I saw a comment on Twitter, remarking about all of the people who just 48 hours ago were authorities on construction of deep-sea submersibles and now have transubstantiated into expert Kremlinologists, “The fundamental problem is that they’re trying to make sense of what is happening in Russia. Things that happen in Russia rarely make sense.” This is why Churchill described Russia as “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939. To the extent outsiders can figure out what is happening in Russia at all, it is usually only in retrospect, long after events that make the news. From 1917 through 1991 academic and “intelligence agency” Sovietologists and Kremlinologists collected untold billions in salaries reading tea leaves, gazing into crystal balls, and writing learned papers about industrial production and labour productivity, yet essentially none of them predicted the whole corrupt and dysfunctional Potemkin empire was going to collapse into a pile of dust, even a year before it happened. As far as I know, the only person who did predict the Soviet collapse was a French demographer who observed in 1976 that collapsing life expectancy was inconsistent with a triumphant superpower empire.
Indeed, that’s what has been coming to mind ever since the start of this episode. In the 2016 “48 hour” coup d’état attempt in The Turkey, which initially appeared to be a well-organised military coup right out of Luttwak’s playbook, quickly degenerated into a comic opera festival of bungling in which the coupsters failed to immobilise the targeted caudillo and control communication channels, leading to Erdoğan’s doing a live FaceTime interview with CNN while the coup leaders were claiming to have seized control. Erdoğan was not restrained from returning from holiday to the capital, shortly after which the coup sputtered out. This was followed by a broad and deep purge of the military and civil service which, by 2016-07-20, had resulted in the arrest or suspension of 45,000 military officers, police, judges, governors, and civil servants, including 15,000 teachers and every university dean in the country. One suspects these names were on a list in somebody’s drawer long before the curtain went up on the coup.
We’ll have to wait to see what the aftermath of the just concluded Russian comic opera will be. If there’s one thing that’s constant from Czarist Russia to the Soviet Union to Putin’s родина, it’s that they’re really good at purges.