The civil strife of 2023 looming in Russia is appearing more each day like an amped up Russian-language remake of the 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, which itself was derived from the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Some story arcs are timeless because they reflect flaws intrinsic to human nature. The movie incarnation of the book used the war in Vietnam as the backdrop to illustrate the moral mind warp that can emerge from fighting in a war as soldiers, already freed of the normal moral ballast of "thou shalt not kill" and facing death delivered by ever more efficient technologies, adopt a strategy of out-brutalizing their enemy in an attempt to win first and stop the killing. The logic of the argument can make sense to someone in the battle but in reality makes no sense because it justifies expanding the violence to larger and larger numbers of "the enemy" which inevitably grows beyond traditional military forces to innocent civilians.
In the 2023 remake underway in Russia, the Colonel Kurtz role is being filled by Wagner PMC head Yevgeny Prigozhin but his role has a background no novelist or Hollywood screenwriter would have the imagination to write. Prigozhin's story arc literally began from selling hot dogs in an outdoor stand in Leningrad in 1991, just as the Gorbachev era Soviet Union was collapsing. As he ventured into other restaurants and catering businesses, he crossed paths with Vladmir Putin who patronized his restaurants and began tossing Prigozhin's businesses millions, then billions of rubles worth of contracts to provide food to schools, government buildings and eventually the military. Like Putin himself, Prigozhin mastered the art of corruption and was pocketing a large portion of these contracts for himself.
Most notably for current events, Prigozhin used profits from military contracts as early as 2012 to found Internet Research Agency, a front for a worldwide hacking and social media disinformation and trolling entity linked to numerous efforts to sow dissent in the media of Putin's enemies including nearly every western democracy. As Russia began attacks against Ukraine in 2014 by invading the Donbas region on the eastern side of Ukraine, Prigozhin created his private mercenary firm, Wagner Group to essentially perform Putin's "wet work" on an outsourced basis. At that time, Putin no doubt thought this was a brilliant strategy on his part.
- Putin gains plausible deniability for the more brutal tasks outsourced to Wagner
- a private military group can operate in Ukraine without OBVIOUSLY looking like the Russian military
- funneling government military spending through a friend serves to put a check on forces in the Russian military who might not be looking out for Putin
- funneling government military spending through a friend produces a sense of obligation by that friend upon Putin which enhances Putin's power within Russia
- funneling government military spending through a friend is personally enriching to Putin, allowing him to skim part of the government spending
Putin has spoke publicly numerous times since the 2022 invasion of Ukriane about Russia's role in history and essentially a Putin version of "manifest destiny" justifying Russian control over a huge swath of the Asian continent. However, he probably should have spent an evening rewatching Apocalypse Now for some key strategic insights. In the opening scene, Captain Willard (Charlie Sheen's character) is alone in a hotel room in Saigon, presumably after a mission and R&R trip back to the States, awaiting his next mission. As he tosses and turns, he summarizes his predicament:
When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could do was think about getting back to the jungle. I'm here a week now. Waiting for a mission. Getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger.
When Willard eventually finds Kurtz amidst his cult in the jungle and speaks with him, Kurtz outlines his philosophy of war this way:
I've seen horror. What horrors have you seen? You have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.
I remember when I was with Special Forces… It seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio and this old man came running after us, he was crying and couldn't say… We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were, in a pile, little arms.. And I remember.. I cried, I wept… like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it, I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized, like I was shot, like I was shot with a diamond, a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my god, the GENIUS of that. The genius, the will to do that. Perfect, Genuine. Complete. Crystalline. Pure.
Then I realized they were stronger than me because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men, trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who have families, who have children, who are filled with love. They had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgement. Without judgement, because it's judgement that defeats us.
Those two dynamics from the movie capture everything needed to understand the current and eventual fate of the Russian empire.
Corruption pervades every aspect of Russian life, for the government, the military and the public. Billions spent on military equipment and supplies has been consistently redirected and skimmed for nearly thirty years into private hands yielding a military with possibly as little as forty percent of what it was supposed to have on paper. Grunts serving in the military see the corruption from the top and have no power to combat it so they participate as well, destroying any traditional sense of command and control discipline within the ranks. In the meantime, crucial military operations have been outsourced to a subset of forces who performed a majority of the dirtiest work, are able to use graft to obtain actual supplies needed and thus get the majority of the "practice" at doing the dirtiest work.
In Apocalypse Now terms, the Russian military plays the role of Captain Willard, realizing it has become "soft" through graft and corruption while its enemies (first the Ukrainians and now Wagner Group) have become hardened in combat and are far more effective combatants. Prigozhin has become Colonel Kurtz, a rogue military commander warped both by a lifetime of corruption and the unique crucible of war, who is capable of seeing "evil" that needs to be destroyed in the person of Putin but cannot see he is equally unfit to lead because he himself is a direct creator and beneficiary of the same regime that is morally corrupt from top to bottom. Putin is akin to the Lt General Corman character, a leader directing an already immoral war, who utilized someone willling to operate at an even LOWER moral level as long as it suited his purposes but now must stop that actor, not because of the actor's immoral actions against others but because those actions now pose an existential threat to Putin himself.
These dynamics have profound impacts for the war in Ukraine and beyond.
Ukraine and the larger Western collection of its allies must avoid ANY inclination to lapse into "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" thinking. Most of the time, both parties are just bad people who need to stay at arm's length. Putin AND Prigozhin are both war criminals. There's no "soul" in either figure.
Within the confines of incentives likely to drive decisions of a war criminal, it can be assumed that Prigozhin can properly interpret tactical information about the location of forces, available supplies and communication channels to judge risks to his own forces. The fact that Prigozhin has withdrawn Wagner forces from Bahkmut and driven one hundred kilometers into Russia to take over the city of Rostov implies he knows Russian forces are so depleted there are no battle hardened troops available to turn back his forces.
Prigozhin also operates in at least ten African countries, offering ongoing training for military and security staff of dictators and despots in those countries. He likely has multiple emergency contingency alternatives to whisk him out of danger as Putin now begins taking steps to quell Prigozhin's rebellion.
If Putin and Prigozhin somehow manage to eliminate each other from the scene simultaneously, the resulting situation in Russia will be no less dangerous -- to Russians themselves or the world. There may not be a successor waiting in the wings quite as cold-blooded as Putin or Prigozhin when it comes to bombing apartment complexes, shooting your own soldiers or blowing up dams and nuclear power facilities but there will be plenty of wanna-be successors who are equally corrupt. Russian society has done nothing since the collapse of "Russia Classic" to foster a legitimate legal system and government. There's no "farm team" at a triple A club in Siberia ("go Huskies!") educating high school teens on the principles of democracy like a Russian version of Boys / Girls State. There's no Russian equivalent of Junior Achievement teaching concepts of business and entrepreneurship.
If Putin is toppled, threats facing leaders of Russian's satellite nations will grow exponentially as they lose their protection, likely generating more leadership changes and unrest. This could create more refugee traffic between these satellites or out of them into bordering western aligned states. There are already economic stresses being incurred in countries like Poland and Germany who took in refugees at the beginning of the war. Those economic costs pose their own political challenges to the host governments.
WTH
