War Party Splits In Russia

The collapse of the Russian army changed the internal political situation in the country.

It also split the war parties and turned its bulk against the leadership and even the leader. In recent days, I have been monitoring cheerful patriotic and "military" channels in blogging and seeing the development of this conflict.

Putin and his entourage, the Ministry of Defense, the leadership of the war party, pretend that nothing special has happened, and everything is going according to plan. Activists and enthusiasts of this party are hysterical, screaming about catastrophe and betrayal. I remember that Nicholas II was not forgiven for dancing at a reception at the French embassy after the mass death of people on Khodynka. Putin will never be forgiven for opening a Ferris wheel and fireworks in Moscow during the catastrophe of Russian forces in the Kharkiv region. Media activists of the war party are already accusing him of betraying the army, cowardice, disassociation from reality, that he is indifferent to the lives of the inhabitants of the regions who are killed in the war, while his “dear Muscovites” are fattening and having fun.

The main accusation against the Russian authorities from the new radical war party is that they still have not made the war total. The radicals demand: the mobilization and militarization of the economy and industry, the creation of a political centre for managing the country and the war, such as the State Defense Committee during the Second World War, and the partial or complete mobilization of youth and (or) certain categories of reservists for war, carpet bombing, the destruction of control centers, transport arteries and public utilities infrastructure in Ukrainian cities, some even write about the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Already not only the marginal Girkin is the ideologist of this direction, but also the completely systemic Zakhar Prilepin, Yegor Kholmogorov, Alexey Chadayev, he is more cautious but close to them. This ideology is preached by many pro-war publics on Telegram.

The new war party wants to change more than just current politics. The radicals are not satisfied with the very political and economic system of Russia and its luxuriate ruling class, which are simply not suitable for the tasks of war and confrontation with the whole world. For example, Chadaev writes about this: “The Russian Federation, as a “social-institutional organism”, is silently sabotaging all this “gathering of lands”... When it came to the Special Military Operation, it turned out that there was no one to fight, everyone in Moscow at the solemn fireworks on the occasion of City Day and at Shnur's concert in Luzhniki... This is the basic ontology of the system... You can’t get away with a targeted capture of “foreign agents”, in fact, the whole system is one big “foreign agent”.

The radicals need a mobilization totalitarian system completely targeted to the war, as in Nazi Germany or in the Stalinist USSR. The Russian elite is not ready for this. She wants everything in Moscow to be as before, comfortable and well-fed, and the unfortunate and losers from the outback (in fact, natives recruited in the colonies) died in the war. Putin is not ready for such a system either, he is an old lazy sybarite and a narcissist, living in a comfortable world of his own illusions, whose peace is carefully guarded against bad news. Such a subfuhrer will not be able to lead a total war.

A clash between the radical part of the “war party” and the Kremlin is becoming inevitable. But it has no chance without the support of the leadership of law enforcement agencies. There is currently no such support. Only Kadyrov is obviously flirting with the radicals, he is the only one from the Russian elite who publicly reacted to the retreat in Ukraine and even promised, with a slight threat in his voice, to “explain the situation on earth” to the leadership of the country and the Ministry of Defence.

Igor Eidman, Facebook