On the first day of class in the fall of 1924, Martha Lum walked into the Rosedale Consolidated School. The mission-style building had been built three years earlier for white students in Rosedale, Mississippi.

Martha was not a new student. This 9-year-old had attended the public school the previous year. But that was before Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, banning immigrants from Asia and inciting ever more anti-Asian racism inside the United States.

At the time, African Americans were fleeing the virulent racism of the Mississippi Delta in the Great Migration north and west. To replace them, white landowners were recruiting Chinese immigrants like Martha’s father, Gong Lum. But instead of picking cotton, many Chinese immigrants, like Gong and his wife, Katherine, opened up grocery stores, usually in Black neighborhoods, after being shut out of white neighborhoods.

At noon recess, Martha had a visitor. The school superintendent notified her that she had to leave the public school her family’s tax dollars supported, because “she was of Chinese descent, and not a member of the white or Caucasian race.” Martha was told she had to go to the district’s all-Black public school, which had older infrastructure and textbooks, comparatively overcrowded classrooms, and lower-paid teachers.

Gong Lum sued, appealing to the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. All nine justices ruled in favor of school segregation, citing the “separate but equal” doctrine from 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

[Imani Perry: Lessons from Black and Chinese relations in the Deep South]

“A child of Chinese blood, born in and a citizen of the United States, is not denied the equal protection of the law by being classed by the state among the colored races who are assigned to public schools separate from those provided for the whites when equal facilities for education are afforded to both classes,” the Court summarized in Gong Lum v. Rice on November 21, 1927.

A century from now, scholars of racism will look back at today’s Supreme Court decision on affirmative action the way we now look back at Gong Lum v. Rice—as a judicial decision based in legal fantasy. Then, the fantasy was that separate facilities for education afforded to the races were equal and that actions to desegregate them were unnecessary, if not harmful. Today, the fantasy is that regular college-admissions metrics are race-neutral and that affirmative action is unnecessary, if not harmful.

The Supreme Court has effectively outlawed affirmative action using two court cases brought on by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Organized by a legal strategist named Edward Blum, SFFA filed suit on behalf of Asian American applicants to Harvard as well as white and Asian applicants to UNC to claim that their equal-protection rights were violated by affirmative action. Asian and white Americans are overrepresented in the student body at selective private and public colleges and universities that are well funded and have high graduation rates, but they are the victims?

This is indicative of a larger fantasy percolating throughout society: that white Americans, who, on average, stand at the more advantageous end of nearly every racial inequity, are the primary victims of racism. This fantasy is fueling the grievance campaigns of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Americans who oppose affirmative action have been misled into believing that the regular admissions metrics are fair for everyone—and that affirmative action is unfair for white and Asian American applicants.

It is a fantasy that race is considered as an admissions factor only through affirmative action. But the Court endorsed SFFA’s call for “race neutral” admissions in higher education—effectively prohibiting a minor admissions metric such as affirmative action, which closes racial inequities in college admissions, while effectively permitting the major admissions metrics that have long led to racial inequities in college admissions. Against all evidence to the contrary, the Court claimed: “Race-neutral policies may thus achieve the same benefits of racial harmony and equality without … affirmative action policies.” The result of the Court’s decision: a normality of racial inequity. Again.

This is what the Court considers to be fair admissions for students, because the judges consider the major admissions metrics to be “race-neutral”—just as a century ago, the Court considered Mississippi public schools to be “separate but equal.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his majority opinion, recognized “the inherent folly of that approach” but doesn’t recognize the inherent folly of his “race neutral” approach.

History repeats sometimes without rhyming. “Race neutral” is the new “separate but equal.”

The Court today claimed, “Twenty years have passed since Grutter, with no end to race- based college admissions in sight.” In actuality, twenty years have passed, with no end to racial inequity in sight.

Black, Latino, and Indigenous students continue to be underrepresented at the top 100 selective public universities. After affirmative action was outlawed at public universities in California and Michigan in the 1990s, Black enrollment at the most selective schools dropped roughly 50 percent, in some years approaching early-1970s numbers. This lack of diversity harms both students of color and white students.

In its reply brief in the UNC case, SFFA argued that the University of California system enrolls “more underrepresented minorities today than they did under racial preferences,”  referencing the increase of Latino students at UC campuses from 1997 to 2019. But accounting for the increase in Latino students graduating from high school, those gains should be even larger. There’s a 23-point difference between the percentage of high-school graduates in California who are Latino and the percentage of those enrolled in the UC system.

Declines in racial representation and associated harms extend to graduate and professional programs. The UC system produced more Black and Latino medical doctors than the national average in the two decades before affirmative action was banned, and dropped well below the national average in the two decades after.

