DOWNFALL, Anna Arutunyan and Mark Galeotti

A short, dense, sharp book about “Putin’s Chef,” the man who formed and ran the Wagner private military company, the man whose armed mutiny nearly reached the Kremlin itself.

…he was ‘sitting’ in Russian parlance, stuck behind barbed wire in what was known as the Zone, the Soviet penal camp system. Old hands in the criminal subculture of the vorovskoi mir, the ‘thieves’ world’, would claim that their real life was that lived inside the Zone.

Prigozhin travelled the world and made millions upon millions, but he never truly left the Zone. This is the story of a born thug and career criminal who learned how to manipulate power but never learned how to armour his own ego against the fact that he was always going to be the hustler with his hand out.

This is, after all, how Putin’s system works. To a considerable extent, it is a modern, bureaucratic state like so many others, its day-to-day actions defined by rules, laws, regulations and institutions. Atop it, though, is an almost medieval court, in which constantly competing factions and individuals are struggling for the most important currency of them all: Putin’s favour. That, in turn, can be converted into whatever else one could want: wealth, fame, power over one’s enemies.

Not that dealing with that world worked out well for everyone in post-Soviet Russia.

…the only man who knew for sure where all the money was, Central Committee treasurer Nikolai Kruchina, fortuitously fell out of a window.

There is a dark dry humour woven through the book. Which isn’t out of place when you’re tracing the life of a street criminal who became a restauranteur and caterer who became a mercenary army commander.

Wagner, so named for the callsign used by Utkin, a man who, as one Russian newspaper report so coyly put it, was ‘known for his commitment to the aesthetics and ideology of the Third Reich’. (He would even sometimes greet Prigozhin with ‘Heil Petrovich,’ using his boss’s codename.) Naming a mercenary army after the German composer may seem surreal, but it later led to a whole slew of supportive memes, with the force being referred to euphemistically as the ‘orchestra’.

The Russian Defense Ministry described Prigozhin thusly: “no morals, no conscience, and no hobbies … He is a machine in the bad sense of the word.” He made himself into a machine for gathering money and power, but the book makes it clear he was always on the outside of real power. The story would almost be a tragedy if Prigozhin wasn’t such a fucking monster. It seems apt that, towards the end of his story, he came full circle:

The first videos that emerged showed Prigozhin standing in a circle of zeks, Russian penal colony prisoners, in their black and white uniforms. He made no bones about the fact that he was from Wagner, that the war was hard and that he was looking for ‘stormtroopers’, but he made his pitch based on equal parts patriotism, machismo and self-interest: ‘no one falls back, no one retreats, no one surrenders’, if need be on pain of a firing squad, but after six months of honourable service, they would be discharged and free. Or dead: ‘I take you out of here alive, but don’t always bring you back alive.’

Admittedly, at least then their families would receive a 5-million-ruble payout (worth some $57,000 at the time). In many ways, this was quintessential Prigozhin. The ever-resourceful businessman had found a new source of manpower for the war, but he could now be out in the open, and talking to the kind of people he had been able to understand and engage in his twenties and still could today.

The follow up to that teaches me a new phrase: “meat wave.”

To a large extent, they would be used as poorly armed and poorly trained cannon fodder, deployed in so-called ‘meat waves’ to wear down or draw out the Ukrainian forces and shield the more experienced Wagner veterans, and their casualties were inevitably frightful.

It’s perhaps a little light on detail in its final chapter or two, partly because at the time of writing it was (and is) still unknown precisely how Prigozhin was killed. But we all know why. Perhaps the real subject of this book is not Prigozhin, but what examining his life reveals about how modern Russia works. The adhocracy, headed by an ageing tsar who puts off hard decisions for entirely too long.

And Aleksander Dugin pops up!

Putin doesn’t care, because he has created a system in which there are always more waiting for their chance. Take, for example, the philosopher Alexander Dugin, a man whose greatest genius may be in self-promotion. For a short while in 2014, his nationalist views aligned with the interests of the Kremlin and he was elevated to scholarly superstar status, his books on every shelf, interviewed on every television channel. Then official policy changed, and Dugin – who for a while was being described as ‘Putin’s brain’ in the West – was no longer needed. The TV appearances dried up, and he even lost his position at Moscow State University. Yet still he stayed loyal – what else was there for him?

Brilliant book. Zips along, and yet feels very complete. And if, like me, you haven’t read deeply into current Russian politics, it feels like a great primer for the actual state of things inside the Kremlin, and explains much about the current situation.

DOWNFALL (UK) (US+)