There are two pieces of good news in Putin’s replacing General Sergei Surovikin as the commander of Russia’s troops in Ukraine with Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov.
The more immediate and obvious tiding is that the substitution can be described by a Russian saying of exchanging a needle for soap (shilo na mylo)—roughly the equivalent of saying “six of one, half a dozen of the other.”
Appointed only a few months ago, Surovikin’s only signal achievement was a more or less orderly retreat from Kherson, which fell to the Armed Forces of Ukraine in November of last year.
Gerasimov, who a few years ago sent some western military theorists into a tizzy with his “hybrid war” doctrine, may be a good theoretician, but, as presumably one of the architects of the invasion, has failed miserably in real war.
If this is the best Putin can do, Ukraine and its supporters in the West ought not to worry about the enemy’s tactical, let alone strategic, acumen. Russia’s march to an increasingly distant victory will likely continue as it started: as a slog over the corpses of its soldiers.
Yet it is hard to believe that the vast Russian military would be so utterly bereft of gifted general officers. The reason for Putin’s choice may lie in the national political tradition. Like most authoritarian regimes, yet perhaps with greater determination and consistency, Russia’s rulers had always been wary of their top generals. With the notable exceptions of the 18th-century Alexander Suvorov and Grigory Potemkin, Russia’s finest generals were eventually shunted aside (or worse) in favor of lightweights and nonentities. As the great Russian poet Joseph Brodsky wrote on the occasion of Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s death, an entire page in Russian history could be devoted to the country’s conquering heroes who “boldly entered foreign capitals but dreaded returning to their own.”
The fear of “caesarism” propelled early Soviet leaders to indulge Stalin’s hatred of Leon Trotsky, who had won the civil war. Having executed all the Soviet Marshals, starting with the brilliant Mikhail Tukhachevsky, and spared only nincompoops like Semyon Budyonny and Klement Voroshilov, Stalin would not vest Zhukov with full command of the Soviet army until the Germans were at the gates of Moscow in the fall of 1941—and exiled him to the Ural Military District shortly after the war.
Hence the second piece of good news: For all Putin’s preening, for all his blistering rhetoric of supreme confidence and praise of his subjects’ unity, patriotism, and devotion, his choice of faithful mediocrities reveals fears about his army’s loyalty.
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