Wars, especially unpopular wars, breed revolutions. And revolutions are unpredictable. News reports indicate that the Wagner Group mercenaries under the leadership of Yevgeny Prigozhin took control of military headquarters in Voronezh and Rostov-on-Don, and are headed toward Moscow in an effort to bring about regime change in Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to the nation on Saturday and vowed to crush the rebellion. Other reports indicate that Putin may have fled Moscow in a plane destined for St. Petersburg, but the Kremlin has denied those reports. Meanwhile, Ukrainian leaders are boasting that this is a sign of Russian weakness and the impending collapse of Putin’s regime. Those familiar with Russian history are wondering whether these events will resemble 1905 or 1917.

In 1905, during an unpopular and unsuccessful war against Japan, the Russian monarchy was nearly toppled as workers’ strikes broke out in major cities, peasant groups rose up in the countryside, and liberal and leftist political parties demanded reforms. Some Russian armed forces even joined the rebellion, and nationalist rebellions emerged in non-Russian parts of the empire. Nicholas II, following the advice of Count Sergei Witte, instituted political reforms (including an elected Duma or parliament), regained control of the army, cracked down on radical groups, and negotiated an end to the war. But to paraphrase the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo, it was a close-run thing. The Romanov dynasty barely survived.

It did not survive the 1917 revolution, which like 1905 resulted from an unpopular and unsuccessful war. In February–March 1917, strikes and riots again broke out in major cities across Russia. And this time the armed forces, bled by a war that Russia was wholly unprepared for, did not stay loyal to the monarchy. The result was chaos and eventually the rise to power of a weak Provisional Government that forced the Tsar to abdicate but continued to fight the war against Germany and its allies. The German government sent Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin to Russia, in Winston Churchill’s words, “in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus” to undermine the government. Lenin promised bread, land, and peace, and the Bolsheviks seized power in a coup de état in October-November 1917.

But the Bolshevik seizure of power did not end the turmoil in Russia. Instead, it led to a civil war between the “Reds” and the “Whites” which lasted for four years and cost millions more lives. War once again led to revolution, which led to anarchy, a military coup, and civil war.

Lenin’s Communist Party regime lasted until 1991, when the end of the Cold War resulted in regime change in Russia. This time an unsuccessful Cold War led to a political revolution with great hopes that Russia could escape its tragic history. But it was not to be. Russia’s brief “democratic” experiment under Boris Yeltsin was snuffed out by the rise of Vladimir Putin who brought autocracy back to power in Russia and sought to reclaim parts of the empire. Putin seized the Crimea in 2014 and invaded Ukraine in 2022. That war, too, has been unsuccessful and increasingly unpopular, and led to today’s rebellious events.

Will Putin be able to survive today’s rebellion as Nicholas II did in 1905, or will Russia’s armed forces — who have suffered the most among Russians from Putin’s war — abandon the regime in a replay of 1917? If Putin falls, will there be another Russian civil war — and in this civil war will both sides have access to nuclear weapons? And will the winner of the civil war be a Yeltsin, a Lenin, or another Putin? Russia’s tragic history does not inspire optimism.