#aleksandr gerasimov

[random-brushstrokes]

Aleksandr Gerasimov (Russian, 1881-1963) - Boat Trip

[sovietpostcards]

"After the Rain" by Aleksandr Gerasimov (1955)

[pwlanier]

At the shelter.

Author: Gerasimov Aleksandr Mikhailovich

Year: 1930s.

Technique: Paper, graphite pencil, watercolor, whitewash.

Sovcom

[artmialma]

Aleksandr Mikhailovich Gerasimov (1881 - 1963)

A Russian Communal Bath [Banya] Study      1948

[abr]

Polizia segreta istituita dal governo zarista nel 1881, fu la Ochrana a commissionare i “Protocolli dei Savi di Sion”, un presunto piano per la conquista del pianeta che sarebbe stato elaborato al primo Congresso sionista di Basilea del 1897, in realtà fabbricato rielaborando vari materiali (da Sergej Aleksandrovič Nilus, autore di vari testi di devozione ortodossa) .

(...) Pubblicati per la prima volta nel 1903, furono dichiarati fasulli da un tribunale svizzero trent’anni dopo. Ma tuttora sono molto diffusi e presi sul serio a livello ufficiale in vari paesi islamici (...). E girano anche in vari ambienti (anti) occidentali (...). Da noi sono stati conosciuti soprattutto a partire da una edizione del 1937, con una singolare introduzione di Julius Evola, secondo cui sarebbero stati falsi nella forma ma veri nella sostanza (...).

119 anni dopo, (d)all’Ochrana (...) (alla) Cheka, Gpu, Nkvd, Kgb, Fsb. (C)ome ad esempio è stato  il tedesco ad aver dato al mondo la parola blitz, lo spagnolo golpe, l’inglese intelligence, il portoghese per mediazione boera commando o l’italiano fascismo, dal russo abbiamo preso la parola disinformatija (...).

La storia che l’Aids lo avevano fabbricato gli americani fu passata dal Kgb al giornale indiano filo-sovietico Patriot, che lo pubblicò la prima volta nel 1983. Ma venne sostanzialmente ignorata fino a quando, nell’ottobre del 1985, non fu rilanciata dalla Literaturnaya Gazeta, e poi potenziata da una relazione di Jacob Segal, un biofisico informatore della Stasi tedesco orientale. Non c’erano ancora internet e i social, ma bastarono giornali popolari inglesi (...) per diffonderla ai quattro venti. Nel 1987 (...) l’Urss ammise formalmente che era una balla, ma ormai nel Terzo Mondo aveva fatto ulteriore strada (...).        

L’Urss nel 1992 cessò di esistere, e (...) nel 1996 venne istituita la Fsb. L’anno dopo esce “Osnovy geopolitiki: geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii”: “Fondamenti di geopolitica -  Il futuro della Russia”. Adottato come libro di testo dall’Accademia militare  russa, lo firma  Aleksandr Dugin, un intellettuale misticheggiante e studioso del citato Julius Evola (...).

In qualche modo, la “quarta teoria politica” da Dugin teorizzata per “andare oltre le teorie politiche classiche della modernità” (...). “La quarta  teoria politica è antiliberale, anticomunista e antifascista allo stesso tempo” (in realtà è solo ferocemente antiliberale e nazional-socialista, cioè sintesi statalista nazimao, ndr), e allo spirito dei Protocolli si richiama chiaramente (diluendo) l’antisemitismo in un più ampio antioccidentalismo. (...)

Oltre all’ideologia, però, in questo libro in particolare Dugin propone una strategia, che aggiorna il repertorio zarista e sovietico all’epoca della rete. (L'uso di) strumenti asimmetrici: disinformazione, sovversione, guerra politica. Un concetto tipicamente da Ventesimo secolo come quello di competizione asimmetrica, (...) è messo assieme alle idee del generale Valery Gerasimov su come condurre la guerra nel XXI secolo. Risultato: “Una pratica non lineare di competere con l’Occidente solo nelle aree in cui la Russia si trova in vantaggio”. E la prima di esse era quella dell’informazione, per via del sistema autoritario che mette la Russia relativamente al riparo dalle contromosse dell’altra parte.

Però da qui (il rischio di ) una  escalation fuori controllo, su cui poi il Cremlino avrebbe avuto gravissimi problemi a tornare indietro (causando la dipendenza dalla Cina, ndr). E qua stiamo.

via https://www.ilfoglio.it/esteri/2022/03/19/news/l-antica-tradizione-russa-di-manipolare-le-informazioni-e-diffonderle-3823233/

Maurizio Stefanini datato e pur abbondantemente depurato dal tifo da stadio demogradigo (le curvesud so' opposte ma tutte uguali), cmq. utile per evidenziare gli evidenti, rozzi FLAWS concettuali del fronte che in occidente si dichiari anti occidentale, gettando il bambino assieme all'acqua sporca ("bei pirla", cit. Feltri).

