The beatification of Prigozhin and the fight for the future of Russia
- October 17, 2024
- Mark Galeotti
The posthumous struggle to define the legacy of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the thuggish mercenary entrepreneur apparently killed by the Kremlin last year, presents a problem for both Putin and his opponents.
It is all too easy to invoke the shadow of Stalin when looking at Vladimir Putin’s totalitarian turn, yet it is also a lazy and misleading habit of mind. For all the talk of purges and gulags, Putin has unleashed nothing like Stalin’s industrial-scale murder machine. Nor, for that matter, is there anything like the same grandiose desire to shatter society in order to remake it to the state’s convenience. Instead, Putin exhibits a familiar desire to crush and deter dissent with the least effort possible, a characteristic of any repressive banana republic: not so much the Great Terror as the Great Intimidation.
The main target has been the liberal opposition and, in particular, attempts to build anti-government solidarities across socio-economic and regional divides. This was, after all, what made Alexei Navalny so dangerous: from being an opposition figure (barely) tolerated in order to give some credence to the continuing fiction that Russia was a pluralistic and law-based democracy, he became an enemy who had to be hounded, poisoned, imprisoned and driven to his grave. While it is still unclear whether or not he was actually poisoned while in the infamous IK-3 ‘Polar Wolf’ special regime prison camp, at the very least he was placed under conditions which his compromised health was unlikely to survive. Whether directly or indirectly, his death in February 2024 was state murder.
His particular sin was that he had begun to build a broad ‘coalition of the fed-up’ beyond the usual middle-class, metropolitan liberals. He reached out to the working poor, as well as the so-called byudzhetniki – state-sector employees, such as teachers and local government workers, even the same police force the state used against him. His attempts to build a nationwide network as the precursor to the creation of a political party sealed his fate. When he returned to Russia in January 2021 from medical treatment in Berlin, he was arrested and by April his Anti-Corruption Foundation was officially classed as an ‘extremist organisation’, its fledgling regional headquarters forced to close.
Navalny’s spokesperson Kira Yarmysh affirmed that his movement would endure: ‘We will be victorious in the end. Russia is our country, it belongs to us and we need to return it us.’ Nonetheless, recent years have seen a continued campaign not only to crack down on liberal critics of the war and the regime, but, above all, but to stop any attempt to establish wider connections. As one former NGO worker told me, ‘we’re like mice in the kitchen; we can nibble here and there, but the moment we become visible, we’re dead’.
Yet while it seems that any scope for even small-scale liberal opposition is both limited and dangerous, that does not mean there is no sustained criticism of the regime. In the West there is still an easy assumption that dissent means democracy, that the goal of opposition must be an open society, and that it comes from cultural figures, human rights activists, and a mobilisation of the liberal intelligentsia. Instead, there is a growing chorus of disapproval coming from the so-called ‘turbo-patriots’. For some time there has been a nationalist critique of Putin and his system, sometimes rooted in dissatisfaction with its kleptocratic parasitism, sometimes in the gap between his bombastic patriotic rhetoric and the realities of his policies.
Back in January 2022, for example, retired Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, chair of the unofficial All-Russian Officers Assembly, published ‘On the Eve of War’, a blunt demand for Putin to end his ‘criminal policy of provoking a war’ and resign. Ivashov comprehensively castigated the regime for creating a situation in which the main threats to the system come not from Ukraine or the West but from within: ‘the model of government is not viable, leaders and administrators are totally incompetent and unprofessional, while society is passive and disorganised. No country can live long in such a state’.
Ivashov has long been a critic of the Kremlin and, despite its grandiloquent title, the All-Russian Officers Assembly is a rather small collection of retired and reserve officers of extreme nationalist views. It is, however, representative of a wider and growing range of forces that have a significance beyond their numbers because they are disproportionately represented within the military and security apparatus on which the Kremlin depends.
After all, nationalists and monarchists played a significant role in the ‘Snow Revolution’ of the 2011-12 Bolotnaya movement, which had its genesis in protests ensuing from the November 2011 ‘Russian March’. Eduard Limonov, now deceased leader of the National Bolshevik Party, and Konstantin Krylov, head of the unregistered right-wing National Democratic Party, marched alongside such liberal icons as Boris Nemtsov and Yevgenia Albats.
