Some books are easier to write when their subject is dead. Several years ago, a Russian journalist contacted the press service of Yevgeny Prigozhin while preparing an innocuous “day in the life” story about his family. The PR team of the Russian mercenary boss responded by telling the reporter that if she proceeded, her emails would be hacked, her car would be run off the road and she was at risk of being raped.
A year after the Wagner Group leader staged a spectacular mutiny against Vladimir Putin and died in a suspected state assassination, two complementary books tell, in gripping style, Prigozhin’s implausible journey from street hot-dog seller to secretive international warlord to a social media-addicted insurrectionist.
Downfall by Anna Arutunyan and Mark Galeotti, one a Russian-American journalist and the other a British historian, casts Prigozhin as a creature spawned in Putin’s Russia who eventually turns on his patron and creator. In The Wagner Group, Jack Margolin, an independent researcher and expert on modern mercenaries, provides a deeply reported history of the Wagner private military company. Both books show how the ill-fated Wagner mutiny was a product of the “ad-hocracy” that defines Putin’s rule — and that Prigozhin’s savage, entrepreneurial spin on the privatisation of force will probably long outlive him.
Arutunyan and Galeotti skilfully intertwine Prigozhin’s biography with Putin’s own rise to power. In their telling, the president is cast as the tsar presiding over myriad squabbling subordinates playing “games of court”, amid which Prigozhin emerged as a sort of ultra-violent court jester.
It is only through understanding the nature of this system that it is possible to grasp how a caterer ended up controlling a sprawling private army based across three continents. The fact that the Russian war machine came to rely on a man like Prigozhin, the authors write, “is, at its core, an admission of a moral and ideological vacuum at the heart of ‘Putinism’”.
We first meet Prigozhin as a wayward youth in 1970s Leningrad. Born into a middle-class background to a mother who was a doctor and with a stepfather who was a ski instructor, the young “Zhenya” fell into a life of petty crime. After robbing a woman at knifepoint, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison. Inside the brutal, stratified environment of Soviet-era penal colonies, he seemingly thrived among the thieves and villains before emerging into a collapsing empire ripe with opportunity.
Just as Prigozhin stepped out of prison in the early 1990s into a world transformed, the man who would later become Russia’s president was a dazed 38-year-old ex-KGB officer just back from a posting in Dresden in communist East Germany. Traumatised by the end of the Soviet Union, he initially drove a taxi to make ends meet before moving into the world of St Petersburg politics. Prigozhin, meanwhile, turned the talents he learnt in prison to businesses. He made his first million dollars by setting up kiosks selling the exotic American delicacy of hot dogs. In his telling, while he mixed the mustard in his kitchen his mother counted the cash.
As the 1990s progressed, Prigozhin made friends in the Russian underworld and set up a string of fancy restaurants cosplaying the aristocratic grandeur of the 19th century. An early venture, called The Old Customs House, proved a hit, served up expensive imported food to status-conscious emerging tycoons and power brokers. He micromanaged his kitchen with a furious temper, once having a cook dragged into a cellar and beaten into a hospital bed for serving an underwhelming plate of tomatoes to a VIP customer. Years later he would subject his catering staff to a polygraph after a chair was damaged at a state function.
It is in this extended salon of conspicuous consumption and bulletproof Mercedes limousines, with organised crime figures mingling with bureaucrats and spies, that Prigozhin first met Putin. By the turn of the millennium, Putin was president, and the ambitious caterer wined and dined his new master, who in turn used Prigozhin’s restaurants to host dinners for visiting dignitaries such as George W Bush and the future King Charles III.
Prigozhin parlayed his connections into lucrative and rigged state catering contracts. Margolin notes how, by 2012, Prigozhin’s companies controlled 90 per cent of Russia’s military catering, worth $2.9bn at historical exchange rates. The food was slop. Aviation academy cadets found cockroaches in their porridge, and local school children got dysentery.
But while his restaurants allowed him slowly to gain access to Putin’s court, as Arutunyan and Galeotti write, he was doomed to forever remain an outsider, a serf and the butt of jokes. (In one encounter Putin greeted the bald-headed Prigozhin with “nice hairstyle!”.) Unlike the Russian president’s true inner circle of childhood friends, judo sparring partners and ex-KGB hardmen, the chef was dispensable, vulnerable and always had to prove his usefulness to the tsar.
While other far richer oligarchs attempted to please Putin through ploughing the billions they had made from extracting rents from privatised natural resources into snow-barren provinces, or buying up foreign football teams, Prigozhin could not compete on those terms. He needed to find his own niche. When Putin seized Crimea in 2014, the chef spotted his opening. As Margolin writes, “his commodity of choice was force”.
