Over the course of a month I spent in the Russian capital, the red and black billboards of Yevgeny V. Prigozhin’s paramilitary Wagner group piled up. “Join the winning team!” They said only their eyes could be seen beneath an image of menacing mercenaries in balaclavas and masks.
One possible implication was that the Russian armed forces mushrooming on the other Moscow billboards — regular soldiers recruited by the Defense Ministry, depicted via slogans like “Real Work!” or “Be a Hero!” — were the losers to reckless gambling by President Vladimir V. Putin in Ukraine.
As ruthless Muscovites made their way to their offices and gyms, their Italian or Japanese restaurants, their bars and nightclubs, this dual-fronted military recruitment drive in the capital offered the only picture of Russia’s struggle to contain the fallout and hide the full impact . of the invasion that began 16 months ago. It’s easier to order a latte than to think about the lives lost in Mariupol.
Now, Mr. Prigozhin’s blunt portrayal of this invasion as a “gear maker” that “wasn’t necessary to demilitarize or denazify Ukraine” and his seemingly short-lived armed insurgency has exploited one of Mr. Putin’s worst fears: division and rebellion, with tanks in the streets, like in the chaos of the 1990s, from which Mr. Putin, a former KGB officer, suddenly emerged as the inscrutable president and lord of stability.
Since then, over 23 years, Mr Putin has steadily consolidated his power, using his wars, which began in Chechnya, to perpetuate nationalist sentiments, terrorizing the opposition to the point that dissent has become a crime, and an outright has built an unequal economy around a clique of hand-picked oligarchs. He has transformed Russia, after its brief but exciting post-communist flirtation with a freer society, back into an autocratic police state under an all-powerful modern tsar.
“The system that Putin has built is very stable,” a Western ambassador in Moscow told me this month. “But if I woke up one morning and saw tanks on the street, I wouldn’t be totally amazed.”
This startling revelation, made under usual diplomatic anonymity, is a reminder of the tight secrecy of Mr Putin’s inner circle, which has made wartime Kremlin research in Ukraine as tedious as it was at the height of the Cold War. There are very few tea leaves for reading. Russia, smothered in propaganda and fear, is opaque.
Although the government has expended great effort and expense to maintain the illusion of “business as usual,” the calm surface Russia has displayed so far during the war masks unease.
In murmured expressions of confusion and anger across the country, not least in Mr. Prigozhin’s foul-mouthed diatribes against what he sees as the cowardly incompetence and half-heartedness of the Russian generals, the cornerstone of these tanks lies in the ambassador’s prescient vision.
Russia tends not to progress; it wobbles, like 1917 or 1991, and it circles. Mr. Putin has maintained old habits by employing doublethink. He prefers to “forget all that needed to be forgotten” and then “restore memory at the moment when it was needed,” as Orwell put it.
Therefore, in his short speech on Saturday, Putin conjured up the year 1917, a time when an internal rupture led to the nascent Soviet republic losing a considerable population and large parts of agricultural land Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Next year. Therefore, Mr. Putin promised, he would resist the current “mortal threat” of “mutiny” through “brutal” actions.
Suddenly, the glorious Soviet victory over Nazis and Fascists in the “Great Patriotic War” of 1941-1945, which set the drumbeat for the unworldly Ukrainian onslaught, was quashed by Mr. Putin in favor of a crushing historic defeat.
He uses the past for his purposes, even if he has very little to say about the future.
For example, nobody knows what Mr. Putin would call a victory in his “special military operation” in Ukraine. There are more mysteries. For many months, the question has been how Mr. Prigozhin, a former convict who started out as a hot dog in St. Petersburg and later provided hospitality for the Kremlin, survived.
If the family of a Russian child who paints a picture of a Ukrainian flag faces imprisonment in Putin’s Russia, how could this loudmouth in riot gear get away with claiming, among other things, that Sergei K. Shoigu, the Minister of Defense, did the genocide allows? from other accusations and insults?
I heard many answers all over Russia. But perhaps the most fundamental was found in the recently excavated grave of 42-year-old Boris Batsev, a railroad worker who was killed six months ago near Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, leaving behind a wife and two children.
Brightly colored plastic roses and carnations were piled around his tombstone, under the red and gold Wagner flag, in Siberia, near the town of Talofka, thousands of kilometers from the Ukrainian front.