[Per inciso, rassicuriamo Stefanini: la Russa ANELA a trovare una way out dal dispendioso e totalizzante casino alla Saddam Hussein in cui s'è cacciata, ma come tutto il resto, non dipende più dalla Russia, potenza oramai solo (macro-)regionale. Dipende dagli Usa: sarà sufficiente attendere la cacciata di Biden a fine anno e ci siamo.]

Testimonianza concreta di come un SANO COMPLOTTISMO, quello anti autoritario anti derive culturali anti degrado, debba porre dubbi e metter sotto al microscopio TUTTI i tentativi di manipolazione collettiva collettivista. La stella polare: sospettare quando si sente puzza di autoritarismo statalista, di ogni specie: sia Deep State Dem. che satrapia orientale.

[mariacallous]

On June 23, the Russian warlord, mercenary, and billionaire Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose Wagner troops had performed with brutal resilience in the war against Ukraine, led his men in a short-lived mutiny against his patron, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin seemed to be demanding the dismissal of the defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, and the chief of staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov. Putin denounced him for treason. But having seized Rostov-on-Don and marched on Moscow, Prigozhin accepted the mediation of another Putinite courtier, Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko.

Putin celebrated with a military parade in the Kremlin, attended by Shoigu, while several senior officers were dismissed for criticizing the conduct of the war. Some, apparently including his most competent fighting general, Sergey Surovikin, disappeared, possibly arrested for acquiescing in Prigozhin’s plans. At the time of writing, Shoigu and Gerasimov remain in command of the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, at a meeting with Wagner officers at the Kremlin on June 29, Putin received Prigozhin, whom he had called a traitor less than a week before. Perhaps it was a recognition that Wagner had fought so well for the motherland.

We outsiders know little of the real intrigues of a personalized autocracy in which a vast state is ruled by a tiny clique under a single despot. There are many ways to analyze the Prigozhin mutiny and the strange maneuvers since. In this, history can be usefully revealing—but never the final word.

This certainly was the old story of a mercenary captain demanding gold and guns for his warriors. On the political spectrum, the mutiny reveals the dissident pressure from nationalist-imperialists within the elites who believe Putin has not waged war fiercely enough. More broadly, it exposes the eternal problem in dictatorships: In a system where real opposition is forbidden, conspiracy is the only way to register protest or promote change.

In terms of factional conspiracy, this represents a stage in the perhaps gradual crackup of an autocrat’s system of playing his magnates against each other. It undoubtedly exposes the creaking of an entire corrupt, incompetent klepto-bureaucracy faced with the brutal and brutalizing stress of a terrible, unnecessary, and atrocious war.

In the court politics of an embattled, isolated tsar, this revolt heralds the betrayal, both hurtful and hazardous, of a friend and protégé who had been promoted and enriched at the ruler’s whim and had proved more efficient, more loyal, and more ferocious a warrior than many of the ruler’s bureaucratic cronies.

Autocrats hate to lose favorites, for they are creatures created by the ruler and therefore meant to be blindly loyal: Such loyal outsiders are hard to find and to replace. But when they cease to be that, they lose their purpose. They are ultimately dispensable.

Though dictators have few friends, and Putin is not famed for his sentimentality, many of his favorites are childhood friends, or like Prigozhin, people he met in the early 1990s in St. Petersburg. Putin has not lightly dropped or liquidated such characters, and that may explain the extraordinary meeting with Prigozhin in the Kremlin after the mutiny—and why Prigozhin is still walking the earth.

The other reason is the war, Prigozhin’s unique role in it, and the historically perilous relationship between Russian rulers and their paladins. The bizarre tale of Prigozhin is best understood through the prism of how tsars relate to their military leaders.

Every Russian ruler since the early 18th century has struggled to find a balance between the essential themes of military leadership in Russia: the necessity to play the victorious supreme commander, and the suspicion that the army is potentially disloyal and possibly a deadly threat.

On the first point, it is clear by now that Putin is no general. Every stage of his planning during the invasion of Ukraine has gone horribly wrong, from the first blitzkrieg to take Kyiv in a week to the southern push to seize Odesa. He has repeatedly promoted, undermined, backed, and sacked ministers, commanders, spymasters, and warlords; Putin has meddled clumsily in every detail, high and low, at a terrible cost.

The conventional wisdom, repeated in the Western press, is that Putin is just inexplicably a micromanager, obsessive control-freak, and omnipotent meddler.

But it is much more fundamental and institutional than that. Like most of his predecessors, Putin sees it as his mission and his duty as Russian ruler to command in battle. The reason is not just the poison fruit of Putinesque vanity and obstinacy. It a role that is deeply ingrained within the founding myth of Putin’s regime and even deeper inside the creation of modern Russia: Putin believes that a Russian autocrat is not just a political ruler, but also must be a military commander. He aspires to be the presidential emperor and supreme commander who reconquered Crimea and Ukraine and restored the Russian imperium.

This can be traced to the founding charter of modern autocracy. In 1613, when the Romanov dynasty was raised to the throne, Russia was a failed principality, the Grand Duchy of Muscovy. Since the extinction of the Rurikid dynasty in 1598, it had been carved up by carnivorous neighbors: Sweden, Poland, and the Tatar khanate that ruled southern Ukraine and Crimea.

