Even though I studied Russian and Russia for years, it was at the Bolshoi that I really understood the strange mechanics of this huge country. Watching the opera Boris Godunov, as magnificent as it is endless. Tragic above all, like all the operas of Modest Mussorgsky.
The story ? Boyar Boris Godunov ascends the throne after the suspicious death of 8-year-old heir to the Russian Empire, Dimitri. Many suspect the ambitious man of having caused the Tsarevich to disappear. Years later, his power is challenged by a fake Dimitri who claims to be the true heir to the throne. With an army of mercenaries, this impostor goes up to Moscow. The coup is foiled, but seals the fate of Godunov, who dies soon after. The false Dimitri ascends the throne.
You can imagine that I am not writing this column to talk about the musical prowess of opera, but to take a fresh look at its narrative, inspired by a historical novel by Alexander Pushkin.
The composer and the author saw in this story a metaphor for the history of their country. I can’t help seeing striking similarities there with the psychodrama that unfolded on Friday and Saturday in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Here we see Vladimir Putin as Boris Godunov. To keep the power he has held for two decades, the Tsar suppresses all opposition and surrounds himself with shadowy figures.
The darkest of them, Evguéni Prigojine, is a former common law prisoner from Saint Petersburg. He gets closer to Vladimir Putin by organizing for him sumptuous dinners staged to impress the leaders of the whole world who land in Russia.
He comes closer to it by becoming the businessman behind the Wagner group, this army of mercenaries that we saw appear in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and which turned out to be both a formidable weapon of war and a sower of fear and chaos in Syria, in several African countries and again and again in Ukraine, since the beginning of the invasion.
Note also the allusion to the opera. The group of mercenaries takes its name from the nom de guerre of its first military commander, Dmitri Outkine, a big fan of the German composer.
This army of volunteers and infrequent ex-prisoners claims to be independent, but is in fact completely linked to the Kremlin, we learned last year thanks to the excellent documentary Wagner, Putin’s shadow armyby Ksenia Bolchakova and Alexandra Jousset, who won the Albert-Londres Prize in 2022.
Since the end of last year, Wagner’s big boss has not attacked the tsar directly, but rather his defense minister and the general staff, whom he accuses of being at the origin of all Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine. Aware of his power, flanked by his thugs armed to the teeth, Yevgeny Prigojine indulges in criticism of the Russian army that would land anyone else in prison.
For a long time, Russians and most foreign experts have believed that everything is orchestrated by the Kremlin and that Prigozhin has inherited the role of army whipper in a new kind of opera.
But this interpretation of the scenario took its toll when Yevgeny Prigozhin’s men took control of the Rostov base on Friday and their leader announced that he was ready to go to Moscow with an army of 25,000 men. to challenge the Minister of Defence.
There, the Boris Godounov of the 2000s understood that it was his power that was called into question. He understood that he is dealing with the fake Dimitri. Like Boris Godounov, he seems to have thwarted the plan of the man in the shadows, but not without leaving feathers behind. Not without leaving his panache of imperturbable.
Hours after accusing Prigozhin of treason and promising to punish him, Putin brokered peace through an authoritarian leader. It’s quite different from the end of Boris Godunov, you will tell me, but that would be taking it for granted that the curtain has fallen on this opera. Allow me to doubt it.
By composing Boris Godunov, Mussorgsky, like Pushkin, wanted to remind us that Russian power has the gift of being its own best enemy. We saw it repeatedly during the period of the tsars, but also in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, then during Stalin’s purges, which weakened the Red Army on the eve of the Second World War.
History unfortunately seems to have hiccups again.