“Blood, honor, fatherland, bravery,” said a Wagner inscription. A mild breeze blew across Troetskoe Cemetery as Federal Security Service (FSB) agents looked on from a vehicle that had suddenly appeared nearby.
Because the Russian armed forces often lack the necessary equipment and sometimes act like a human wave, Mr. Putin needed meat for the meat grinder. Mr. Prigozhin, who recruits in Russian prisons with offers of amnesty and large payouts, could make it happen, even from Siberia. He was too effective and useful to throw aside.
According to Prigozhin, Wagner lost 20,000 soldiers in the long battle alone over the charred ruins of the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.
Others suggested that the deployment of Mr. Prigozhin was the apotheosis of Putin’s tactic of dividing his subordinates and shifting influence from Sergey V. Lavrov, the foreign minister, to Mr. Shoigu in recent years as Russian society continued to be militarized to undermine the Minister of Defense through Mr. Prigozhin.
“Putin likes competition, he liked to pressure Shoigu and he enjoyed the theatre,” Dmitri A. Muratov, the Nobel Prize-winning editor of the closed independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, told me in an interview. “Meanwhile, the elite around Putin doesn’t care about the country, they’re just afraid for their lives.”
Mr. Prigozhin was useful to Mr. Putin in other ways as well. Through Wagner, he helped spread a ruthless and lawless form of Russian power in several African countries, including Mali and the Central African Republic. He was also a way for the Russian leader to play the moderate in the midst of a grossly misjudged war, implying that without him things could get worse and just as unstable as Mr. Prigozhin’s temper.
Eventually, Mr. Prigozhin became an increasingly popular mouthpiece for the widespread displeasure of wealthy Russian elites, unaware of the cost and suffering of the war in Ukraine. That was cathartic in the face of accumulated Russian frustrations and, in that sense, perhaps useful for Mr. Putin.
But the paramilitary leader has also emerged as a true national figure over the past nine months, through adept use of social media and persuasive rhetoric, with a notoriety that has made him the subject of much debate and speculation about a possible political future.
Mr Putin has now become aware of this danger, even if Mr Prigozhin may have exaggerated.
The Russian president has spoken of an “armed uprising” and a former commander of Russian troops in Ukraine has spoken of a “military coup,” but Mr. Prigozhin’s description of his actions as a “march for justice” will have resonated with some, perhaps many , Russians.
Those sentiments will not go away overnight, though Mr Prigozhin has since stopped sending military convoys to Moscow and has agreed to travel to Belarus if the charges against him and his fighters are dropped, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry S. Peskov .
To what extent all this back and forth was staged theater and to what extent it was a real confrontation will probably not be determined soon, if ever.
It is clear that Mr. Putin has large reserves of support. “The West has told Russia that its only right is to give in,” said Petr Tolstoy, deputy chairman of the Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Federal Assembly, in an interview. “Putin said ‘Enough!’ and that assures him of popular support.”
Such is the president’s control over the country’s military, security and intelligence machinery that the biggest direct challenge to his rule in more than two decades appears to have been averted in a short space of time, even if Mr Putin has suffered the great embarrassment of losing a man On the day he made this accusation, he was asking a traitor to get away with it.
It’s been a long time since Mr Putin blinked like that.
There will be reverberations. Since the invasion of Ukraine on February 24 last year, little has gone according to plan for Mr Putin. Covering up a war that has claimed 100,000 Russian lives, according to American diplomats in Moscow, comes at a price. That he was not on par with the Russian people added to Mr. Prigozhin’s anger, which was evident in his repeated statements that the defense establishment had lied.
Mr. Prigozhin has described himself as the man who tells the hard truth. In the Belgorod region on Russia’s border with Ukraine, which I visited earlier this month, he was furious that Mr Putin and his state media would prefer to forget the devastation of cross-border Ukrainian shelling of Shebekino, a Russian town of 40,000 people.
In the city of Belgorod, in a huge makeshift dormitory for displaced people at an indoor bike track, I met 62-year-old Aleksandr Petrianko, who was semi-paralyzed from a stroke.
“Could Mr. Prigozhin have saved Shebekino?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice shaking. “I hope he doesn’t get killed prematurely.”
