EDWARD LUCAS: A Hollywood scriptwriter would struggle to find a villain like Yevgeny Prigozhin. Now he is said to be dead, in a plane crash that was surely no accident.
, the head of a business empire with tentacles stretching around the world, he was also the author of an audacious coup that could have put him in charge of the world's largest nuclear arsenal.Kremlinologists will be picking over the significance of this for weeks.
Prigozhin exemplified the overlap between business, dirty tricks and government that characterises Putin's 24 years in power But whereas Putin found salvation and discipline through judo, studied for a law degree and joined the KGB, Prigozhin took a darker path.Prigozhin announces a 'march for justice' to stop the 'evil being spread by the country's military leadership'.
Like many in the Soviet criminal underworld, he found his metier in the anarchic capitalism that followed the collapse of communism. As Catherine Belton, leading expert in Russia's power structures, outlines in her book Putin's People, the anonymous-seeming municipal bureaucrat quickly found a common language with the city's gangsters, and with the businesses involved in foreign trade.
According to Ukraine's former Deputy Minister of Information Policy, Dmytro Zolotukhin, Prigozhin's restaurants often served as venues for Mafia meetings and parties.And as Putin rose to power, so did the man who had become one of his closest associates. Prigozhin became Putin's chef. He was also living in a $105million St Petersburg estate, which included a house for his daughter Polina, who boasted on social media that the family's yacht — named St Vitamin — had 'six bedrooms, a dining room, a kitchen, rooms for the staff, two decks and a terrace'.
This 'factory of lies' worked alongside Russian spies, whose trade was the hacking and leaking of supposedly private emails. But both these entities became central to Putin's disruptive, vengeful anti-Western foreign policy. Whereas the internet trolls spread cynicism, apathy and discord within Western societies, the Wagner mercenaries concentrated on Africa and other distant lands where they offered leaders 'dictatorship in a box' – a potent mixture of military muscle and dirty tricks.
It was also hard initially to persuade anyone that Russia's disinformation campaigns could really be influencing the mighty democracies of the West. Instead he used his convict background as an asset, to recruit the dregs of the Russian penal system. The grim bargain he offered was that if they survived the meatgrinder of the frontline, they could have their freedom.
He did not spare Putin from his criticism either. We have a 'happy grandpa', he says, snarling into the camera, 'but how do you win a war,' he asks sarcastically, 'if it turns out that this grandpa is a complete d***head?' 'Grandpa' is a name Russians often give to their president. Prigozhin was turning his fire on his own modern-day tsar. It was astonishing behaviour.
The images, taken at the end of last month, revealed caches of assault weapons and ammunition along with stashes of gold bars and packets of white powder, a stuffed alligator and a framed photograph showing the severed heads of some of the disgraced warlord's enemies. There are also shots of counterfeit passports and a collection of his wigs as well as a set of images purporting to show Prigozhin in disguises. Such mocking coverage usually presages disgrace and imprisonment.
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