THE REVOLUTION WILL NOW BE TELEGRAMMED / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL

The revolution will now be Telegrammed

Smartphones gave us unprecedented insight into Russia’s latest coup attempt

Gillian Tett 

© Cristiana Couceiro

What on earth is happening in Russia? 

It isn’t merely ordinary observers who were confused by last week’s “coup that wasn’t”, undertaken by the Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. 

I’ve spent the week talking to western diplomats and foreign policy officials, and almost no one has been able to explain with confidence exactly what occurred, much less dared to predict what might happen next.

My perspective involves a strong element of déjà vu. 

In 1991, I was in Vilnius, Lithuania, when an abortive Soviet coup hastened the dissolution of the USSR. 

The following year, I was in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, when protests in the former Soviet republic led to the president being overthrown. 

Then in 1993, I was in Moscow as parliamentarians attempted unsuccessfully to oust Russian president Boris Yeltsin. 

Each event was intense. 

I will never forget being swept into the presidential palace amid bullets as a Tajik crowd seized control, or finding a still-warm teapot on the desk of an official who had presumably just fled.

What also defined them — as well as the Prigozhin rebellion — was a sense of profound confusion. 

In history books, coups look almost neat. 

In real time, they are usually surreal and contradictory, particularly when they occur in places where power is exercised in such shadowy ways that almost nothing is quite what it seems. 

In that sense, we should not be surprised at the sense of bewilderment surrounding current events.

There is one crucial sense in which these events in Russia now differ from previous coups: the influence of smartphones. 

Thirty years ago, journalists could obtain an intense, street-level perspective on events. 

But it was tougher to get a bird’s-eye view on anything unfolding more than a few miles away.

Compare that with last weekend, and the deluge of eye-witness accounts readily available on social media platforms that could be viewed in such detail that, at certain moments, Prigozhin’s march towards Moscow felt like an episode of Band of Brothers was being live-streamed.

Digital dispatches from Prigozhin and the Russian president Vladimir Putin were available, with near-simultaneous translations. 

There were also messages from figures such as Igor Girkin, a far-right nationalist Russian, calling for Putin’s resignation, along with surreal video clips of Wagner mercenaries, mid-rebellion, placing orders at the former McDonald’s in Rostov (now called Vkusno & Tochka, or “Tasty — Full Stop”).

Were you so minded, you could view maps created by amateur cyber-sleuths that tracked the movement of Prigozhin’s convoy or the private planes of fleeing Russian oligarchs. 

There was further footage of Prigozhin being fêted by the crowd in Rostov and dramatic shots of Russian attacks on his convoy in the town of Voronezh. 

Never before has an attempted coup seemed not only so easy to watch sitting half a world away but quasi-participatory; smartphones collapse space.

In some ways, this represents progress. 

If a revolution can be followed on our phones, it should, theoretically, make it easier to persuade Americans, or anyone else, to take note of geopolitics. 

The contemporaneous information and footage gathered may also help to hold the perpetrators of war crimes to account. 

As for journalists, such a stream of information is a blessing that was unimaginable 30 years ago. 

But the perils of turning coups into reality TV are equally evident. 

One key issue is disinformation; in an age of artificial intelligence, it is very easy to create video fakes. 

And precisely because the torrent of social media clips creates the impression of transparency, it is sometimes easy to forget that so much is still opaque.

Right now, for example, it is frustratingly hard to track what is happening on the front lines in Ukraine’s counter-offensive because the Kyiv government has excluded most journalists from that region (unwisely, in my view). 

It is equally hard to know the precise contours of the splits inside the Russian intelligence services and military. 

The sense of enigma feels doubly frustrating precisely because we feel that at other times we see so much.

The other big lesson I learnt from the 1990s coups was that history can move in surprising ways and that seemingly impregnable authoritarian regimes can crumble. 

In 1991, it initially seemed as if the coup against Gorbachev had failed. 

But the cracks it created started a slow, months-long unravelling of the regime. 

Something similar happened following 1993’s events. 

I suspect this will play out with Putin’s regime too. 

But I would not guess about the timing. 

Russia might have seemed tantalisingly close on western phone screens last weekend. 

But we remain a long way from understanding it.