When life imitates art: can literature help explain the ‘mutiny’ in Russia?

Something big just happened in Russia. But it doesn’t seem as if anyone really knows what or even how big that something is — although judging by the column inches the global commentariat and Twitterati have devoted to it, it must matter, right?

Maybe. But all those words are built upon very few confirmed (or confirmable) facts. There’s a touch of open-source intelligence: some intercepted Russian-language posts in Telegram channels and a few photos or videos from social media. Then there are the self-interested statements from the key players — all notorious fibbers. Oh, and one flight map.

 What don’t we have? Actual on-the-ground journalistic reporting, either independent or embedded. All we know for sure (more or less) is that the Wagner private military occupied the city that hosts Russia’s military campaign headquarters, Rostov-on-Don, demanding changes in Russian military leadership. A contingent then headed north and, probably, got about two-thirds of the way to Moscow, downing Russian aircraft on the way. Then it turned around.

Now (although we have only the words of liars to go on) most of the foot soldiers have been absorbed into the Russian army while the Wagner leaders set up camp in Belarus. 

In the absence of the facts provided by the sort of journalism we would normally rely on, it’s literary fiction that tells a better truth. Social media have been reaching for help in the Russian-language classics on war such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel trilogy, Ukrainian-born Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Stalingrad. Maybe even fellow Ukrainian Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard on life in Kyiv three or four sieges ago.

The drama is typically Shakespearean — a violent succession barney between the nasty and the feckless.

There’s Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, perhaps a stand-in for Dostoevsky’s amoral Rodion Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Or perhaps he’s the cheerfully cynical Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov from Ukrainian-born Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, travelling around to recruit soon-to-be-dead convicts instead of just the papers of already dead serfs? 

And what of Russian President Vladimir Putin? Perceptions of his character — his current political weakness — are suddenly being shaped by a known unknown: as the Wagner troops approached Moscow, did he stay or did he go? 

It matters a lot in Russian mythology. In Animal Farm, one of George Orwell’s most devastating strikes against his Stalin figure Napoleon was the pig’s cowardice in the Battle of the Windmill. (In one of the oddest contretemps in mid-20th century literature, TS Eliot rejected the novel on behalf of Faber & Faber because it was thought too harsh on the-then Soviet leadership — and on pigs, too, it seems.)

For understanding how Ukrainian identity is shifting in Ukraine’s contested zone, there’s the fictional Sergey Sergeyich in Grey Bees by ethnically Russian but “politically Ukrainian” writer Andrey Kurkov.

And the dramatic arc? Sherlock Holmes offers a 100-year-old parallel with “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time” in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Silver Blaze: when the Russian military failed to bark and join the mutiny, the drama turned — at least in this act.

For prologue — the KGB takeover of the late Soviet state — literature offers John le Carré’s Smiley books. But to understand the internal political dynamic of the regime right now that calls for the key political science text of organisational politics written as fiction, The Godfather.

A leading writer on post-Soviet governance, Bálint Magyar, described a mafia state (such as Russia) as a kleptocratic, predatory “organised criminal upper world” built, like The Godfather’s mafia, around a patron (now Putin) and his adopted political family, sorted in turns into clans, like Prigozhin’s Wagner group and related interests.

Some strong journalism reports how this happened. Putin’s People, by the Financial Times’ Catherine Belton, tracks how Russia (and the KGB elite) morphed through the chaos of the ’90s into Magyar’s mafia state, with Putin as patron.

It didn’t come out of nowhere. The Death of Stalin — first as a graphic novel by French writer Fabien Nury and, more famously, as a movie adapted by Armando Iannucci — suggests the world of the criminal gang goes back deep into 20th century Russian history.

So what does all this tell us? Maybe the inter-gang spat is just theatre. Maybe we’ll only know its significance once the mafia state collapses. Meanwhile, as The Godfather tells us, mafia dons come and go. The corruption and violence, however, endures.