This was the Smuta, or Time of Troubles, the first of the three traumatic spasms of chaos (the others are the civil war of 1918-20 and humiliations of the 1990s) that have justified resurgent autocracy in Russia. The first Romanov tsar, effectively elected by an assembly of different interests, was a sickly teenager named Michael whose family was linked to the old Rurikids, but the dynasty came to power promising to restore the kingdom and expel the invaders.

As the Romanovs succeeded in their mission and rapidly switched to expansion, their court developed as a military headquarters. The third Romanov tsar, Peter the Great, took this even further, dressing in Germanic military uniform and mastering the details of artillery, infantry, and shipbuilding—and abortively attacking both the Ottomans and Tatars in southern Ukraine and the Swedes in the north.

Faced with first defeat and then invasion by the Swedes, he reformed his army and then actually commanded it in battle to rout the invaders at Poltava in 1709. Peter was far from a military genius: When he personally led an expedition against the Ottomans in July 1711 he was defeated and very nearly destroyed. But he succeeded in the north, defeating the Swedes, conquering the Baltic, and founding St. Petersburg and a Russian fleet, victories he celebrated by granting himself the Roman title imperator, or commander, and rebranding Muscovy as an empire that he renamed Roosiya.

Russia was founded as an expansionary empire; its tsar remodeled as a conqueror. Every one of Peter’s successors aspired to command in war, and most of them spent all of their time in uniform, often personally drilling soldiers. But the role is both a mixed blessing and poisoned chalice: It is essential, and yet to fail at it can be catastrophic.

Peter’s female successors promoted favorites to command in battle since they could not do so themselves: Catherine II’s romantic and political partner, Prince Potemkin, the greatest statesman of the Romanov centuries, secured new conquests—southern Ukraine and Crimea, and a protectorate over Georgia. Her son Paul was a disastrously inconsistent commander in chief, while his son Alexander I made a fool of himself against Napoleon at Austerlitz, then yielded command, humiliatingly, to the popular Gen. Mikhail Kutuzov; the emperor then commanded the Russian army all the way to take Paris.

Even Nicholas II lived in uniform, aspired to be commander in the Russo-Japanese War, and took command in World War I—so calamitously that it led, in part, to revolution. Yet Russia’s new rulers aspired to this tradition as much the old: The provincial lawyer Alexander Kerensky was never out of military uniform; the Georgian cobbler’s son and Bolshevik activist Joseph Stalin believed from youth that he was born to command.

During World War II, Stalin controlled every military detail of the Soviet war against Hitler, even to the extent of keeping a notebook with a tally of individual tanks during the Battle of Moscow. He lost millions of men in the first year of the war, many of these deaths caused by his ignorant bungling. But ultimately, at the terrible cost of 27 million people, Stalin fought all the way to Berlin.

That victory of 1945 ensured the Soviet Union survived for another 40 years and intensified the military pretensions of Russian rulers.

After the humiliating collapse of Soviet superpowerdom, marked by withdrawal from Eastern European vassal-states and the loss of 14 former Russian imperial territories reconstituted as Soviet republics, Putin doubled down on the necessity of military success: His regime commandeers the prestige of Soviet victory in 1945, conjuring himself as the actual supreme commander. His minor victories in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria seemed to confirm that he had the gift. But his vision of himself as supremo has set himself an impossibly high threshold—and the price of defeat and stalemate in his Ukrainian war of choice have made regime security as important as military victory—or more so.

In 1698, when he was in London on his Grand Embassy mission, Peter the Great faced a mutiny by the Kremlin musketeers that he crushed brutally, breaking up that obsolete force and creating his own regiments of new-model guards that remained the Romanov dynasty’s praetorians until the end of the regime. Yet the guards, like their Roman equivalents, regularly backed their own candidates for tsar, as they did on his death in 1725 with his widow Catherine I. Later they overthrew tsars, most famously in the coups of 1741, 1762, and 1801.

In 1825, elite officers launched the Decembrist rebellion against autocracy itself, only to be crushed by Nicholas I, who created the organs of secret police in part to investigate and prevent military revolts. In February 1917, while a spontaneous uprising seized the streets in Petrograd, it was the generals who forced Nicholas II to abdicate. Later that year, his successor, Kerensky, was almost destroyed by his commander Gen. Lavr Kornilov.

Russia’s modern rulers inherited that distrust of military esprit and Bonapartist ambition in their generals, whom they feared might build a Napoleonic-style military regime with popular support—using political commissars and special military sections of their new security organs, the Cheka, NKVD, KGB, and today’s FSB—to terrorize and surveil military officers.

As early as 1930, Stalin was mulling a blood purge of top military officers that he enacted in 1937 when he executed more than 40,000 officers and three of the five marshals, including two of the most brilliant, Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Vasily Blyukher, who were tortured and murdered savagely. Instead he promoted inept cronies from his civil war days, led by Marshals Kliment Voroshilov and Grigory Kulik.

