In the immediate aftermath of the failed rebellion by Yevgeny Prigozhin, experts in publications from Foreign Affairs to Business Insider announced the “beginning of the end” for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now, not even two weeks later, such predictions are growing scarce as Putin reasserts at least the appearance of control and the normally voluble Prigozhin, at this writing, with his websites blocked seems to have been stuffed into a memory hole.
Putin’s demise has been regularly (and wrongly) predicted for the last 20 years, in nearly identical language to the Prigozhin headlines, whenever Putin’s rule seemed threatened. For example, when Russia suffered economically from an oil price collapse, the headline “The beginning of the end of Putin” appeared in the Economist. That was 11 years ago.
For generations, world-shaking events in or involving Russia have been blindsiding intelligence agencies and experts. They failed to foresee both the 1917 Russian Revolution and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the 1949 Russian test of an atom bomb, the 1957 Sputnik satellite launch, the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, all took the West by surprise.
Even flawed crystal balls sometimes make the right call, as shown by the accurate U.S. warning in late 2021 that Russia was about to invade Ukraine, but that was coupled with the woefully wrong prediction that the Russian army, with its 12,000 tanks, would steamroll the Ukrainian army and take Kyiv in a few days.
In 1839, French traveler Astolphe de Custine visited Russia. He came away impressed by the difficulty of comprehending Russia’s inner workings. “Their Byzantine policies,” he wrote in “Letters from Russia,” “working in the shadows, carefully conceal from us what is thought, done or anticipated in their country. We step forward in daylight, they advance in the dark: the match is unequal. They leave us blinded by ignorance.”
In other words, be humble about our ability to understand this sphinx of a country that combines a “mythic conception of greatness” with perpetual insecurity despite a land mass spanning 11 time zones.
Between the 18th and 20th centuries, Sweden, Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany, without appreciating what they were getting into, each in turn invaded Russia and in turn each suffered a devastating defeat. Henry Kissinger observed of the Swedish invasion that “Charles XII of Sweden marched into Russia because he thought it would be easy to impose a Swedish ruler in Moscow. What he found were Russian peasants burning their own crops in order to deny food to the invaders. He had marched across Europe, but he had never seen this before.”
Ironically, even Putin, isolated in COVID self-quarantine and consumed by irredentist visions of a new Russian empire, failed to understand his own country, or at least its military capabilities. He appears, like American intelligence agencies, to have been ignorant of the rampant corruption that left the Russian army a “brittle and hollow” shell, failed to recognize that his multi-front invasion plan far exceeded the military resources available to execute it, and badly underestimated the Ukrainian will to fight.
Putin, who uses Russian history to justify the invasion, apparently never considered that Ukraine might repeat Russia’s own valiant history of fending off bloody-minded invaders bent on conquest.
One of Russia’s most unforeseen, consequential shocks was the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union formed an alliance to divide up Poland, thereby precipitating World War II. Following the announcement of the pact, Winston Churchill ruefully called Russia “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
It’s still very much true.
Gregory J. Wallance, a writer in New York City, was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations, where he was a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team that convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. His newest book, “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia,” is due out in December. Follow him on Twitter at @gregorywallance.