[Bertrand Cooper: The failure of affirmative action]

Underrepresentation of Black, Latino, and Indigenous students at the most coveted universities isn’t a new phenomenon, it isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t because there is something deficient about those students or their parents or their cultures. Admissions metrics both historically and currently value qualities that say more about access to inherited resources and wealth— computers and counselors, coaches and tutors, college preparatory courses and test prep—than they do about students’ potential. And gaping racial inequities persist in access to each of those elements—as gaping as funding for those so-called equal schools in the segregated Mississippi Delta a century ago.

So what about class? Class-based or income-based interventions disproportionately help white students too, because their family’s low income is least likely to extend to their community and schools. Which is to say that low-income white Americans are far and away less likely than low-income Black and Latino Americans to live in densely impoverished neighborhoods and send their kids to poorly resourced public schools. Researchers find that 80 percent of low-income Black people and 75 percent of low-income Latino people reside in low-income communities, which tend to have lesser-resourced schools, compared with less than 50 percent of low-income white people. (Some Asian American ethnic groups are likely to be concentrated in low-income communities, while others are not; the data are not disaggregated to explore this.) Predominately white school districts, on average, receive $23 billion more than those serving the same number of students of color.

When admissions metrics value SAT, ACT, or other standardized-test scores, they predict not success in college or graduate school, but the wealth or income of the parents of the test takers. This affects applicants along racial lines, but in complex ways. Asian Americans, for example, have higher incomes than African Americans on average, but Asian Americans as a group have the highest income inequality of any racial group. So standardized tests advantage more affluent white Americans and Asian ethnic groups such as Chinese and Indian Americans while disadvantaging Black Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans, and poorer Asian ethnic groups such as Burmese and Hmong Americans. But standardized tests, like these other admissions metrics, are “race neutral”?

Standardized tests mostly favor students with access to score-boosting test prep. A multibillion-dollar test-prep and tutoring industry was built on this widespread understanding. Companies that openly sell their ability to boost students’ scores are concentrated in immigrant and Asian American communities. But some Asian American ethnic groups, having lower incomes, have less access to high-priced test-prep courses.

Besides all of this, the tests themselves have racist origins. Eugenicists introduced standardized tests a century ago in the United States to prove the genetic intellectual superiority of wealthy white Anglo-Saxon men. These “experimental” tests would show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture,” the Stanford University psychologist and eugenicist Lewis Terman wrote in his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence. Another eugenicist, the Princeton University psychologist Carl C. Brigham, created the SAT test in 1926. SAT originally stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” aptitude meaning “natural ability to do something.”

Why are advocates spending millions to expand access to test prep when a more effective and just move is to ban the use of standardized tests in admissions? Such a ban would help not only Black, Native, and Latino students but also low-income white and Asian American students.

Some selective colleges that went test-optional during the pandemic welcomed some of their most racially and economically diverse classes, after receiving more applications than normal from students of color. For many students of color, standardized tests have been a barrier to applying, even before being a barrier to acceptance. Then again, even where colleges and universities, especially post-pandemic, have gone test-optional, we can reasonably assume or suspect that students who submit their scores are viewed more favorably.

When admissions committees at selective institutions value students whose parents and grandparents attended that institution, this legacy metric ends up giving preferential treatment to white applicants. Almost 70 percent of all legacy applicants for the classes of 2014–19 at Harvard were white.

College athletes are mostly white and wealthy—because most collegiate sports require resources to play at a high level. White college athletes make up 70 to 85 percent of athletes in most non-revenue-generating sports (with the only revenue-generating sports usually being men’s basketball and football). And student athletes, even ones who are not gaming the system, receive immense advantages in the admissions process, thus giving white applicants yet another metric by which they are the most likely to receive preferential treatment. Even Harvard explained as part of its defense that athletes had an advantage in admissions over nonathletes, which conferred a much greater advantage to white students over Asian American students than any supposed disadvantage that affirmative action might create. And white students benefit from their relatives being more likely to have the wealth to make major donations to highly selective institutions. And white students benefit from their parents being overrepresented on the faculty and staff at colleges and universities. Relatives of donors and children of college employees normally receive an admissions boost.

Putting this all together, one study found that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard were recruited athletes, legacy students, the children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list (as relatives of donors)—compared with only 16 percent of Black, Latino, and Asian American students. About 75 percent of white admitted students “would have been rejected” if they hadn’t been in those four categories, the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found.

