From Palladium Magazine, September 20:
On August 23rd, 2023, a sudden explosion ripped through the private Embraer jet of Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Russian mercenary organization Wagner Group. The blast severed its left wing, and the jet immediately entered a lethal tailspin. Just moments later, Prigozhin and his most important lieutenants were dead. Many speculate that it was an assassination by the Russian government in response to his failed rebellion against Moscow a few months before. At the funeral of the mercenary leader and his second-in-command, a poem by Joseph Brodsky was displayed in eulogy. The call went: “Are you my son or are you my God?” The response went: “Dead or alive…it makes no difference.” The spirit of Wagner flew on.
Those who read Prigozhin’s biography are often surprised that this sort of man could have formed a mercenary organization strong enough to challenge its own government. He began his career as a brazen petty thief in Russia’s chaotic 1990s and then became a penal colony zek. Between his release and his oligarch days, he did a stint as a hotdog salesman. He made his real fortune by staking bets on commercial properties, like grocery stores and casinos. It was at a restaurant he owned in St. Petersburg that he first met Vladimir Putin, who at the time was hosting U.S. President George Bush.
During the early 2010s, the Russian government began experimenting with private-public partnerships in military affairs. Prigozhin, who was already providing rations for the army, founded Wagner Group in 2013. The private military company mainly saw action in Libya, Syria, and several African countries, where it fought ISIS and orchestrated coups. After the war in Ukraine began, Wagner debuted with an effective offensive near Popasna. In preparation for the siege of Bakhmut, Prigozhin personally flew to prisons across Russia, assembling an assault force of 50,000 prisoners to spearhead the assault. Eventually, longstanding disputes with senior officials in the Russian army and dissatisfaction over how the war was being run in Moscow reached a boiling point. Prigozhin embarked on a “March for Justice” to Moscow to capture its military leadership and seek an audience with Putin. Its failure would eventually culminate in his death.
Prigozhin was the only type of person who could have founded an organization as unconventional as Wagner, which grew to be far more than a mercenary company at its peak. For a moment, it was an alternative cultural institution that operated a complex media empire, and it was even poised to supersede Russia’s army in influence. But throughout that time, it relied on the Russian state to provision its resources even as it grew increasingly autonomous from the state.
The Power Vertical
The same systemic chaos that made Prigozhin’s unconventional career possible also made Wagner itself possible. The Russian state’s inability to provide resources and coordination opened a window for him to carve out a fiefdom that could surpass the capacities of the state itself in its domain. These conditions are at an advanced stage in Russia, but they are not peculiar to it. “Wagnerization” may lie in the West’s future as well.
In the first year of the war, at the height of the media buzz about Prigozhin recruiting from penal colonies, I called up an old friend living in a part of Russia that sends a lot of men to the front. He had around a dozen friends and acquaintances who were in the army. While a few had been mobilized, the rest were volunteers who “would have fought for free.” It’s a common enough type in his circles.He mentioned that some of them were considering leaving the army to join Wagner. When asked why, my friend said that the equipment, training, and provisions were better than those of the army itself, which is notoriously bad at meeting its own logistical standards. The Russian army felt like a big machine that could take in coherent instructions and competent personnel, and then spit out a complete mess. Wagner’s informal and personal structure meant problems could be addressed directly in real-time by Prigozhin’s lieutenants or by the man himself. Wagner paid better, and unlike the army, it always paid on time....
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