“Little green men” — troops in unmarked uniforms — then invaded eastern Ukraine, and bands of pro-Russian “volunteers” declared a breakaway republic in Donetsk. Putin claimed these were simply the spontaneous actions of “patriots”. But the Kremlin’s need to maintain plausible deniability over its invasion had to be balanced with the ill-disciplined irregular forces it was cultivating in Ukraine. This provided Prigozhin’s opportunity to offer up a more organised, but still unofficial military solution.
Through an introduction to Dmitry Utkin, a former Spetsnaz (special forces) officer with multiple Nazi tattoos, Prigozhin secretly established the basis of the private military company that would come to be known as Wagner, named after Utkin’s call sign, a tribute to his favourite composer. Supported by Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, Prigozhin would later proudly recollect how he himself “cleaned old weapons, sorted out [military kit] and found specialists. On 1 May 2014, a group of patriots was born”.
Margolin expertly chronicles the evolution of this fledgling outfit into what he calls “the ‘second’ Wagner, a sprawling network of companies born from Prigozhin’s earlier illicit endeavours”. Moving beyond Ukraine, Prigozhin began offering his services to embattled and kleptocratic dictators such as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, trading security and propaganda services from his burgeoning troll farms, in return for natural resources concessions. Fighters with call signs such as “Zombie” and “Lotos” who had washed out of the conventional Russian military for criminality or insubordination rose to become feared Wagner commanders.
This brought handsome benefits for both Prigozhin and the Kremlin, bolstering its ties with useful, if unsavoury, regimes at a relatively low cost. Prigozhin carved out a market for doing deals in places that regular multinationals wouldn’t touch. Unburdened by the rules that govern state armies, Wagner fighters inflicted horrific atrocities on local populations including summary executions, torture and rape.
Western governments responded with economic sanctions against Prigozhin and his companies. Publicly, he continued to deny any connection with Wagner, and went after journalists reporting on his empire. In one instance he used expensive London libel lawyers to sue them. In another, his men were suspected of murdering three Russian reporters in the Central African Republic in 2018.
But secrecy also came at a cost. In Syria Wagner fighters were massacred in February 2018 by US firepower as Russia’s Ministry of Defence refused to acknowledge them as their own. It left Prigozhin seething, sowing the seeds of a vendetta that would violently resurface years later.
With Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Prigozhin came full-circle. As the Russian war effort faltered, Wagner was drafted in to help. The ex-convict returned to the haunts of his youth and began recruiting prisoners to sign up to his private army. And, like a cartoon villain having their mask pulled off, Prigozhin took to social media to finally admit, after years of denials, lies and threats, that he really had launched Wagner seven years before.
Any triumph was shortlived. In the burning wreckage of Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine, where Wagner fighters were massacred in “human wave” attacks reminiscent of the first world war, Prigozhin descended into the crazed fury that eventually destroyed him and his private army. Dressed in body armour and surrounded by the corpses of his men, Prigozhin took to social media to unleash ever angrier tirades against the incompetent and corrupt Russian war effort as well as calling into question the whole basis on which the invasion was launched. “Shoigu! Gerasimov! Where’s the fucking ammo?” he screamed in a rant in May 2023 directed at Russia’s then top military leadership.
The man who once served Putin his supper in St Petersburg was now firing off unspeakable, shocking truths about the system that created him. Turning on his one-time master, he marched his men towards Moscow last June, only to then dramatically stand them down a few hundred kilometres from the capital following a hastily brokered truce. For an eerie while, it seemed as if nothing had happened and all had been forgotten. Prigozhin swapped fighting in Ukraine and social media for a quieter life. But no one expected Putin to forgive the betrayal. Two months later, in August 2023, a private jet carrying Prigozhin, Utkin and other Wagner leaders exploded in mid-air killing everyone on board.
For Margolin, it was the logical conclusion of the internecine competition of the Putin regime, a mix of medieval feudalism and globalised capital that had “given rise to a cast of violent and criminal entrepreneurs”. Arutunyan and Galeotti note that Prigozhin, thuggish, venal and desperate, was no revolutionary. But his insurrection may be remembered as a turning point in Russian history. His demise showed “not just how the Putin system works, but how it is beginning to fail”.
“Nonetheless, someday, democracy will be coming to Russia,” they write, “and . . . Prigozhin’s disruptive mutiny and critique will have played its part in that process”.
Downfall: Prigozhin, Putin and the new fight for the future of Russia, by Anna Arutunyan and Mark Galeotti, Ebury Press £18.99, 272 pages
The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army, by Jack Margolin, Reaktion Books £15.99, 180 pages
Miles Johnson is an investigative reporter for the FT. His book ‘Chasing Shadows: A true story of the Mafia, Drugs and Terrorism’ is now out in paperback
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