Fear of retribution, the iron that held together the Russian Imperial army, had begun to dissolve in a strange ferment. “The lives of the officers has become impossible,” read a prophetic intelligence report issued in September 1918. “In the 470th Regiment, for example, the regimental soldiers’ committee passed a resolution to interrogate each officer on his political convictions. In the 731 Regiment, a huge crowd gathered and a soldier-orator declared that all commanders were counter-revolutionaries. The Second Pskov Dragoons put all their officers under house arrest.”

The historian Orlando Figes famously observed that Russian President Vladimir Putin sees himself as heir to the imperial tsars—their magnificence, their total power, and their territorial ambitions. Like a child, he has shown himself an enthusiast for period sets and pantomime, but a poor student of history.

Warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny over the weekend proved brief—but it has irretrievably shattered the illusions on which Putin’s authority is built. Irrespective of what happens next, it is clear the bodies Putin had sacrificed were not the foundations for Russian glory.

That realisation—not a stab in the back, as Putin claims—would lead tsar Nicholas II, known in the Russian Orthodox Church as Saint Nicholas the Passion-Bearer, to his execution at the merchant Ipatiev’s modest house outside Yekaterinburg, together with his entire family.

The revenge of the lambs

From the summer of 1914 to the end of 1918, imperial Russia mobilised some 5,100,000 men into its standing army of 1,400,000. The next summer, another 2,300,000 were drafted. The overwhelming peasant conscripts, contemporary racial cliché held, were made up of semi-human simpletons, who would march like lambs as the tsar held up his jewelled sceptre. “The Russian soldier,” Times of London journalist Stanley Washburn gushed in 1915, was the most good-natured, child-like, playful creature.”

The carnage was neither playful nor good-natured. By 1917, 587,357 had been killed outright, or died of their wounds. A staggering 2,720,000 others were taken prisoner or otherwise lost.

To read more: https://theprint.in/opinion/security-code/putin-sees-himself-as-a-tsar-hes-even-repeating-their-deadly-mistakes/1641492/