蘭尼克先生在《紐約客》上這篇文章的標題是：討論普瑞郭新發動兵變可能產生的「效應」；但內容跟「普丁弱點」沒有什麼關係。它談到普瑞郭新的發家史，普丁和普瑞郭新的言談風格，俄國高層的派系，以及俄國中、低層官僚的心理狀態等等。全文雖然八卦多於分析，不失為一篇有趣的報導；對了解俄國政情也多少有些幫助。

該文中的 “Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have exploited coup attempts to carry out mass arrests, …” 這段話跟開欄文我說的：「還是普丁自導自演的『苦肉計』？」有呼應之妙。

有線新聞電視網這篇評論對這次兵變的分析則比較有料，可參考。


Putin’s Weakness Unmasked

How Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion exposed the Russian President.

David Remnick, 06/24/23

In recent years, Vladimir Putin has run much of his Presidency in the most splendid isolation, bunkered away in palaces from the wooded suburbs of Moscow to the shore of the Black Sea. He is often curiously remote from the Russian people and the bureaucracies and the security services over which he presides. Putin emerged on Saturday at 10 a.m., an early hour for him, and let loose a five-minute-long tirade ordering his military to destroy an “armed rebellion” led by one of his former loyalists, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenary force known as the Wagner Group. Since taking power a generation ago, Putin had never looked so weak. A year and a half ago, he thought he could capture Kyiv in a matter of days. Tens of thousands of casualties and several ruined cities later, he could no longer focus solely on his adventure in Ukraine. Citing the revolutionary days of 1917, he was now forced to protect his own capital and power against thousands of Prigozhin’s mercenaries. By the end of the day, Moscow time, Prigozhin was saying that he had called off his march north to avoid bloodshed, a truce reportedly brokered by Belarus, but, for Putin, there was no avoiding the fact that some of the deepest fissures and anxieties in the Russian leadership had been exposed.

After combing through the more reliable outlets of the independent Russian press and social media, I had a lengthy conversation with Mikhail Zygar, one of the most knowledgeable reporters and commentators on Kremlin power. Zygar is a former editor-in-chief of TV Rain (known as Dozhd in Russian) an independent channel that Putin closed after the start of the war. His 2016 book, “All the Kremlin’s Men” was a best-seller in Russia and a well-sourced examination of Putin’s rule and the inner dynamics of his ruling circle. His new book, “War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” will be published next month. Zygar, who is forty-two, left Russia after the invasion and has been living in Europe. In January, 2023, he wrote an Op-Ed column in the Times about Prigozhin titled “The Man Challenging Putin for Power.”

“I am feeling a little prophetic this morning,” Zygar told me.

Prigozhin, like Putin, was born and raised in Leningrad, which was renamed St. Petersburg as the Soviet Union was crumbling. As a young man, Prigozhin was a petty criminal and was eventually arrested and sentenced to twelve years in prison for robbing apartments. He was released after nine years. The rest of his biography resembles that of so many around Putin. After making some money selling hot dogs at the local flea market, he got involved in the grocery business, then casinos, construction, catering, and restaurants. He formed a close relationship with Putin, a frequent diner at his establishments, and that put him in a position to increase his good fortune. Private planes, helicopters, and immense residences soon followed—as did the founding of troll farms in St. Petersburg and the Wagner Group, a military contractor that was heartily supported by Putin as a way to help assist Russian Army troops and also, according to Zygar, as a way to counterbalance the power of figures like Sergei Shoigu, the Defense Minister.

The relationship between Putin and Prigozhin ruptured during the war as Prigozhin repeatedly went on social-media platforms, particularly the messaging app Telegram, and, in profane, blunt language, lambasted the Russian military leadership for betraying the Wagner Group, denying them ammunition and support, and, generally, botching the war effort against Ukraine.

“They split the moment when Prigozhin started believing he was popular,” Zygar said. Last fall, as Prigozhin criss-crossed Russia recruiting prisoners for the Wagner Group, “he felt like a rock star.” His gift was that he “spoke with them so effectively in their language,” Zygar said. “There came a moment when Prigozhin was no longer Putin’s puppet. Pinocchio became a real boy.”

When I asked Zygar 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.”

The confrontation between Putin and Prigozhin is also a clash of propagandists. Putin has the full-throated support of such well-known TV commentators as Dmitry Kiselyov and Margarita Simonyan, who have grown rich and famous as the President’s mouthpieces. Prigozhin has at least the tacit support of a new breed. “The most important propagandists now are not the propagandists on state TV,” Zygar told me, “they are the so-called war correspondents on Telegram, former military officers turned bloggers. They pose themselves as representatives of some ‘true Russia.’ They are careful, but they do not denounce Prigozhin.”