Everything looks clearer in the rear-view mirror
The illusion of clarity in assessing organisations’ origins
Happy Friday!
I hope this week is bringing you joy and you are either enjoying some rest or fired by inspiration. Both are equally acceptable!
My attention has been a little scattered this week as I’ve flitted between projects and tasks. Also, I’ve allowed myself to be distracted by the joy of redesigning my office, so that I can comfortably use my second computer (designed for greater security). It’s the little things…
I’ll be taking a break from the newsletter over August. I may drop in if something major happens or the winds of inspiration blow particularly strongly, but I find it helps creativity to take a break from normal routines every now and then. Plus open rates drop during August — for some reason, many of you prefer relaxation to reading about Russian security. Crazy! This week, however, I want to ruminate on a problem that arises across domains: The challenge of assessing how groups come into being.
With that in mind, here’s what you’ll find this week:
- The search for the beginning
- Anachronistic narratives
- The origins of clouds
The search for the beginning
In their early days, Russian private military companies (PMCs) were a niche interest, attracting the attention of just a few investigative journalists and academics. Then, Russia invaded Ukraine and Wagner’s activities both on the frontline and in Russian prisons triggered an avalanche of coverage and the birth of a veritable cottage industry of analysts — spanning the full spectrum of expertise.
As more and more people looked to tell the story of Wagner, so they turned to where the group came from. They traced the group’s roots back to Russia’s first war on Ukraine and paramilitary activity in the eastern part of the country in 2014. They examined links to the Russian security services and how PMCs fitted in with their broader strategy. They explored the biographies and career trajectories of the leading protagonists.
The result? A more-or-less clear picture of the group in its historical context. A narrative arc. A story with a beginning, middle, and — eventually — end.
The problem? The clarity is illusory, deceptive, deeply misleading.
Allow me to explain.
Anachronistic narratives
The manner in which interest in Wagner has developed follows a fairly typical trajectory. Something unusual catches the attention of a few people, but how important that thing is isn’t completely clear. The thing grows in size or steps up its activities and a few more people pay attention. Eventually, it becomes impossible to ignore: It is obviously noteworthy and starts to feel like it was always so. If a phenomenon becomes big enough, it draws in the relentless army of experts-in-everything — the analytic grifters who speak confidently on everything from Nigerian jihadism to Chinese foreign policy.
The search for a clear narrative is perfectly understandable and biologically rooted. But the story itself is often anachronistic, backdating a current clarity to a point in the past where it never existed.
Take the Wagner example. It is as common for people to talk about anything that existed in 2014 as if it were the same thing that went to war in Ukraine in 2022. Yet, as Ilya Barabanov and Denis Korotkov note in Our Business is Death — still one of the best books available on Wagner — Wagner was just one of many loose paramilitary formations operating in eastern Ukraine at the time, fundamentally indistinguishable from all the others.
These two authors explain in depth how Wagner, as a defined organisation, did not take shape until the Syria campaign of 2015. Jack Margolin, author of The Wagner Group — the best English-language account of the group — dates the creation of the group’s online subculture to the same period and characterises its first appearance in 2014 as little more than a “battlefield rumour.”
Whatever its roots were in 2014, it was not the same group that fought in Syria and then spread across Africa before returning to Ukraine. It was not a leviathan in waiting. It bore little resemblance to what it was to become.
The origins of clouds
This, of course, does not mean that these early activities are irrelevant. On the contrary, they are vital for understanding the group’s origins. The use of the label ‘Wagner’ is also understandable if the goal is to be clear — it avoids the need to continually refer to The Group That Became Wagner.
But this clarity comes at a cost. It blinds us to the chaos and uncertainty that was a central part of its story. It creates the impression that everything started as a seed: small, unrealised, but always concrete and identifiable. Instead, we should think about group formation as akin to clouds: disparate droplets that eventually come together to form something visible and tangible but lack a singular point of origin.
For many groups, we lack a good understanding of how they really came to be. To continue the (if not already, then soon-to-be tortured) cloud analogy, we obscure a great deal by focusing on the trajectory of specific drops, like the Elif Shafak of security. We overlook how the different elements combine and attribute design where none is present. Our efforts to craft a clear narrative require us to fill in gaps rather than acknowledge them.
This is a problem I’m currently grappling with in regard to a different paramilitary organisation: Spetsnaz Akhmat. When is it valid to talk of this group using this term? Some of those involved in creating it were in Ukraine from the very first days of the war in February 2022. However, as far as I can tell, the term didn’t start to be used regularly until May 2022, and it didn’t really assume the organisational shape we see today until Apti Alaudinov was appointed commander in September/October of that year.
Understanding the origins of the group matters because it helps us see that Spetsnaz Akhmat represented the institutionalisation of mobilisation efforts, not their target. Unpacking the threads and relationships that underpinned the process is a difficult task — but one that does not even need attention if we backdate clarity on the group’s origins.