While private and public universities tout “diversity” recruitment efforts, their standard recruitment strategies concentrate on high-income students who are predominantly white and Asian, at highly resourced schools, positioned to have higher grade point averages and test scores that raise college rankings. Public colleges and universities facing declines in state and federal funding actively recruit white and wealthy out-of-state students who pay higher fees. At many institutions, including a UC campus, “admission by exception,” a practice originally promoted as a means of expanding opportunities for disadvantaged groups, has been used to enroll international students with the resources to pay U.S. tuition fees.

Targeting international students of color to achieve greater diversity on campus disadvantages American students of color. Targeting students from families who can pay exorbitant out-of-state fees benefits white families, who have, on average, 10 times the household net worth of Black families.

Affirmative action attempted to compensate not just for these metrics that give preferential treatment to white students, but also for the legacy of racism in society. This legacy is so deep and wide that affirmative action has rightly been criticized as a superficial, Band-Aid solution. Still, it has been the only admissions policy that pushes against the deep advantages that white Americans receive in the other admissions metrics under the cover of “race neutral.”

[Issa Kohler-Hausmann: No one knows what ‘race neutral’ admissions looks like]

If anti-affirmative-action litigants and judges were really supportive of “race neutrality”—if they were really against “racial preferences”—then they would be going after regular admissions practices. But they are not, because the regular admissions metrics benefit white and wealthy students.

Litigants and judges continue to use Asian Americans as political footballs to maintain these racial preferences for white and wealthy students. Particularly in the Harvard case, SFFA’s Edward Blum used Asian plaintiffs to argue that affirmative action harms Asian American applicants. No evidence of such racist discrimination was found in the lower courts. According to an amicus brief filed by 1,241 social scientists, the so-called race-neutral admissions policy SFFA advocated for (which was just adopted by the highest Court) would actually harm Asian American applicants. It denies Asian American students the ability to express their full self in their applications, including experiences with racism, which can contextualize their academic achievements or struggles and counter racist ideas. This is especially the case with Hmong and Cambodian Americans, who have rates of poverty similar to or higher than those of Black Americans. Pacific Islander Americans have a higher rate of poverty than the average American.

Pitting Asian and Black Americans against each other is an age-old tactic. Martha Lum’s parents didn’t want to send their daughter to a “colored” school, because they knew that more resources could be found in the segregated white schools. Jim Crow in the Mississippi Delta a century ago motivated the Lums to reinforce anti-Black racism—just as some wealthy Asian American families bought into Blum’s argument for “race neutral” admissions to protect their own status. Yet “separate but equal” closed the school door on the Lums. “Race neutral” is doing the same. Which is why 38 Asian American organizations jointly filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of affirmative action at Harvard and UNC.

A century ago, around the time the Court stated that equal facilities for education were being afforded to both races, Mississippi spent $57.95 per white student compared with $8.86 per Black student in its segregated schools. This racial inequity in funding existed in states across the South: Alabama ($47.28 and $13.32), Florida ($61.29 and $18.58), Georgia ($42.12 and $9.95), North Carolina ($50.26 and $22.34), and South Carolina ($68.76 and $11.27). “Separate but equal” was a legal fantasy, meant to uphold racist efforts to maintain these racial inequities and strike down anti-racist efforts to close them.

Homer Plessy had sued for being kicked off the “whites only” train car in New Orleans in 1892. About four years later, the Court deployed the “separate but equal” doctrine to work around the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause to defend the clearly unequal train cars and the exclusion of Black Americans like Plessy from better-equipped “whites only” cars. Later, the Court used the same doctrine to exclude Asian Americans like Martha Lum from better-equipped “whites only” schools.

The “separate but equal” doctrine was the Court’s stamp to defend the structure of racism. Just as Plessy v. Ferguson’s influence reached far beyond the railway industry more than a century ago, the fantasy of “race neutral” alternatives to affirmative action defends racism well beyond higher education. Evoking “race neutrality,” Justice Clarence Thomas recently dissented from the Supreme Court decision upholding a provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that prohibits racist gerrymandering.  

Now that “racial neutrality” is the doctrine of the land, as “separate but equal” was a century ago, we need a new legal movement to expose its fantastical nature. It was nearly a century ago that civil-rights activists in the NAACP and other organizations were gearing up for a legal movement to expose the fantasy of “separate but equal.” In this new legal movement, defenders of affirmative action can no longer use the false framing of affirmative action as “race conscious” and the regular admissions metrics as “race neutral”—a framing that has been used at least since the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision in 1978, which limited the use of affirmative action. Racist and anti-racist is a more accurate framing than “race neutral” and “race conscious.”  

