Brian M Downing
Defeat, imminent or actual, brings discontent, strife, assassination, secession, and breakdown. The Afghan state lost control in 1979 and decades of civil war and fragmentation have ensued. The German army disintegrated late in WWI. Militias clashed in cities, politicians were murdered, and Bavaria tried to secede. A failed but portentous beer hall putsch came a few years later. Russia was confident when it mobilized for WWI but three years later it was devastated by mutinies, fiscal calamity, abdication, and a coup followed by civil war.
Russia faces extraordinary problems next year. Export revenue and GDP are slumping, the army is weak, parts of the public are angry, and ethnic regions simmer. The problems may not be as jarring as the ones that brought down Nicholas II, but Putin is heading into turmoil that might harm the war effort and paralyze the state.
Urban youth
Images of Putin’s Russia concentrated on young, educated urban dwellers enjoying western lifestyles. They dress like peers in the EU and US, listen to the same music, and enjoy consumerism and nightlife. Politically, they are more aligned with liberties and openness. They are by no means representative of the population. Most Russians live modest or even austere lifestyles and support authoritarian rule and military prestige.
Western-oriented youths oppose the war. Though hundreds of thousands have fled Russia, the others want no part of the war or military service. Some attack police stations and induction centers. A slew of fires at war-related industries have taken place. Some of them may have been accidents but others were likely acts of resistance. Russia has a long history of youthful militancy. The tsars faced them after defeats.
Mobilized troops
Casualties have forced Putin to resort to mobilization. About 300,000 have been recently inducted and cast into the war with poor equipment and almost no training. A second round of mobilization is underway. Opposition to the war and resentment over high casualties and harsh conditions are bringing disciplinary troubles, at home and on frontlines.
Trouble between Mobiks and officers has already broken out. They have also fought with regular army troops and Wagner Group formations. Mobiks are only barely integrated into a command and control system. Some have deserted en masse. They could become armed rabbles attacking and stealing from other units and hapless civilians, in Russia and Ukraine.
Reformers vs Putinists
The army was built by Putin and his generals. They planned the war and boasted Ukraine would quickly fall. The army has performed abysmally. Its equipment is shoddy, logistics inadequate, troops untrained, and officers unadaptive. That’s clear to all up and down the chain of command, though criticism is muted.
There are thousands of senior and field-grade who see their careers stifled by cronyism in Moscow, their army ruined, their nation weakened, and young lives entrusted to them squandered. Challenges to Putin and his generals may be forthcoming. Reformers may call for Shoigu and Gerasimov to be replaced and sweeping reforms to be introduced to bottom. In some cases orders could be meet with demurral, criticism, or refusal, bringing cascades of discipline trouble, desertions, and possibly firefights with loyalist units.
Ethnic fragmentation
Stalin’s empire lost much of its non-Russian population in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and Baltic, Caucasus, and Central Asian SSRs broke free. Nonetheless, Putin’s domain contains millions of Muslims and Asians in the Caucasus and trans-Ural regions.
Tatars, Tuvans, Bashkirs, and Buryratians have long experienced ethnic hostility from nationalist Russians in Moscow and other cities. They are over-represented in the army, all the more so after the recent mobilization. The same is true of casualties.
Thousands of Chechens (Kadyrovites) serve Putin in the Ukraine war. Many others serve on the other side and are encouraging countrymen back home to rise up against Moscow. Other Muslim and Asian homelands are experiencing discontent as well.
As the war enters 2023, and the army bleeds and loses ground, discontent will emerge over leadership, hardships, conscription, unemployment, and the perception that the poor – Russian and Asian – are suffering disproportionate casualties while privileged groups are relatively untouched. The notion of a poor man’s war is never far away in protracted conflicts.
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The war will be central to public discontent, but it won’t be all antiwar. Considerable numbers will support the war more intensely. They will insist that the war isn’t being prosecuted as pitilessly as it should be and that malcontents at home should feel the knout. As a Moscow commentator noted, the nation needs a new Lavrentia Beria. These ultra-nationalists may deal with resistors in their own way, bringing street fighting and murder to Russian cities.
National discontent may be especially strong in Muslim and Asian lands. That could bring a more serious problem for Putin – armed resistance. Many Muslim and Asian men have served in the war, learned about weapons and tactics, and come to loathe ethnic Russians all the more. They could form low-level insurgencies or, following the examples of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan in 1991, try to break away from Moscow’s failing grip.
Separatism will be encouraged by Ukraine and the West of course but more importantly and perhaps more effectively, by Kazakhstan and Turkey. Those two powers have growing senses of national destiny and longstanding concerns with Russian imperialism.
©2022 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to fellow Hoya Susan Ganosellis.