Why Putin needs to watch his back

It is impossible to predict when the memories of the Soviet Union’s quagmire in Afghanistan — the zinc-lined coffins and the unmarked graves — will result in resentment, then anger, then mass protests.

It is for just such an eventuality that Putin set up the national guard, under his former bodyguard Viktor Zolotov, in 2016. Borrowing from the police and entirely absorbing the former special riot troops (known as the OMON), the guard, which in the past six years has grown to an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 men, is supposed to be utterly loyal to the Kremlin. However, it is one thing to bash the heads of students in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and another to shoot at the mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine. If the guardsmen hesitate, the military will not come to Putin’s rescue, while the oligarchs might be emboldened enough to donate to the protesters, as their Ukrainian counterparts did during the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Maidan Revolution of 2014.

The Russian national tradition is unforgiving of military setbacks. Virtually every major defeat has resulted in radical change. The Crimean War (1853-1856) precipitated Emperor Alexander II’s liberal revolution from above. The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) brought about the First Russian Revolution. The catastrophe of World War I resulted in Emperor Nicholas II’s abdication and the Bolshevik Revolution. And the war in Afghanistan became a key factor in Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.