[From the September 2021 issue: This is the end of affirmative action]

Affirmative-action policies are anti-racist because they have been proved to reduce racial inequities, while many of the regular admissions metrics are racist because they maintain racial inequities. To frame policies as “race neutral” or “not racist” or “race blind” because they don’t have racial language—or because the policy makers deny a racist intent—is akin to framing Jim Crow’s grandfather clauses and poll taxes and literacy tests as “race neutral” and “not racist,” even as these policies systematically disenfranchised southern Black voters. Then again, the Supreme Court allowed these Jim Crow policies for decades on the basis that they were, to use today’s term, “race neutral.” Then again, voter-suppression policies today that target Black, Latino, and Indigenous voters have been allowed by a Supreme Court that deems them “race neutral.” Jim Crow lives in the guise of “racial neutrality.”

Everyone should know that the regular admission metrics are the racial problem, not affirmative action. Everyone knew that racial separation in New Orleans and later Rosedale, Mississippi, was not merely separation; it was segregation. And segregation, by definition, cannot be equal. Segregationist policies are racist policies. Racial inequities proved that then.

The Court stated in today’s ruling, “By 1950, the inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment had thus begun to reemerge: Separate cannot be equal.” But it still does not want to acknowledge another inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment that has emerged today: Race cannot be neutral.

Today, racial inequities prove that policies proclaimed to be “race neutral” are hardly neutral. Race, by definition, has never been neutral. In a multiracial United States with widespread racial inequities in wealth, health, and higher education, policies are not “race neutral.” Policies either expand or close existing racial inequities in college admissions and employment. The “race neutral” doctrine is upholding racist efforts to maintain racial inequities and striking down anti-racist efforts to close racial inequities.

Race, by definition, has never been blind. Even Justice John Harlan, who proclaimed, “Our Constitution is color-blind” in his dissent of Plessy v. Ferguson, prefaced that with this declaration: “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country” and “it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage.”

In the actual world, the “color-blind” often see their color as superior, as Harlan did. In the actual world, an equal-protection clause in a constitution can be transfigured by legal fantasy yet again to protect racial inequity.

“Separate but equal” then. “Race neutral” now.

When we write history, it tends to be tidy and led by great men. In real time, it’s messy but still astonishing. Last weekend, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who leads a private army called the Wagner Group, attempted what many have called a coup against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Technically, it failed. He landed in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, pledged to march to Moscow, and then turned around. Nothing about this series of events suggests expert planning or high competence. Prigozhin is a former prisoner and a former hotdog salesman. Staff writer Tom Nichols puts him in a league with “gangsters” and “clowns.”

But sometimes gangsters and clowns are the ones who shake up the established order. Prigozhin’s march lasted barely 48 hours, yet it seems to have changed the conversation about Russia. Putin appears shaken and, as staff writer Anne Applebaum put it, “panicky.” His response to such a direct threat has been surprisingly tentative. The mutiny may have technically failed, but it left some revolutionary thoughts in people’s minds. Putin is not, in fact, invulnerable. Which means Russians might have a choice.

In this episode, Atlantic staff writers Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols explain this week’s wild turn of events in Russia and the door those events opened.

“We’ve lived with Putin for 23 years. We’ve kind of internalized his narrative that he’s untouchable and he can stay forever, and that he reigned supreme,” Nichols says about this remarkable moment. “That’s gone. And so I think it’s a pretty natural thing to wonder: If he’s not that powerful and if he doesn’t have that kind of support, how long can he remain in power?”

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Over the weekend, something wild happened in Russia. A man named Yevgeny Prigozhin seemed to start a rebellion. His private army, the Wagner Group, fights alongside Russian troops in Ukraine. But this weekend they turned their guns against Russia itself. They took over a major southern city called Rostov-on-Don and then pledged to march on Moscow, making it hundreds of miles before turning around.

Was this a mutiny? Was it a failed coup? People are debating Prigozhin’s motives and whether he thought he had internal support. Zooming out, though, what it means is that one man—a guy who was in prison, then became a hotdog salesman, and then rose up to become a loyal protégé of President Vladimir Putin—turned on Putin, humiliated him, and somehow survived. We’ve been told that Prigozhin is now in Belarus. Anyway, the news is moving quickly and there’s been lots of speculation. Two people I trust to ground us are Atlantic staff writers Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols.

So Tom, the past week’s events in Russia have been called a coup and a mutiny; however, you refer to it as a falling-0out among gangsters. What did you mean by that?

Tom Nichols: Well, the problem is that the Russian state is a conglomeration of power players who are much like the five families—you know, in the old Godfather movie—these are mobsters, and Putin is the gangster in chief. But he has capos under him. And there was some issue there about territory and control with Prigozhin and his forces, who were going to be pulled in under another one of Putin’s cronies, the minister of defense.

