The Stupidest Revolt in History

By Dmitry Orlov

In its thousand-year history, Russia has seen many revolts and a couple of revolutions. There was the peasant war led by Stepan Razin, which lasted from 1667 to 1671. The rebellion was quashed by government troops and Razin was eventually captured and executed at the place of execution on Red Square in Moscow, called “lobnoe mesto”, which still stands. During his execution, the rebel kept his composure to the end and showed no sign of pain. The executioner first chopped off his limbs, one by one, then his head, then chopped his body into pieces and put them up on pikes, while his entrails were fed to the dogs.

Then there was the peasant war led by Yemelyan Pugachev, lasting from 1773 to 1775. It ended with an actual court trial, which, after interrogating Pugachev, rendered an official verdict, which read: “Yemel’ka Pugachev should be quartered, his head stuck on a stake, his body parts carried to the four gates of Moscow and placed on wheels, and then burned.” The sentence was carried out on January 21, 1775 at Bolotnaya Square.

Those two were proper rebellions, doomed from the start, to be sure, but not exactly stupid. There were some other rebellions too, but until last weekend the title holder of the stupidest Russian revolt ever went to the Decembrists. On December 26, 1825, an armed political demonstration took place on Senate Square in St. Petersburg. It became the largest political uprising of members of Russian nobility in the history of Russia. Its main goals were the overthrow of autocracy, the abolition of serfdom, the adoption of a constitution and the introduction of representative government. The leaders of the rebellion — members of the nobility and free-thinking members of secret societies — lied to the soldiers about the nature of their rebellion, marched them out and had them stand around in the cold. Then the soldiers got wind of what was happening, the meeting broke up and the leaders got arrested, interrogated, and eventually sentenced to internal exile.

During the interrogation, they were asked hard questions, such as “Who the hell filled your heads with these stupid ideas?” Ironically, their demands were eventually met: serfdom was abolished in 1861; the first Russian parliament — the Duma — was created by order of czar Nicholas II in 1905; and the first Russian constitution was created by the Soviet revolutionary government in 1918.

A considerable time later, thanks to the efforts of Lenin and his followers, who were looking for honorable historical antecedents to their great feat of shamefully surrendering to the enemy Russia’s great victories in World War I, triggering a full-on civil war that dragged on until 1923, and brainwashing an entire cohort of Marxist zealots that it then fell to Stalin to reign in using horribly repressive measures, the Decembrist rebellion was lauded as a precursor of the Great October Revolution of 1917. As a result, plenty of streets and squares in St. Petersburg and elsewhere are named after the Decembrists in general and their leaders individually, making a mountain out of what was, really a molehill of a monument to human stupidity that had stood unchallenged until last weekend.

then comes Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner PMC, a.k.a. “the musicians”. Private military companies played an important and necessary role in recent Russian history.

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The operation to force Kiev regime troops out of it became known as the Bakhmut meat-grinder. It was chosen specifically because there was no doubt that the Kiev regime would do its utmost to hold on to it, it being an important regional hub and its loss severely weakening the regime’s ability to resupply its troops and maneuver in the entire region. The super-dirty job of “grinding the meat” was given to Wagner PMC and its head Yevgeny Prigozhin, who recruited prison inmates for the job, promising amnesty to these bandits and cutthroats after their short tour of duty in absolute hell — should they survive. Indeed, the ones who had survived — about half of them, according to Prigozhin — were then released into the wild as promised, a few of them doing the stupid thing almost immediately and ending up back in jail where they started.

The object of the exercise was not just to capture Artyomovsk (that was more of a nice-to-have for Russia) but to deplete the Kiev’s regime mobilization potential. To this end, Prigozhin ordered that no prisoners be taken. Being a free agent not bound by any Geneva conventions, Prigozhin was free to do that without incurring the wrath of Russia’s Ministry of Defense, but the defense officials certainly hated him for it and such feelings were, I am sure, mutual.

And so, the hapless Ukie recruits — the ones without the wits to flee the country in time and without the money to pay off army recruiters — were forced to march forward and die at the hands of some of Russia’s most reprehensible miscreants, or they could attempt to retreat and get mowed down by the Kiev regime’s anti-retreat detachments that were dug in right behind them and stocked with vicious, swastika-tattooed, Mein Kampf-wielding Ukie Nazis. Drugged out of their minds on special preparations provided by the Americans, the poor Ukies marched to their death, zombie-like, feeling neither fear nor pain, crawling forward even when they could no longer walk. They died in numbers that would have thoroughly demoralized any army in the world — but not Prigozhin’s “musicians”!

First, it must be realized that Prigozhin had been fired. In accordance with an order issued by Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu, all members of private military companies, euphemistically termed “volunteers”, are expected to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense by July 1; either that, or they become civilians. Apparently, Russia no longer has any super-dirty jobs like the Bakhmut meat-grinder and Russia’s army no longer has any reason to hide from its enemies; therefore, private military companies are to be disbanded. What, your Western intelligence people, military experts and journalists missed this incredibly pertinent fact? Perhaps you should fire them — like Shoigu fired Prigozhin.

Prigozhin certainly got the memo, but he didn’t want to go off quietly into the night. Instead, he resorted to a tactic that had been traditional among Russian bandits during the wild 1990s called “nayezd”: you show up to your enemy’s headquarters in force and heavily armed and present your demands as a dramatic way of starting the negotiation. Refusing to negotiate with terrorists and other namby-pamby rhetoric is then of no use: either you negotiate, or you die in a hail of bullets. An unnecessary death is a foolish death, and nobody wants to be remembered as a fool, so it is better to swallow your pride and negotiate even with the most despicable bandits.

But it’s not the 1990s and Putin is not the permanently drunk Boris Yeltsin. Putin called Prigozhin a traitor on national television, followed by a number of regional governors, followed by just about everyone else in public view. Many people remembered the traditional thing to be done to traitors in Russia: they are not to be shot (such a death is itself a sort of military honor); instead, they are to be hung by the neck until dead. But there is a moratorium on executions in effect in Russia, and many Russians took this opportunity to also reflect on this policy, thinking it overly vegetarian given the times.

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Prigozhin chose as the target for his “nayezd” the regional office of the Minstry of Defense headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, rolling into the city with tanks and armored personnel carriers. They found the building deserted and simply stood around, sometimes getting stuck as in the above photo. Meanwhile, another detachment was sent rolling down the highway north toward Moscow, greatly inconveniencing all the Russians driving toward their vacation spots in Crimea.

The rebel convoy got stuck when it ran out of fuel because the rebels’ fuel depot, located near Rostov, had been most thoughtfully set on fire beforehand. An uncomfortable standoff ensued, lasting some hours, with some fearless Rostov residents rubbernecking around corners while others (army veterans, mostly) marched right up to the musicians and described them to their faces using language so foul it could curdle milk. A few more people ventured forth to take photos, such as the one above, of a rebel tank stuck in the gates of the Rostov city circus.

It was all peaceably resolved by the end of Saturday, with Belarussian president Lukashenko agreeing to grant Prigozhin asylum and the “musicians” agreeing to return to their bases. Very little damage has been caused, considering what could have happened, and the “musicians”, who, in an echo of the Decembrist revolt, hadn’t been told what was really going on, are mostly going to be forgiven. Criminal charges against Prigozhin have been dropped and he is now free to form a new private military company in… Belarus.

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Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/7785c431-e41f-430d-b801-3a0605905468