Will the Protests Following the Mobilization Give Birth to an Anti-Putin Revolt in Russia?

Putin's choices, each more disastrous than the last, now suggest such an outcome.

A question has been on our mind for some time: will the war in Ukraine give birth to a Russian revolution like the Russo-Japanese war that started in 1904, and then the First World War, the 1917 revolution, as the opposition intellectual Andrei Piontkovski implied in a recent program? Or could it at least produce cracks capable of shaking Vladimir Putin's dictatorship to the core, paving the way for Putin's collapse or his removal?

Even if the regime has a repressive apparatus and a propaganda machine that have so far kept discontent in check, the question of the regime's solidity is now on everyone's lips. By deciding to appeal to the people to continue his war in Ukraine, which is turning sour, the Russian president has de facto destroyed the implicit “social pact” he had concluded with the people by promising stability in exchange for political submission.

“He is shooting himself in the foot,” said the well-known opposition journalist Alexei Venediktov in his program “Zhivoi Gvozd” (The Living Nail), claiming that Putin was alienating the heart of his electorate. “He has no choice, given the setbacks his army has suffered,” replied Russian historian Vladimir Pastukhov, referring to a self-destructive slope of bad options.

In February and March 2022, the Kremlin's war in Ukraine had already prompted the departure of hundreds of thousands of liberal middle-class Russians, frightened by the red wheel of internal repression. But this rush abroad has taken an unprecedented turn in the past week, with hundreds of thousands of potentially mobilizable young men, representing all social classes, attempting to flee the call to the military.

The gigantic lines of cars that continue to stretch for kilometers forming large traffic jams at the borders of Georgia, Finland, and Kazakhstan, constitute a resounding denial of the idea that the Russians are behind Putin as one man.

“The draft dodgers must be shot,” Putin's frightening TV ideologue Vladimir Soloviev belched on television, while a Russian senator called for closing the borders for all men of draft age. Such a decision would increase tension, especially in an elite that has become accustomed to enjoying the pleasures of the castle life, preferably in Europe.

In addition to the “vote with their feet” of the candidates for exile, there have been protesting demonstrations in many cities, despite the heavy-handed repression and the 10 to 15-year prison sentences now in force. Several videos posted on the Internet show conscripted soldiers and mothers attempting to challenge the mobilization, attacking officers.

In Dagestan, a Muslim republic in the North Caucasus with a long tradition of rebellion against Moscow, hundreds of wives, mothers, and daughters occupied Makhachkala Square, shouting that Putin's war “was not theirs” because Russia had attacked. “No to the war,” they shouted, vowing not to let their sons go. Demonstrations took place in many other national republics, such as Yakutia.

Russia's opposition television station Meduza reported that the mobilization orders affected a larger percentage of people in remote areas of the country and especially in republics representing minorities. In Dagestan, for example, 13,000 people are supposed to be mobilized, for a republic of 3 million people, which has already lost the largest percentage of soldiers since the beginning of the conflict. On the other hand, the city of Moscow, which has 13 million inhabitants, has 16,000 people.

Deliberate fires at military recruitment centers have also increased, with opposition media counting “several dozen” since the announcement of the mobilization. In Ust Ilinsk, near Irkutsk, a young reservist opened fire on the head of the recruitment center, seriously wounding him before being apprehended. In Ryazan, a young man tried to set himself on fire. “These are isolated events, but sooner or later the discontent will turn into a mass movement,” predicts opposition MP Dmitry Gudkov, who does not see an immediate revolt.

Amidst the rising boil, Russian historians nevertheless point out that wars and mobilization have several times given birth to social and even revolutionary unrest in Russia. This was the case in 1904-1905 when Tsar Nicholas II ordered the drafting of Russian peasants to send them to fight in the Far East, where he had only 100,000 men to face the 350,000 men of the Japanese army. Poorly trained, the Russians were often selected arbitrarily, with the heads of families forced to leave their wives without income.

“This led to disorder on a massive scale,” summarizes historian Ilia Derevianko, about “the white spots of the Russo-Japanese War, which would end in the Tsushima disaster.” “Discovering a war that lasted, instead of the short victorious campaign they had been promised - from this point of view, nothing changes! - the troops engaged in destruction and looting, often in a state of total drunkenness,” says writer Vikenty Veresaev.

In the aftermath of this lost war, about 440 riots broke out in 1905 in the army, which was influenced by revolutionary ideas. 106 of them were armed uprisings, which were finally crushed. In 1916, during the First World War, it was Turkestan, just conquered by Russia, that showed the way to revolt against the rest of the army, when its peasant and miserable populations, recruited by force although they had been exempt from military service until then, rose against mobilization and engaged in terrible massacres of Russian populations.

In the months that followed, chaotic mass mobilization and extremely precarious combat conditions gave birth, once again, to a series of mutinies across the country, leading to the February 1917 revolution.

Could today's Dagestan become the Turkestan of that time?

Of course, we are not there yet. But the details that are constantly leaking out on Russian TV channels and social networks about the failures of the Putinian mobilization do not allow us to exclude that the anger will snowball when the corpses will start coming back and the mobilized soldiers will realize the trap they have fallen into.

A video published by Muscovite soldier Sergei Sourkov on social networks revealed that his unit had been sent without any preparation, neither in shooting nor in combat tactics, despite the announcements that had been made. The general staff had to react by affirming that this preparation would indeed take place.

Opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov predicts that closing the country would be another bullet in Putin's foot. “If we close the country,” he says, “it will mean that we close the lid of the boiling pot, and the steam won't be able to get out. It could explode,” he notes.

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Some reading

• Putin Has Passed the Point Of Not Return — The Security and Stability of the World Mean Moving On to the Post-Putin Era. There is nothing to negotiate with Putin. Russia gambled on force and lost.

• Impotent in the Face of Crises, What Can Be the Future of the UN? The legitimacy of the UN continues to sink.

• Vladimir Soloviev Continues to Be the Craziest and Most Virulent Propagandist in Putin’s Service. The presenter multiplies rants and outrages.

• War in Ukraine — Putin’s Ukase Causes Disarray Among Russian Reservists. Summonses have already been sent to 300,000 reservists across Russia.

• Xi Jinping’s China Increasingly Weary of Vladimir Putin’s Drawn-Out War. The fact that the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs met, on September 22, 2022, his Ukrainian counterpart, has nothing trivial.