And, um, things got outta control.

Rosin: So how does Prigozhin fit into that picture? Sort of where is he in the gangster taxonomy?

Nichols: Well, he’s got his own crew. He’s a powerful captain. He’s got his own army. He has, you know, 25,000 well-armed, battle-hardened men who answer to him. And another capo was threatening to take that away from him, and he wasn’t going to stand for that.

Rosin: So you see it less as a geopolitical battle than just an internal fight for power between two people?

Nichols: People have multiple motivations for doing things. I think a lot of what Prigozhin tapped into is real. People are, both in the military and back home, fed up with the way that the guys in Moscow have run this war and taken immense casualties and pretty much gotten nowhere. I mean, that’s a real thing.

It’s a real problem, but it’s also in part a struggle for power among these players. So there are multiple things going on here and, and not all of them, I think, are clear to us over here right now.

Rosin: Right. So Anne, looking towards the real motives that Tom brought up, Prigozhin has for a long time been openly criticizing the war in Ukraine and the motives for the war in Ukraine. What types of things has he been saying, and why do you think they struck a chord?

Anne Applebaum: For the last several weeks and months, really, Prigozhin has been blaming the leaders of the army, the leaders of the military, for failing to provide leadership, failing to provide equipment. I mean, he’s focused in particular on the minister of defense, [Sergei] Shoigu and the army chief of the general staff.

And he talks about them using very insulting language. He talks about Shoigu, you know, living a luxury life. And [Valery] Gerasimov being a paranoid, crazy person who shouts at people. These are very personal anecdotal descriptions of them. Um, which may well ring a bell among people around them as something that’s true.

More recently, and right before his strange ride to Moscow, he came out with a much more substantive critique. In other words, he began talking about the causes of the war itself. He said, well, the war was—the only reason we’re fighting this war is because Shoigu wants to advance. He wants to be a marshal. You know, he wants a better rank.

And because lots of people in Moscow were making money off of the 2014 occupations of Ukraine territories in the east that they gained at that time, and they want more. They got greedy and wanted more.

In other words, it’s not a war for empire. It’s not about the glory of Russia. It’s not about NATO. It’s not about any of the things that Putin has said. It’s just about greedy people wanting more. The appeal of this narrative is that it’s very comfortable for Russians to hear that there’s a reason why they’re failing. You know that there are specific people to blame.

Rosin: And you mean failing in the war in Ukraine?

Applebaum: I mean failing in the war in Ukraine in that they were supposed to conquer the country in three days and that didn’t happen. There’s been massive casualties [and] losses of equipment. It may also have an echo among people who want someone to blame for general misery. The economy hasn’t been going well for a while. People can see corruption all around them. It’s not like it’s a big secret. And pinning it on specific people saying these guys are responsible for failure might be something that a lot of Russians want to hear.

Rosin: Yeah. I can see as you guys are talking how it can be both a gangster war and something that is sincere and taps into a true vein of discontent. Like, it can be both of those things at the same time. Now, this question is for either of you: We are getting news trickling out this week about the possibility that Prigozhin had some kind of support in the Russian military. If that’s true, and I know that’s a big if, what does that change about how we should understand the situation?

Applebaum: So I assumed he had some kind of support in the military, both because of the way he behaved in Rostov-on-Don, where he seemed chummy with the generals at the head of the Southern Military District and where his soldiers were tolerated and almost welcomed in the city. He couldn’t have done that and he couldn’t have kept going without somebody being on his side. And it seems like he expected more, or he thought there would be more support, so that doesn’t surprise me at all. I mean, the precise names of who it was and what their motives were, I don’t think we really know that yet, although there have been concrete names mentioned in the press. But he clearly expected something more to happen.

Nichols: Yeah, I agree with Anne. I don’t think you march on Rostov-on-Don and then turn north toward Moscow and think that you’re on your own. There may have been some specific people that he had spoken to, but I think there was also a larger expectation—because remember, Prigozhin’s a pretty arrogant guy, and there is a lot of discontent in the Russian military—that he was just expecting that there would be units that he would just pick up along the way or that around Moscow would get word of this and say: We’re on your side.

And I’ve been curious about Putin’s tentativeness, his procrastination and all this, and I wonder, given these reports, whether he had concerns himself about which units—if he ordered an attack or if he wanted to do something more demonstrative—which units would actually obey his orders or which units would actually stay with him or join the mutiny if they were forced to make a choice. But again, we can’t know that for sure. But it certainly makes a lot of sense that Prigozhin wasn’t going to do this without having spoken to somebody in Moscow and in Rostov-on-Don.