Only later in the war did Stalin sack these bunglers and promote a brilliant team led by Georgy Zhukov, but he never fully relaxed his military terror: He allowed his secret police minister, Lavrentiy Beria, to investigate and arrest generals while building up a separate phalanx of special NKVD military forces—his own praetorians. Some of his generals, most famously Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, literally came from prison to Stalin’s headquarters when the war required talented officers—and had to sit in the dictator’s office with Beria, who had personally tortured him.

After the war, Stalin demoted Zhukov to command the Odesa and the Urals military districts while deliberately promoting political hacks to military rank. (Beria and Nikolai Bulganin were marshals.) After his victory at Stalingrad, Stalin himself never appeared in public out of his marshal’s uniform. On Stalin’s death, Zhukov turned the tables on the secret police when he backed Nikita Khrushchev’s arrest—and later, execution—of Beria.

In 1957, he again backed Khrushchev against Stalin’s grandees Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich. But Khrushchev also feared Zhukov, sacking him and accusing him of Bonapartism. Later, Khrushchev tried to arrange his own promotion to marshal of the Soviet Union—and when his equally unmartial successor, Leonid Brezhnev, secured his own promotion to that rank, he danced to celebrate it.

During the 1990s, President Boris Yeltsin, whose prestige was ruined when the great Russian army was defeated by ragtag Chechens in the streets of Grozny, was forced temporarily to turn to an overmighty paratrooper, Gen. Alexander Lebed, who had run against him in the 1996 election. Lebed, too, was accused of Bonapartism and sacked.

Zhukov and Lebed are the examples who would be on Putin’s mind in the more than 500 days of the Ukraine war. To avoid potential rivals, Putin promoted Shoigu and Gerasimov, his own version of Stalin’s inept cronies.

Every Russian ruler must exist in a perpetual state of ferocious vigilance, paying paramount attention to personal security. Stalin constantly purged and shuffled his security grandees, always keeping his personal security under his own control. His successors, even Yeltsin, did the same: Yeltsin’s devoted bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov, was promoted to general and top aide until he overreached. Putin has studied these lessons, recalling how Fidel Castro, the long-serving Cuban dictator, told him how he had survived many assassination attempts by always keeping personal control of his security.

Putin has promoted his former bodyguard Viktor Zolotov to command the huge National Guard (Rosgvardiya) that is his shield against military threats. Yet at the same time, the failure to take Kyiv or Odesa and hold Kherson has revealed the cloddish incompetence of his chosen military leaders.

Putin’s entire system, not unlike that of the tsars and general-secretaries before him, resembles a court in which magnates are rewarded and promoted, then played against one another. The ruler is the supreme adjudicator. Even though Russian despots seek and reward loyalty above all other qualities, they still value and promote competence too.

Every Russian ruler has to deal with the knowledge that their bureaucrats are often cautious, corrupt, and incapable of initiative. To get things done, rulers turn to dynamic favorites, former outsiders who become intimate insiders empowered to exert pressure on vested elites. That is where Prigozhin came in.

Favorites tend to reflect the rulers they serve: Peter’s Prince Alexander Menshikov was as brutal and dynamic as his master; Catherine’s Potemkin the same combination of enlightenment, empire, and vision as she. Alexander I, disenchanted by the liberal dreams of his youth, promoted a glowering brutal disciplinarian in Gen. Alexei Arakcheev as his effective deputy, who loved to declare: “I am the friend of the tsar, and complaints about me can be made only to God.” Nicholas II’s Grigori Rasputin mirrored the weakness and mysticism of his tsar.

Prigozhin reflects Putin’s nature, too—but he was, for all his criminal record, his rise in catering, and his brutal nature, a doer: When Putin wanted to create troll farms to undermine Western democracies, Prigozhin did it; when he wanted a deniable, cheaper military force, Prigozhin created the Wagner Group that helped achieve victory in Syria and push Russian interests in Africa.

When Putin made the dire decision to attack Ukraine, Prigozhin enthusiastically embraced the war, and shaming the venal bureaucrats and military pencil pushers Shoigu and Gerasimov, he shaped Wagner as a Russian storm force. Putin’s promotion of an independent unit and its warlord was itself a sign of state weakness—and lack of confidence in his own military.

The failure to promote an effective general to fight the Ukraine war is one of Putin’s most egregious lapses. Indeed, one of the chief duties of the war leader is to select generals who can win victories and remove those who can’t. Even Stalin, after many defeats, backed Zhukov and other talented generals. Putin has either never found that talented general, or more likely, so fears the threat of one that he has preferred stalemate to the peril of a victory won by someone else. Gen. Sergey Surovikin, for example, was promoted to commander in Ukraine, then removed.

Fearing that a successful rival general could provide an alternative potentate around whom his courtiers could rally, Putin instead empowered Prigozhin to promote himself and attack the military hierarchy as slothful and crooked while he emulated Stalin’s penal battalions of World War II by recruiting criminals from Russian prisons; Prigozhin flaunted his devotion to the motherland, having deserters executed with his trademark sledgehammer. Tempered and bloodied by the cruel battles at Bakhmut and elsewhere, and possibly liberated by his own struggle with cancer, Prigozhin started to believe himself a Russian paladin hamstrung by deskbound cowards and a sclerotic autocrat.

