Prigozhin’s class analysis of Russia’s military campaign made him dangerous
In any conflict involving conscripted soldiers, the issue and question of class begins at a certain point to penetrate the consciousness of those doing the fighting and the dying, along with that of their loved ones at home.
In his magisterial work, Ten Days That Shook The World, American communist and journalist John Reed, providing an up close and personal commentary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, recounts the declaration of a common soldier during a mass meeting in Moscow just before the revolution.
Reed:
A soldier was speaking — from the 548th Division, wherever and whatever that was: ‘Comrades,’ he [the soldier] cried. ‘The people at the top are always calling upon us to sacrifice more, sacrifice more while those who have everything are left unmolested.’
Fast forward to 2023 and Evgeny Prizoghin’s regular videos, during which he spared no criticism of Russia’s military strategy, organisation, supply and logistics, began to be increasingly laced with an attack on the way that the Russian elites and their children were spared from the suffering being endured by poor Russian conscripts at the front.
In this his message will have resonated with the common soldier, just as the Bolsheviks’ class analysis of the First World War resonated with the common soldier in the trenches then. Prigozhin is no Bolshevik, let us be clear, but his time at the front among his Wagner troops certainly produced within him a rising tide of anger at the way the war was being waged by not only the Russian high command but also by extenstion Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Sparing the children of the elites and sacrificing those of the poor and ordinary citizens has always been the way of wars waged in the name of a national idea, a conception of the nation state rooted in myth more than reality. The lived experience of a family existing in poverty in rural Russia is so divorced from that of a family living in luxury in Moscow or St Petersburg that they could to all intents be living on different planets.
The object of any political class is to pose as the servant in order to become the master. And under any capitalist system the same political class exists to serve the interests of the rich at the expense of the poor. Twas always thus and always thus will be.
With this in mind, while national myths are very effective in peacetime when it comes to instilling a sense of a common national identity cohered around a shared history, cultural values, language etc., in wartime they begin to be challenged on the basis of class.
Putting it another way — in a time of war, when sons and husbands and fathers are coming home in coffins or in pieces by the thousand, those myths at a certain point become insufficient to alleviate the pain being felt by those forced to sacrifice all while others have and are sacrificing little, if anything at all.
This is the point at which class becomes a factor, or more specifically ‘class consciousness’.
Evgeny Prigozhin’s attempted mutiny exposed the contradictions that have underpinned Russia’s military campaign as it became ever more protracted and bloody. Death and carnage focuses the mind like nothing else. And while Putin may have survived, along with his defence minister Sergei Shoigu and his Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov — the latter two attracting the particular ire of the former head of Wagner — no one should doubt the extent of support for the sentiments of this now dead mercenary chief among the troops and many of their families and communities at home.
The same principle applies to the Ukrainian side, of course, where again it is the poor and working class who are deemed eminently expendable in a conflict that brooks no evidence of ending any time soon.
Though Evgeny Prigozhin may not have been the answer to the issue of the Russian elite not having to sacrifice their sons in the conflict in Ukraine, he did pose the question. It is one that will loom ever larger the longer the conflict continues.
End.
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