Before the invasion, the nationalist critiques tended to focus on corruption and arbitrary power, the belief that this regime robes itself in the flag, while stealing from and degrading the people and the state they affect to love. The former gunman and war criminal Igor Girkin – his call sign ‘Strelkov’ meaning ‘Shooter’ – for years castigated former defence minister Sergei Shoigu and Putin as the ‘Plywood Marshal’ and – tongue firmly in cheek – as Russia’s ‘Unique Strategic Advantage’, before forming first the All-Russian Nationalist Movement and later his Club of Angry Patriots.
Most of the turbo-patriots welcomed the February 2022 invasion, but then became exasperated by the incompetence, corruption and amateurism with which the war was then prosecuted. They also have sympathisers, especially within the mainstream pseudo-opposition Communist and (nationalist) Liberal Democratic Parties. Their views are often echoed within the national-patriotic social movements on which the Kremlin often rests, from the Cossacks to the Yunarmiya militarised youth movement. Most importantly, this is a critique which appeals to a wide strand of the middle-rankers within the military and security apparatus: captains, majors, even colonels. These are, after all, the career officers who do not live the truly pampered lives of the top brass, who likely joined at least in part out of a sense of duty, and who feel their values dismissed by those at the head of the chain of command.
Scroll through their Telegram channels or some of the more recondite message boards and it soon becomes clear how strong these views can be, even within such bodies as the National Guard, which is intended to be the final backstop of Kremlin security. The government has tended to assume that so long as it pays them well, praises them often, and decorates them at any excuse, their loyalty is assured. For some, it undoubtedly is. However, even soldiers and security officers have lives and loyalties beyond the state, and it is insiders who tend to understand better the sins of the system.
This came to a head with the unexpected mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin in June 2023. It is hard to consider the thuggish entrepreneur-turned-mercenary commander as a dissident: he was the quintessential opportunist ‘minigarch,’ happy to make money by doing whatever the Kremlin wanted done. Nonetheless, his anger at being looked down on by the military elite and outmanoeuvred by Shoigu, as well as betrayed by Putin – who backed what was in effect a hostile takeover of his Wagner mercenary army – was amplified by what seems to have been genuine anger at the murderous waste of ‘his boys’ as well as the foolishness behind both the invasion and the subsequent military campaign.
His mutiny was not an attempt to topple Putin but rather an act of coercive negotiation, a last-ditch attempt to persuade his erstwhile patron to choose him over Shoigu. That said, had he had his way, the regime might well have been seriously undermined as a result. Prigozhin might have realised this, had he been a smarter political strategist or less in thrall to the macho culture of ‘the Zone’, the prison camp system, with its injunctions that it was better to take a beating than bend the knee. It was hardly surprising that two months after his mutiny he died in a plane crash that was almost certainly a state killing. Nonetheless, by openly questioning the official rationale of the war (‘the special military operation was done for the purpose of “denazification”… But we ended up legitimising Ukraine… As for demilitarisation… Fuck knows how, but we’ve militarised Ukraine’) and standing up against the Kremlin Leviathan, he became a perverse icon of resistance to the very system which had for so long protected and enriched him.
Prigozhin was no closet liberal. The vision he and his loyalists had for Russia was a horrifying one: of a revanchist new order cleansing itself from the enemy within with Stalinist savagery (Prigozhin himself memorably said that ‘Comrade Stalin was absolutely right’ about the need to execute those getting in the way of the war effort). Yet while opinion polls must be treated with caution in a police state, even after the mutiny, separate surveys by both Levada and Russian Field found almost a third of respondents still viewing him in a positive light. In other words, still supporting to some degree a man who had just staged an armed insurrection. Even Russians who were horrified by what Prigozhin did and said have come to see him as a symbol of the fearless Russian muzhik – peasant – as willing to do whatever was needed to protect the Motherland as to speak truth to power.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin had a nasty shock as so many of its security forces, from the army to the National Guard, seemed, if not actively supportive of the mutiny, certainly unwilling to challenge it. Afterwards, it launched a new crackdown on the turbo-patriots and their sympathisers. Girkin, who had enjoyed years of tolerance because the Kremlin feared alienating his constituency, was arrested and convicted on extremism charges. Once seen as a potential future chief of the general staff, General Sergei Surovikin, who had been an ‘honorary member’ of Wagner and may have had prior notice of the mutiny, disappeared into interrogation for three months and was then rusticated to an insignificant sinecure.