Prigozhin was serving in a classic role as a way to intimidate the military command, but unlike Stalin’s Beria, this ferocious, loudmouthed military amateur was also winning admiration from some generals, possibly including Surovikin.

But ultimately, it was unlikely that Putin would choose an amateur condottiero and his small force of Wagnerians over the huge Russian army. In the end, he was always going to back the army. And he did so, allowing his officials to cut off Wagner’s ammunition and its budget. But Putin failed to perform his essential role of balancing his magnates, apparently refusing to talk to Prigozhin—who turned to desperate measures.

Putin now finds himself the prisoner of the conundrum of despot as supreme commander and security sentinel. His dream of imperial greatness has become a fatal trap. His weakness now means that any retreat from command could lead to a hemorrhage of power.

Every autocrat competes with gilded and titanic ghosts of imperators past. In 1945, when U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman congratulated Stalin on taking Berlin, the dictator replied, “Yes, but Alexander took Paris.” Putin could not hold Kherson.

Few autocrats can be Peter or Stalin, but Putin dreams of such victories. His dilemma—a tsar’s inability to balance his roles as military commander and political survivor—is also Ukraine’s tragedy. When dictators aspire to empire, many innocents bleed; when they fail, they take whole, innocent peoples down with them.

[sometimesigif]

⬇️ Tag drop ⬇️

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[ammg-old2]

A short recap of the past 24 hours in Russia reads like the backstory for a fanciful episode of Madam Secretary or The West Wing. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the brutal convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, declared war on the Russian Ministry of Defense and marched into the city of Rostov-on-Don. He then headed north for Moscow, carrying his demand for the ousting of Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. The city went on alert.

Prigozhin and his men came within 125 miles of the capital—that is, closer to Moscow than Philadelphia is to Washington, D.C. He then said that a deal had been struck and that Wagner’s forces were turning around to avoid bloodshed. Apparently, however, the blood Prigozhin saved from being shed was his own. If the “deal” announced by the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov accurately reflects an actual settlement, Prigozhin has in the space of a day gone from being a powerful warlord to a man living on borrowed time in a foreign country, waiting for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inevitable retribution.

According to Peskov, Russia is dropping all charges against Prigozhin, who must now go into exile in Belarus. Wagner fighters who did not take part in the rebellion will be given amnesty, and then they will sign contracts that will bring them under the control of Shoigu’s Ministry of Defense. I suggested yesterday that Shoigu’s attempt to seize Wagner’s men and dissolve the force might be one of the reasons Prigozhin went on the march. This outcome is a defeat of the first order for Prigozhin, who has now lost everything except his life.

We can at this point only speculate about why Prigozhin undertook this putsch, and why it all failed so quickly. One possibility is that Prigozhin had allies in Moscow who promised to support him, and somehow that support fell through: Perhaps his friends in the Kremlin got cold feet, or were less numerous than Prigozhin realized, or never existed. Prigozhin, after all, is not exactly a military genius or a diplomat; he’s a violent, arrogant, emotional man who may well have embarked on this scheme huffing from a vat of his own overconfidence.

Nonetheless, this bizarre episode is not a win for Putin. The Russian dictator has been visibly wounded, and he will now bear the permanent scar of political vulnerability. Instead of looking like a decisive autocrat (or even just a mob boss in command of his crew), Putin left Moscow after issuing a short video in which he was visibly angry and off his usual self-assured game. Putin reportedly worries a great deal about being assassinated, and so perhaps he wanted to hunker down until he had more clarity about who might be in league with Prigozhin. But whatever the reason, he vowed to deal with Prigozhin decisively and then blew town, probably to his retreat at Valdai, in a move that looked weak and disorganized.

Bringing in President Aleksandr Lukashenko as a broker at first seemed an odd choice on Putin’s part, but it makes a bit more sense in light of the supposed deal. The Belarusian autocrat could personally vouch for Prigozhin’s safe passage; Lukashenko has no connections in Moscow that are more important than Putin; he does not live or work in the Kremlin and so he was a secure choice to carry out Putin’s terms; he owes Putin his continued rule and has no reason to betray him. Also, sending in Lukashenko was something of a power move: Putin is a former intelligence officer, and in that world, Prigozhin is merely a scummy convict. The two men were friendly before this, but they were not equals. It would have been a huge loss of face for the president of a great power to negotiate with his former chef in person.

Prigozhin gets to stay alive, at least for the moment, but his life as he knew it (and maybe in any sense) is over. Putin, however, is now politically weaker than ever. The once unchallengeable czar is no longer invincible. The master of the Kremlin had to make a deal with a convict—again, in Putin’s culture, among the lowest of the low—just to avert the shock and embarrassment of an armed march into the Russian capital while other Russians are fighting on the front lines in Ukraine.

