LENIN wrote that any cook should be able to run the country under communism. He never, however, suggested giving any catering contractor a private army.

That last is an innovation of the Putin regime in Russia, and one the president may well be regretting.

There is endless penny-a-dozen analysis — much of it conspiracist — of the mutiny in Russia at the weekend.

The real peculiarity is the fact that a private business, the Wagner Group, had at least 25,000 troops under arms, equipped with tanks and heavy artillery; the capacity for military action independent of the state and could take over a regional army headquarters without, apparently, firing a shot.

None of that is normal. Russia has no monopoly on mercenaries, but nowhere else have private armies risen to such exalted eminence that they can, in the middle of a war, simply pull tens of thousands of troops out of the battle zone to settle their employer’s grudges for him.

Clearly, the development of a post-Soviet Russian state that actually functions as some recognisable form of public power is still a work in progress.

In the misbegotten Yeltsin years, oligarchs like Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin ran amok without the slightest regard for the government or its inebriated leader. 

Vladimir Putin’s calling card was that he had regularised relations between anarchic big capital and the state into something more like those that prevail in other capitalist countries.

But maybe not. The Russian president’s web of dependence on the oligarchy may never be unravelled, but the events at the weekend suggest that the power relationship is not as specified in the constitution, itself no more than the gangrene of counter-revolution.

Wagner has loomed large in the invasion of Ukraine, not least because its leader has conducted a running commentary on the shortcomings of Russia’s military leadership. 

All this while simultaneously serving as the strike force for Russian intervention in west Africa, often as a preferred bidder when the rivals are the former colonial powers.

To this list of achievements can now be added shooting out of the sky several Russian warplanes and throwing the Russian elite into a panic.  Quite a business prospectus.

The armed forces and security services remained loyal for now to Putin, who has yet to burn through all his political capital with the elite, so the advance on the Defence Ministry was never likely to have been crowned with success.

Wagner are merely the latest to march on Moscow unsuccessfully. The nearer you get, the worse the journey home.

But as performative politics in the contemporary populist style, it was sensational. 

When Prigozhin denounces the “corruption and incompetence” of the Russian military leadership he undoubtedly touches a popular chord. This was a drama in the theatre of failure and many Russians know it.

It is fair to assume that wherever exactly Russia is now on the Ukrainian battlefield, it is not where it expected to be in February 2022. Generals Shoigu and Gerasimov would not have retained their posts, or likely even their freedom, in Soviet times. Zhukov and Rokossovsky they ain’t.

Whatever lubricates the wheels of Russia’s government today it is not commitment to a common cause. For the well-connected, blundering carries no cost.

Baroque tsarist fantasies concerning the impermissibility of Ukrainian statehood are the Potemkin front for a bourgeois regime of thievery and cronyism, which grants impunity to incompetence and license to adventurers like the mutinous chef. His insurrection may not be the last.

The enraged Prigozhin also called out one of Putin’s rationales for his special military euphemism — that it pre-empted a mass genocidal onslaught by Kiev on the Donbass. Not so, says the Wagner boss.

Even if that had been Volodymyr Zelensky’s plan it could easily have been thwarted by deploying to the Donbass the Russian troops instead dispersed hither and yon across Ukraine in invasion plan A.

Prigozhin blamed Russia’s top brass for the misleading intelligence. Who knows? Defeat is famously an orphan, and although Russia is not defeated in Ukraine nor is anyone pencilling in a victory parade. 

Nothing intended by Putin prior to the invasion — stopping Nato expansion, keeping Ukraine out of the hands of the US, regime change in Kiev or even uniting the Donbass under Russian suzerainty — has been attained, more often the exact reverse.

So Prigozhin may be an unlikely dove of peace, but there is nothing in an anger management deficiency that stops you asking the questions everybody wants answers to.

The streets of Rostov seemed far from entirely unwelcoming to their temporary overlords, and it is not impossible that the oligarchy may likewise be ambivalent toward Putin.  

His re-election next year may no longer be the anticipated formality, although the advent of a regime in Moscow ready to throw in the towel to Nato provocation is far less likely.

The most obscure point of all is how the uprising came to its ambiguous and very provisional conclusion.

In the morning, Putin had denounced the Wagner Group as traitors and pledged the condign punishment one might expect. By tea time Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, whose scope for autonomous action in such matters must be minimal, had brokered a peace deal.

Under its terms, Wagner abandoned its occupation of Rostov to resume its occupation of Ukraine, where Russia is mounting that defence to a faltering Kiev-Nato offensive which Prigozhin fled the better to grind his own axes.

And the former chef himself is spirited off to sanctuary in … Belarus, allegedly. Now, the arm of the Russian state is not as long as many thought, but it can surely reach as far as Minsk if it wants to.

Yet a day later Putin appeared to be rowing back on his safe-conduct pledges, and warning darkly of a recrudescence of Bolshevism. If only.  Prigozhin would be wise not to open the door to any visitors from GRU on a tourist mission.

Only the most decrepit regimes would leave the authors of such an episode unpunished.

Perhaps Prigozhin is being kept on ice by the oligarchy as a sort of populist alternative to decaying Putinism or perhaps punishment is merely deferred until his Wagner operatives are safely either in the formal Russian army or back in prison again. 

But two things should be kept in mind. The first is that this volatility is menacing to the world. That is another argument for a ceasefire and peace talks, unless you’re totally fine about the possibility of nuclear-armed caterers. The more war is prolonged, the more the unpredictable becomes inevitable.

Second, this rickety Russian state is the fruit of the overthrow of socialism and working-class power, and its replacement by oligarchic rule. Much the same applies in Ukraine, with added Nato. That is the great tragedy from which many other tragedies have ensued.

Putin appears haunted by Lenin, which he should be. His ghost will not be exorcised by the exile — or worse — of the importunate Prigozhin.

But until the working class can assert its own values over those of the oligarchy and its militarised finger-buffet merchants we can only agitate for an end to the Ukraine conflict, the menacing consequences of which ripple ever wider.