of Putin’s backyard as soon as he could. Load up the G-VI with as much gold and loose diamonds as it’ll carry and fuck off to Wagner’s little fort in Libya.
I don't think Beria had anything to do with it. You can't fake this kind of surprise:
Jason Isaacs as Zhukov was what made it for me.
Never seen the movie myself. Will have to give it a watch. A good Stalin-related miniseries is Archangel with Daniel Craig.