Prigozhin drew blood and then walked away from a man who never, ever lets such a personal offense go unavenged. But Putin may have had no choice, which is yet another sign of his precarious situation. All of the options were terrifying: Ordering the Russian military to attack armed Russian men would have been a huge risk, especially because those men (and their hatred of the bureaucrats at the Defense Ministry) have at least some support among Russia’s officers and political elites. Killing Prigozhin outright was also a high-risk proposition; with their leader dead and the Russian military closing in, the Wagnerites might have decided to fight to the death.

This wound to Putin’s power goes deep, but how deep is difficult to gauge for now, especially because we do not know whether Shoigu or Gerasimov still have their jobs. And although the rebellion has taken Wagner off the field in Ukraine, Putin may still seek to cover this ignominious moment by escalating Russia’s brutality there. But two things appear certain. First, Putin has suffered a huge political blow, and he has survived by making deals with both Prigozhin and his own colleagues in the Kremlin who are, by any definition, a humiliation. And second, Yevgeny Prigozhin has changed the Russian political environment surrounding Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Prigozhin’s rebellion and its effects will last beyond today, but how long he will live in Belarus—or stay alive in Belarus—to see how the rest of it plays out is unclear.

[rfsnyder]

Aleksandr Gerasimov

[cyberbenb]

UK Defense Ministry: Gerasimov makes first public appearance since Wagner mutiny

Russia's General Staff chief Valery Gerasimov appeared on Russian state television on June 10, the U.K. Defense Ministry reported on July 12.

Gerasimov was seen being briefed via video call by Russian Aerospace Forces Chief of Staff Colonel-General Viktor Afzalov. Afzalov is deputy to Commander-in-Chief Russian Aerospace Forces, General Sergei Surovikin.

According to British intelligence, Surovikin’s whereabouts remain unclear, which adds further weight to the hypothesis that the general has been sidelined following the mutiny.

An armed insurrection began in Russia on July 23, and, before it abruptly came to an end, looked poised to soon break out into open, large-scale violence.

The notorious Wagner mercenary force, once often called “Putin’s private army,” occupied two major regional capitals and began a march on Moscow.

Its leader, outspoken war criminal Yevgeny Prigozhin, turned his sights not only on his arch-rivals, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and head of the Russian General Staff Valerii Gerasimov, but, de facto, on the entire Russian regime, including dictator Vladimir Putin.

Wagner Group's founder Yevgeny Prigozhin said on June 24 that the mercenaries would stop their march on Moscow and withdraw to military camps.

Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko claimed he had held talks with Prigozhin, after which Wagner’s boss announced the troops’ retreat, according to Lukashenko’s press service.

Lukashenko's press service claimed that Wagner was negotiating a deal that would envisage security guarantees for the mercenaries.

Prigozhin, whose whereabouts have been unclear after his failed rebellion, is allegedly in Moscow since at least July 1, according to the French media outlet Liberation, citing its sources in Western intelligence.

He reportedly has spent the time negotiating Wagner's fate with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin as well as meeting with National Guard head Viktor Zolotov and the Foreign Intelligence Service boss Sergey Naryshkin.

Russia comes to the brink of civil war: How we got here and what it means

Visually, the scene was a familiar one. Russian armored vehicles emblazoned with the Z logo in the central streets of a once peaceful city, masked soldiers standing at key intersections, and confrontational conversations with bemused local civilians. But this wasn’t a Ukrainian city in the first da…

The Kyiv IndependentFrancis Farrell

[curtadasemana]

The Killers (Убийцы) é uma curta-metragem estudantil russa, produzida  em 1956. Foi o primeiro filme alguma vez dirigido pelo grande Andrei Tarkovsky com a ajuda dos seus colegas Aleksandr Gordon e Marika Beiku, enquanto estudantes no instituto de cinematografia Gerasimov. A curta é uma adaptação do conto "The Killers", de Ernest Hemingway,  onde dois assassínos entram num bar na tentativa de encontrar um cliente habitual. Tarkovsky sucede em estabelecer um ambiente de alta tensão ao longo da curta, que é alimentado por pequenas pausas que interrompem a ação. A obra é um ótimo precedente para o estilo e a carreira de um dos cineastas mais importantes da Rússia.

[random-brushstrokes]

Aleksandr Gerasimov - Paris. Viavinni street (1930s)

[pwlanier]

Noon. Rome.

Author: Gerasimov Aleksandr Mikhailovich

Year: 1934.

Technique: Paper, watercolor, gouache.

Sovcom

[psikonauti]

Aleksandr Gerasimov (Soviet/Russian, 1881-1963)

Peonies ,1931

oil on canvas

[my-russia]

After the rain, 1935, Aleksandr Gerasimov

[mariacallous]

Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plans are extremely unclear: Nobody can be sure whether he and his mercenaries will choose to take up Aleksandr Lukashenko’s offer of a safe haven in Belarus. But it is certainly plausible that he will do so, at least for a while.

The Belarusian dictator is presenting his role in brokering an accord between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prigozhin as a triumph of his personal diplomacy. But in truth, the presence of the warlord in Belarus is dangerous for Lukashenko. It further ties Belarus to a war that is unpopular with most citizens and has the potential to destabilize not only Lukashenko’s relationship with Putin, but also the foundations of his regime.