Rosin: Right. So the reason this continues to be a live issue is because it matters who supported him. It matters because it speaks to the degree of insecurity on Putin’s side, and it speaks to sort of how strong the discontent is.

Nichols: It matters because it says that the Russian government and the Russian high command have serious stresses and cracks that are now obvious that had been either smaller early on and hidden, or that had somehow been papered over. But the idea that somehow Putin is completely in charge and invulnerable to challenges—that’s gone.

Rosin: Yeah, and that’s important. Now, Anne, if Prigozhin, as you say, was aiming for something bigger and it didn’t quite work out or technically failed, as we talk about it we still have to grapple with what happened on the other side, which is that he arrived in a Russian city and the citizens kind of shrugged. What did that tell you?

Applebaum: So I thought that was quite significant. We’ve all read many times these somber analyses of so-called polling data from Russia saying that people support Putin. What this showed was that the citizens of Rostov-on-Don weren’t particularly bothered that a brutal warlord showed up in the city, said he wanted to change some things and get them done.

Maybe he was going to go and take Putin’s people down. Maybe he was going to go and take Putin himself down. And they applauded him and they were taking selfies with him. And they started chanting when the Wagner Group was pulling out of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday evening—they were chanting, “Wagner, Wagner” in the streets.

That shows that the support for Putin is pretty weak. It’s passive. He’s the guy there and we don’t see any alternatives, but the instant an alternative emerges, well, you know, that might be interesting. I mean, Prigozhin is not exactly an attractive figure, but maybe from their point of view, he’s more honest; he seems more effective.

And as I said in the beginning, he’s offering them an explanation that’s psychologically comfortable. Why is this war going so badly? Why haven’t we won? Why is everything so corrupt? Why is the army so dysfunctional? Why are so many people dying?

Okay, well he just gave us a reason. The reason is because there are these corrupt generals in charge and they’re doing a bad job. And that’s something that people would like to hear. They want an explanation for this strange war that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere and is only causing damage.

Rosin: Now, Tom, in the aftermath of all of this, Putin has given a statement talking about treason, not naming Prigozhin explicitly. And given what Anne just said, and what you just said about how strong a challenge this actually is, what is this hesitation about? I mean, this whole incident could have ended with Prigozhin dead, but instead he’s in Belarus, or we think he’s in Belarus. And he’s alive, or we think he’s alive.

Nichols: I think both of them are feeling about to figure out who their allies are and they’re both making appeals to society that are meant to isolate. In Putin’s case, he’s just isolating Prigozhin without naming him, saying: Hey, all you heavily armed crack commando mercenary guys, I understand that you were led astray. And it’s okay to come home.

So when he talks about traitors, I mean, this isn’t Stalinism. He’s not saying, Oh, that whole unit, they’re all dead. He’s trying to plant internal divisions there. As is Prigozhin, who has been really careful to say, Look, I’m not trying to overthrow the president. I’m not trying to overthrow the government. But these two guys at the top, Shoigu and Gerasimov, the minister of defense and the chief of the general staff, they gotta go. And if I have to march to Moscow to get them out, then that’s what I’m going to do.

So they’re both being very careful not to proliferate more enemies in society or among the other elites than they need to. Now, for Prigozhin, that makes sense. For Putin, that’s very revealing. I mean, he’s the president of the country and here he is, kind of tiptoeing around, trying not to aggravate thousands of armed men who were part of a mutiny. So while they’re both doing the same thing, I think it’s really revealing that one of them happens to be the president of the country.

Rosin: Yeah, and as much as I understand the iconography of Putin is important—who’s weak, who’s strong—as a unit of analysis. Strong man, shirtless on a horse, does not necessarily wanna lose out to a hotdog-salesman ex-prisoner.

Nichols: Right. He actually appeared in public the first two times—he looked awful; I mean, it looked like a bunker video—where he is standing in front of a desk and he’s kind of raging to the camera. He finally came out again with all of the pomp and all the trappings of his office, coming down the big staircase and the honor guard snapping to attention.

And addressing the troops, the officers, he said something really interesting. He said: You prevented a civil war. Which is not true. Nobody actually did that. It’s certainly not true that the army put down a civil war in the offing. Nothing like that happened, and to make that appeal is to try to pull the military closer to the president, to say: You’re my heroes. I know you saved the country and you will keep saving the country. Which to me was a really striking thing to do. Again, as you and everybody’s been pointing out, Prigozhin is still—at least we think—still alive and running around issuing statements.

Rosin: So what comes next? After the break, we speculate. But with restraint.