Nonetheless, there is now a burgeoning mythology of Prigozhin’s survival. On the anniversary of his birthday on 1 June 2024, when cemetery workers were clearing away the flowers from his grave, they found a card reading ‘Prigozhin is alive. We will take revenge.’ The most recent such note simply promised or warned, ‘I’ll be back.’ Meanwhile, there have been alleged sightings from Chad to Thailand. In the chaotic Time of Troubles that followed the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584, no fewer than three ‘False Dmitries’ arose, claiming to be his son and heir, who had actually died years earlier. Many flocked to their banner, sometimes cynically, but often simply hoping that they had found a saviour or at least an alternative, without really pausing to wonder for what they stood. Likewise, portents of the ‘False Yevgeny’ do not really suggest that there are large numbers of Russians genuinely hankering after a leader who fed their children rotten food in school (on state contracts) and gloried in the murder of deserters.
Rather, it reflects a growing potential for protest that has no ideology to anchor it or leader to channel it. The state’s organs of repression have effectively removed any potential leaders or structures which could organise it. Nonetheless, there is dissent and disaffection: a study of leaked data from censorship agency Roskomnadzor found them happening ‘almost every day’. There are still small-scale strikes and local protests over everything from mayoral elections to lacklustre responses to natural disasters. There are anti-war activists willing to firebomb draft offices and turbo-patriot commentators decrying the strategy in Ukraine. There are movements seeking to save local languages and cultures from Russification, even at risk of arrest and persecution. For most citizens of the Russian Federation life is not so bad, and the war remains a distant menace. But there is also a pervasive sense that worse times may be up ahead, even if nothing can be done to change path.
On Navalny’s death, even the usually pro-Kremlin tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets, while genuflecting to the official line that he was no longer of political relevance, recognised the fundamental truth of Putin’s regime, that it rests on fear and force, not genuine public legitimacy: ‘the Russian political system is structured in such a way that if the government maintains control over the security forces, if it is self-confident, if it is ready to make tough and unpopular decisions, then it is absolutely impossible to defeat it’. That is true, yet politics if often defined less by the agendas of the rulers than by whatever fate chooses to throw their way. In the coming months and years, there are all kinds of potential crises which could shatter the state’s illusion of invulnerability. Whether this is Putin’s death or incapacitation, a rolling economic crisis, a new Chernobyl, a collapse on the front lines or whatever else, matters less than that such a challenge is far from impossible.
Above all, the real struggle is one of hope against hopelessness. Apathy, perhaps even more than fear, is the tyrant’s best friend. If and when a belief in the possibility of change outweighs the fear or futility, the lack of leaders or movements with which the state or the elite can negotiate may prove to be decisive. In such circumstances, new leaders will emerge. Despite his activist past, no one at the start of 1980 would have thought that Lech Wałęsa would by year’s end be heading a new trade union, Solidarity, that effectively became the opposition and expanded to include a quarter of the Polish population. Or that the arrest of opposition campaigner Sergei Tikhanovsky for the temerity of challenging Alexander Lukashenko in the 2020 elections would catapult his wife Svetlana into become effectively Belarus’s president in exile. Politics abhors a vacuum no less than nature.
This, then, could be the new fight for Russia. If and when the regime stumbles and open opposition once again emerges, who will capture it? Liberals eager to redeem the failures of the 1990s and create a genuine democracy? Leftists characterising Putinism as neoliberalism to the max to justify renewed statism? Nationalists capitalising on a sense of rejection, saving the people from traitors and kleptocrats? A moderate insider technocrat, such as Moscow’s Mayor Sergey Sobyanin (as critical journalist Oleg Kashin has imagined)? And having cleared the board, with whom might those within the elite negotiate with in order to salvage something from the situation? The struggle to define Prigozhin’s legacy is in many ways a harbinger of the future clash over Russia’s rightful path.