On June 23-24, the Russian Wagner mercenary group that has fought fierce battles in eastern Ukraine mutinied, demanding that Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov be “handed over” to them. Instigated by Prigozhin—their leader, a Russian oligarch—the Wagner troops crossed the Ukrainian border and swiftly “marched” through the Russian cities of Rostov-on-Don and Voronezh, stopping some 120 miles short of Moscow.

At that time, Lukashenko reportedly negotiated a deal with Prigozhin over the phone, whereby Prigozhin would end the rebellion in exchange for his troops and himself being granted safe passage into exile and “legal jurisdiction for work” in Belarus.

Since then, independent monitors have spotted Prigozhin’s jet twice in Belarus, on June 27 and July 1, though each time it is reported that he returned to Moscow after. Indeed, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov later confirmed that Putin had a three-hour meeting with Prigozhin and 34 Wagner commanders in Moscow on June 29. Two days before that, on June 27, Lukashenko reportedly spent five hours in his residence on a lake just outside of Minsk, known as a venue for holding private and secretive meetings by Lukashenko and his family members. Just 39 minutes after Lukashenko had left the residence, Prigozhin’s jet took off from an airfield near Minsk.

Prigozhin himself, however, has not been seen in Belarus, and neither have the Wagner troops. At the same time, satellite images have revealed the construction of a large military camp in eastern Belarus, which, many speculated, might be being built for the Wagner troops. The independent monitors were also told by reliable sources that some 200 Wagnerites had been deployed to the Losvida military field, near Vitebsk in northern Belarus. On July 6, however, Lukashenko said at a press conference that Prigozhin was in St. Petersburg, Russia, while the Wagner troops were also in Russia, in “their permanent camps to which they had withdrawn after leaving the front line.”

If anyone emerged victorious out of this bizarre imbroglio, at least on the face of it, it was Lukashenko. He reveled in presenting himself as capable of sorting out squabbles within the Russian elites, while also humiliating the Russian president: “I suggested to Putin not to rush … I said, ‘let’s talk to Prigozhin and his commanders’.” He boasted to journalists that Prigozhin would not answer Putin’s phone calls but did respond to his own.

It is doubtful, however, that Lukashenko had the political clout to genuinely mediate at the top level in Russia. Following his rigging of the 2020 presidential election, Lukashenko has lost legitimacy both at home and internationally and stayed in power only thanks to the Kremlin’s political and economic backing.

After the Belarusian authorities forcefully grounded a Ryanair flight en route to Vilnius, Lithuania, in May 2021, which carried an exiled Belarusian journalist, the West imposed strict sanctions against Belarus. Unable to trade with the EU as before (about 40 percent of Belarusian exports had gone to European countries), Lukashenko chose to align even more closely with the Kremlin to keep the battered economy afloat. He has de facto handed over Belarus’ foreign and defense policy to Moscow, allowing Russia to use Belarus’s territory as a launchpad for its aggression against Ukraine. Like the governor of a Russian region, Lukashenko has come to see Putin regularly, approximately once a month, reporting to him on domestic affairs and presumably taking orders.

Most likely, Lukashenko served the role of a messenger from Putin. Belarus was a convenient and perhaps temporary “dumping ground” in which the Kremlin could neutralize Prigozhin rather than dispose of him outright, in light of his rising domestic popularity. Prigozhin’s fate and that of the Wagner Group will be decided in Moscow—Belarus might offer a temporary refuge at best.

In a similar manner, Putin used Lukashenko to take his nuclear scare rhetoric one step further, when he announced in March that Russian tactical nuclear weapons would be moved to Belarus, thereby inciting fears among Western policymakers that nukes would be geographically closer to Ukraine and that they would have to deal with an additional unpredictable actor.

At first, Lukashenko seemed worried at the prospect of hosting the nukes and especially of becoming hostage to increasingly unpredictable outcomes, such as their possible use on the Ukrainian battlefield. Eventually, he decided to make the best of it and use it as a deterrence against any hypothetical Western or domestic efforts to weaken his grip on power as well as against potential retaliation from Ukraine. “I think that it is unlikely that anyone would want to pick a fight with a country that has such weapons,” he said. He also tried to present himself as playing first fiddle and, despite Moscow’s insistence to the contrary, claimed that he would have equal control over the nukes.

Still, it seems that Lukashenko has scored some brownie points for himself from all sides. Since the signing of so-called peace agreements between Ukraine and Russia in Minsk in 2014-15 (which failed to prevent the war), Lukashenko has craved a role in solving the conflict. That could win him kudos in the West and thus, he hopes, relegitimize his rule in Belarus. On the contrary, Russia’s defeat would at the very least weaken Lukashenko, and it could even empower the opposition to dismantle his regime.

Lukashenko was dismayed when his renewed attempt to broker a deal by hosting negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Belarus at the start of the war brought no fruit, and his role was later overtaken by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But now, not only has Lukashenko been publicly praised by the Kremlin, but Ukraine also seems to have noticed his mediation potential. Oleksiy Danilov of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council said that Lukashenko might play a role in potential future negotiations with Russia.