[BREAK]

Rosin: Now, because both of you have studied the situation so closely, my natural temptation is to lob a lot of future-prediction questions at you. Like, what does this mean for Ukraine and what does the weakened Putin mean for a global order? Is it just too hard to speculate?

Applebaum: I feel there are so many missing pieces of this story and so many oddities about it that don’t add up. I would need to know more before I would be confident about telling you that, you know, at 7 o’clock on September the first, X or Y will happen next. Almost everything we know about this story, I mean, it’s like the shadows on Plato’s Cave, you know? We’re seeing the reflections of activities. There are these Russian military bloggers who you have to follow in order to understand any of this. And of course, they’re telling the story from their point of view.

State television is telling it from Putin’s propaganda point of view. It’s not as if we have a reliable source of information who will lay it out for us and give us the facts. Even the story as we’re speaking. I mean, this may even change before this podcast comes out, but as we’re speaking, we’ve been told by several very unreliable people that Prigozhin is in Belarus,—by the Russian spokesman and by the Belarussian.

And, you know, those people have lied so many times that until I see a photograph of Prigozhin, I don’t believe it. He’s gotta have a photograph of him in Minsk and I need to know that it’s not Photoshopped. And then I’m sure it’s true. So that’s why I think it’s very hard to—you don’t wanna make too many sweeping conclusions yet.

I mean, we know what we saw on Saturday. And what we saw on Saturday was a mutiny, and it did demonstrate far more weakness in the state and unpreparedness than anybody was certain was there. We know that Putin was the first to start using the language of civil war. He did it on Saturday morning, and so that indicates that he at least thinks something very serious was happening.

Which is an indication, again, that there may be more to the story to come, but making clear predictions about what will happen, certainly to the war in Ukraine—I mean, I’m not sure yet that it has affected the war in Ukraine. Maybe it will affect Russian troop morale. Maybe it lets us know that there will be more trouble with the military command.

But it hasn’t had a specific effect on the ground yet that we can see. And until that happens, I’m just reluctant to make too many predictions.

Nichols: Yeah, I think when it comes to the war in Ukraine, too many people have had this idea that all the Russian forces are going to stop and say, No, wait. We’re not going to fight until we get this sorted out. Um, they’re still fighting. The situation at the front is the situation at the front, and that doesn’t really change because of this.

So what Ukraine has to do, and the support we need to give them—that doesn’t change … the reluctance to prognosticate. Well, you know, there were a lot of people who said the Soviet Union couldn’t fall. People that study Russia have figured out that you can get burned on these predictions, in part because when you’re predicting stuff, you tend to be predicting the behavior of institutions writ large because you know how they operate. This is all contingent on individuals, and trying to predict the behavior of these kind of Mafia-like characters is really difficult to do, because that could all change in a moment when they decide to shift alliances or one of them runs afoul of another of them.

So I’m with Anne here. I don’t want to get too detailed about what’s going to happen next week … This definitely wounded Putin and he is in a different situation than he was.

I don’t think there’s any going back to sort of pre-June in Russian politics right now.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean that’s important enough. As you were talking, Tom, I was thinking if you write the histories of a lot of mutinies and coups, they do start with an action by someone who seems like a gangster and seems to be behaving in a ridiculous way. Like, coups can start in ridiculous ways.

Applebaum: It is also true that coups and mutinies that don’t succeed can have an impact on politics too. And there’s some famous examples from Russian history: There’s a revolution that doesn’t succeed in 1905, but it had a profound impact on the state. It forced the czar, Nicholas, to pass a constitution and create a Duma—a Parliament.

It very much changed the way that he was perceived. And then in the run-up to the Russian Revolution in 1917, there were also a number of strikes and moments, you know, and other, different kinds of events that happened. And some of them were unsuccessful. The Bolsheviks had a march that was unsuccessful, but ultimately there was a revolution.

They did take power. And those earlier events, you know, looked retrospectively more important than they may have seemed at the time. And it’s too early to say whether that’s what this is. But it’s clearly the case though that a failed event can have political consequences even beyond those of the immediate moment.

Nichols: Right. The 1991 coup was a complete clown show, and it failed. The guy that was actually was supposed to step in as president and replace Gorbachev was, like, drunk all the time, and the whole thing was just a complete mess. But it had a profound impact on the final days of the Soviet Union and on the collapse of the Soviet empire and the emergence of the countries of the post-Soviet space. Most mutinies and coups don’t succeed, but as Anne pointed out, they can have an immense impact just because they happened at all.

