Law, Power, and Justice

The longer the war in Ukraine lasts, the greater the risk of another Smuta in Russia.
— Read on www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/russias-new-time-troubles

Excerpts:

Ivan the Terrible, whose brutal and disruptive rule ended in 1584. Ivan exhausted his people and his finances by fighting endless wars to expand his realm, primarily in the Baltic. He decimated the Russian elite in a paranoid orgy of executions as he tried to consolidate absolute power. And in a fit of rage, he killed the son who could have succeeded him, transforming the throne into an object of fierce competition among elite clans.

nuclear power with a sophisticated urban population, robust digital economy, and resilient financial system, Russia remains strangely antiquated when it comes to its sociopolitical structures and institutions, in some ways less modern even than the Soviet Union.

Every time Russia begins to more closely resemble modern Europe, some jolt sends the country back to its medieval origins. 

Humanistic and enlightened impulses that for decades propelled Russia’s intellectual and social modernization are now underground. All that is left is a nearly operatic cast of figures: the isolated tsar, the supine patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, the treacherous courtiers, the money-grabbing warlords, and, finally, the audacious pretender—all of them acting according to the ancient scripts.

For a single day, Prigozhin became a pretender to the throne in Moscow—the embodiment of the hopes, expectations, and grievances of millions of people. Yet to the great frustration of many on all sides, he quickly shirked this role.

Prigozhin, by contrast, is a mercenary leader who does not believe in anything. He is a cross between a courtier and a mob boss. He was incensed when his enemies, Putin’s other courtiers, prevailed over him and decided to take away his business, his money, and his private army. He never intended to become the next tsar. And his mutiny was not a careful plot to seize power but rather a desperate act to prevent Wagner from being dissolved.