Having done the Kremlin a favor, Lukashenko can now hope for reciprocity. It might come in the form of granting Lukashenko his wish of no Belarusian boots in Ukraine, since, unlike in Russia, the war is unpopular with the Belarusian public—only 30 percent support it. Moscow might also extend direct financial assistance to Belarus’s battered economy; offer more help with circumventing Western sanctions against Belarus (Russia has already taken over some 70 percent of Belarus’ exports that used to go to the EU); or pause some of its “economic integration” projects that could chip away at Belarus’s sovereignty, such as a push toward sharing a single currency.

Lukashenko is also intent on reaping benefits from Prigozhin and his mercenaries. The two men allegedly first met in person 20 years ago and have spoken favorably of each other since then. For example, Prigozhin glorified Lukashenko for flexing his muscle in grounding the Ryanair plane. According to the Belarusian Investigative Centre, the arrival of Prigozhin’s mercenaries and his other business interests in Africa in 2018 may have facilitated lucrative gold and diamond mining by the Belarusian firms supposedly linked to Lukashenko and his family. Lukashenko may well demand a bigger slice of the pie in Africa in exchange for granting Prigozhin a safe harbor in Belarus.

Lukashenko said that the Belarusian army, which has never fought a real battle, would benefit from learning about Wagner’s combat experience. According to the Institute for the Study of War, Lukashenko might seek to use the Wagner Group to “help rebuild lost capability within the Belarusian military” that Belarus had delegated to Russia. “The Belarusian military’s dissolution of its unified ground command in 2011 effectively subordinated Belarus’ military to [Russia’s] Western Military District. Belarus has no recent experience in conducting large-scale operations or organizing exercises above the battalion level. …The Wagner Group has experience conducting combined arms operations with formations larger than the combat services of the Belarusian military.”

Yet Wagner’s expertise in suppressing rebellions against autocratic leaders in Africa would be even more welcome to the Lukashenko regime. Indeed, some of the infamous Berkut police officers who shot at protesters during the 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine later found refuge in Belarus. Lukashenko would appreciate Prigozhin’s advice on training a formidable personal security service, of a type that Wagner provides for many African strongmen. He wants one that is capable of suppressing any potential attempt at toppling his regime, be it a home-grown public protest or an insurgency supported from abroad (a scenario that part of the Belarusian opposition seems to be planning for).

And Prigozhin’s advice on meddling with elections through troll farms and internet bots, for which his (now crumbling) Internet Research Agency was responsible, is another area of great interest to Lukashenko.

Despite the many potential benefits, hosting Prigozhin and the Wagner Group is risky for Lukashenko. Ambitious, wealthy and manipulative, Prigozhin could destabilize the internal dynamic in Belarus and sour Minsk’s relationship with Moscow. Although Lukashenko and his eldest son Viktor (who was the national security advisor to his father until recently) keep a tight hold over the security services in Belarus, the latter are loyal as long as they are paid well and feel the weight of Kremlin backing for the Belarusian regime.

The ultra-cautious Lukashenko would be anxious about any possibility, however remote, of Prigozhin potentially buying off this loyalty for his own advantage and turning the security services against their current master. After all, there is no guarantee that, to use Putin’s words, Prigozhin would not stab Lukashenko in the back, as he did to Putin.

Any attempt to subordinate previously independent Wagner mercenaries to Belarus’s inexperienced armed forces and bureaucratic command structures, as Lukashenko suggested earlier, would pose similar stability risks. It would also raise the question of costs—could Lukashenko really afford Wagner mercenaries? He said himself that “it would be good for our army, if we could invite them [the Wagner Group] at their own expense.”

The Wagner presence in Belarus would also upset both the domestic elites and the public, who would worry not only about further involvement in Russia’s war but also about welcoming dodgy individuals. Mercenary activity is a criminal offence under Belarusian law, punishable by between three and seven years in prison. Lukashenko’s support, already low, could dip even further.

So it is not surprising that Lukashenko has tried repeatedly to reassure not only public opinion, but also his officials: “You should not worry or be concerned. … They [the mercenaries] are not frightening for us,” he has said.

Last but not least, the West may turn further against Lukashenko should the Wagner Group, which some countries call a terrorist organization, find shelter in Belarus. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda has already said that his country may revise its sanctions law and impose stricter entry restrictions for Belarusians. Other countries might toughen sanctions against the Lukashenko regime, too.

Thus, having offered Prigozhin and his mercenaries a safe haven in Belarus, Lukashenko has found himself in a weaker position. The regime in Belarus rests on two pillars: the Kremlin’s support and repression (in June alone, the country made 560 political arrests).

But as the Prigozhin mutiny has exposed Putin’s weakness and his incapacity to deal with domestic crises, Moscow’s backing might not be as solid as it appeared. The other pillar relies on violence, but Prigozhin’s presence in Belarus—if he manages to buy off, or sow discord in, Lukashenko’s security services—could undermine that one, too.