Rosin: Now all I wanna do is ask you guys to speculate, because now it’s very interesting. Now I’m thinking: Okay, so which directions does it go? You know, Is there a future for Prigozhin? Is he making a play to replace Putin one day? Are there other Prigozhins out there? I mean, are any of those answerable questions?

Applebaum: I think you can talk about options. Again, you can look at the past. It seems to me, in the case of Putin, one possibility is: Now that there’s been a challenge that didn’t succeed but that revealed weakness, will there be more challenges? And so you might say, Well, that’s clearly now an option in a way that it wasn’t before last week.

You could also guess that Putin might now try another crackdown. What do leaders do who have been weakened? Leaders like him. Dictators. Well, one of the things they do is they lash out and they try and reestablish their preeminence or their dominance. And they do that by arresting people or purging people. I don’t know what that would be in the case of modern Russia. Cutting off the internet? Or shutting the borders? I mean, you can sort of imagine scenarios, because he will now need to make up for the fact that he’s seen to be weaker. And I’m not saying either one of those will happen, but those are things that, based on how these things have played out in other times in other places, you can guess at.

Rosin: Yeah. Anne, as you look at this, I’m trying to put myself in your head. You’re sort of looking at the dictator’s playbook, watching how he rewrites the story of what just happened in real time and trying to see what other dictators would do or have done in the past. Is that how you track these events?

Applebaum: Yes. And I’m also thinking of Russian history. In the history of the Soviet Communist Party, every time there was a failure or a disaster, they would try to re-up the ideology and sort of restart the project and crack down. It goes in waves, all the way from 1917 up to 1991. And you can imagine a similar pattern working itself out here, yes.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: I feel like I’m going back to the toolbox of the old-school Sovietology that I learned back in the 1980s. And so, rather than prognosticate, I’ll just say the things I’m looking for. I’m literally now looking at videos of who’s sitting next to whom at these meetings. Who’s still in. Who might be out.

I’m looking for personnel changes. Does the minister of defense survive? Does the chief of the general staff get replaced? This now becomes kind of a game of trying to follow all of these people and their portfolios as some kind of indicator of what’s actually happening behind the scenes.

Rosin: Tom, what’s the larger through line you’re tracking? You’re tracking the chess pieces—who’s going here and who’s falling off the board—but what’s the bigger story?

Nichols: I think it’s going to be: Is Putin trying to shore up his power base or is there an alternative base forming against him? I think that’s the thing to watch. You know, we’ve lived with Putin for 23 years seeming to be [invincible], except for when he first arrived in power and when he had a serious challenge around 2011.

We’ve kind of internalized his narrative that he’s untouchable and he can stay forever. And that he reigns supreme. That’s gone. And so I think it’s a pretty natural thing to wonder: If he’s not that powerful and if he doesn’t have that kind of support, how long can he remain in power?

Because until now he has made sure that there were no alternatives to him. And I think what Prigozhin did was to say, well, there could be at least some alternative. Maybe not good ones. But you can in fact oppose this guy and criticize his team and get away with it.

Rosin: Yeah. Basically, Russians, you might have a choice. That’s as much as we can say.

Nichols: Not a great choice, but a choice somewhere.

Rosin: Yeah. Anne, this may be a strange way to put it, but is there a sense that this incident exposes how alone, or kind of lost in his own head, Putin is? He conceived of the war in isolation. The military was never necessarily enthusiastic. Now we have a vision of him not exactly sure who his allies are and who’s on his team, and I just got this vision of: dictator alone.

Applebaum: So we’ve had intimations of that for a couple of years now. In fact, Prigozhin himself has hinted that Putin doesn’t really know what’s going on [and] they’re lying to him. And many others have said that too. So we’ve already had this idea that he doesn’t really know what’s going on on the battlefield. And this incident did make it seem like he also didn’t really know what was going on at home.

I mean, for someone who’s now saying they had foreknowledge of this, he didn’t react like somebody who was confident of the outcome. The speech he gave on Saturday morning was panicky. It was about the civil war in 1917 and “our nation is at stake.”

He didn’t give off the impression of someone who was staying in charge. And so there very much is the impression that he somehow lives in this by himself, surrounded by security guards in some bunker. And that feels more and more like an accurate description of his life.

Rosin: Yeah. Well, I guess a lot more to come this week. This year. For a while. But thank you both for helping us understand what just happened.

Applebaum: Thanks.

Nichols: Thank you.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic. Engineering is by Rob Smerciak. Fact-checking by Yvonne Kim. Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance. Our podcast team includes Jocelyn Frank, Becca Rashid, Ethan Brooks, A. C. Valdez, and Vann Newkirk. We’ll be back with new episodes every Thursday. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.