In recent years, Vladimir Putin has run much of his Presidency in the most splendid isolation, bunkered away in palaces from the wooded suburbs of Moscow to the shore of the Black Sea. He is often curiously remote from the Russian people and the bureaucracies and the security services over which he presides. Putin emerged on Saturday at 10 a.m., an early hour for him, and let loose a five-minute-long tirade ordering his military to destroy an “armed rebellion” led by one of his former loyalists, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenary force known as the Wagner Group. Since taking power a generation ago, Putin had never looked so weak. A year and a half ago, he thought he could capture Kyiv in a matter of days. Tens of thousands of casualties and several ruined cities later, he could no longer focus solely on his adventure in Ukraine. Citing the revolutionary days of 1917, he was now forced to protect his own capital and power against thousands of Prigozhin’s mercenaries. By the end of the day, Moscow time, Prigozhin was saying that he had called off his march north to avoid bloodshed, a truce reportedly brokered by Belarus, but, for Putin, there was no avoiding the fact that some of the deepest fissures and anxieties in the Russian leadership had been exposed.
After combing through the more reliable outlets of the independent Russian press and social media, I had a lengthy conversation with Mikhail Zygar, one of the most knowledgeable reporters and commentators on Kremlin power. Zygar is a former editor-in-chief of TV Rain (known as Dozhd in Russian) an independent channel that Putin closed after the start of the war. His 2016 book, “All the Kremlin’s Men” was a best-seller in Russia and a well-sourced examination of Putin’s rule and the inner dynamics of his ruling circle. His new book, “War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” will be published next month. Zygar, who is forty-two, left Russia after the invasion and has been living in Europe. In January, 2023, he wrote an Op-Ed column in the Times about Prigozhin titled “The Man Challenging Putin for Power.”
“I am feeling a little prophetic this morning,” Zygar told me.
Prigozhin, like Putin, was born and raised in Leningrad, which was renamed St. Petersburg as the Soviet Union was crumbling. As a young man, Prigozhin was a petty criminal and was eventually arrested and sentenced to twelve years in prison for robbing apartments. He was released after nine years. The rest of his biography resembles that of so many around Putin. After making some money selling hot dogs at the local flea market, he got involved in the grocery business, then casinos, construction, catering, and restaurants. He formed a close relationship with Putin, a frequent diner at his establishments, and that put him in a position to increase his good fortune. Private planes, helicopters, and immense residences soon followed—as did the founding of troll farms in St. Petersburg and the Wagner Group, a military contractor that was heartily supported by Putin as a way to help assist Russian Army troops and also, according to Zygar, as a way to counterbalance the power of figures like Sergei Shoigu, the Defense Minister.
The relationship between Putin and Prigozhin ruptured during the war as Prigozhin repeatedly went on social-media platforms, particularly the messaging app Telegram, and, in profane, blunt language, lambasted the Russian military leadership for betraying the Wagner Group, denying them ammunition and support, and, generally, botching the war effort against Ukraine.
“They split the moment when Prigozhin started believing he was popular,” Zygar said. Last fall, as Prigozhin criss-crossed Russia recruiting prisoners for the Wagner Group, “he felt like a rock star.” His gift was that he “spoke with them so effectively in their language,” Zygar said. “There came a moment when Prigozhin was no longer Putin’s puppet. Pinocchio became a real boy.”
When I asked Zygar what was the most striking aspect of the uprising, he said, “Putin is weaker. I have the feeling he is not really running the country. Certainly, not the way he once did. He is still President, but all the different clans”—the factions within the government, the military, and, most important, the security services—“now have the feeling that ‘Russia after Putin’ is getting closer. Putin is still alive. He is still there in his bunker. But there is the growing feeling that he is a lame duck, and they have to prepare for Russia after Putin.”
In ideological terms, Zygar said, “Prigozhin combines two ideas. The first is anti-corruption and anti-oligarch. Despite his own wealth, which is immense, he always portrayed himself as the oligarch-fighter. At the same time, he is super illiberal. He hates the West, and he claims to be the real protector of traditional values. He probably has more supporters beyond the Wagner Group; there are people in the Army, the F.S.B., the Interior Ministry, who could be his ideological allies.”
Ironically, Prigozhin learned to out-Putin Putin. In the early days of his reign, Putin was known in the West mainly for his background in the K.G.B. But his popular appeal also had to do with his ability to exploit the street swagger and the language of his days as a kid who played and fought in the poorer courtyards of his home town. Putin was not afraid to make cutting jokes or use profanity in public appearances. He promised to kill enemies in their “outhouses.” This distinguished him, back then, as a man close to ground, close to the narod, the people. But, as Putin has grown more distant and preposterously wealthy, Prigozhin, often dressed in full battle gear and strutting before the cameras next to his troops in front-line Ukrainian cities like Bakhmut, has taken on the populist mantle.
“Prigozhin has a distinct background,” Zygar said. “He speaks the way prisoners speak. He is the average guy. He went the same way that Putin did twenty years ago when politicians, in 1999, were very old and looked dead and Soviet. They couldn’t speak the language of the people. Putin spoke like a gangster, like a gopnik, like someone from the Leningrad slums. That was a cultural coup—a guy who knows the problems of the simple people. Prigozhin has come along and has followed that pattern in an even more brutal way.”
The confrontation between Putin and Prigozhin is also a clash of propagandists. Putin has the full-throated support of such well-known TV commentators as Dmitry Kiselyov and Margarita Simonyan, who have grown rich and famous as the President’s mouthpieces. Prigozhin has at least the tacit support of a new breed. “The most important propagandists now are not the propagandists on state TV,” Zygar told me, “they are the so-called war correspondents on Telegram, former military officers turned bloggers. They pose themselves as representatives of some ‘true Russia.’ They are careful, but they do not denounce Prigozhin.”
In recent months, when Prigozhin started to become more rebellious, more outspoken in his criticism of the Army leadership and, at least implicitly, Putin himself, Zygar’s sources were telling him that Prigozhin would be shuttled out of the frame, perhaps sent off to Africa to work there with the Wagner Group. “But after Putin’s speech today that scenario is no longer valid,” he said.
Even though Prigozhin has backed off, Russian, Western, and Ukrainian analysts will now struggle to understand the meaning of the conflict with Putin, what it has revealed about the rivalries of power in Moscow, and what it might mean for the war.
There is every possibility that Putin will, at least in the short term, muster the loyalties he needs to eliminate Prigozhin from the picture. However, that does not mean that Putin can be serene about his position in the long term: “Before this rebellion, there were a lot of rumors and theories about different clans supporting Prigozhin. There were rumors that he was supported by siloviki [security-service figures] in business like Igor Sechin [the C.E.O. of the energy conglomerate Rosneft and a former Deputy Prime Minister] and Sergey Chemezov [the C.E.O. of the state-owned defense conglomerate, Rostec].”
Zygar went on, “The F.S.B. [a successor to the K.G.B.] and G.R.U. [military intelligence] is not a single clan; it is a mixture of different clans, and we will see how they are going to react. For years, Putin has selected his inner circle with only one criterion: a lack of ambition. They are not the best of the best. They are the worst of the worst. So how will such mediocrities face up to one desperately brave person, or a desperately brave group of terrorists? We will see.”
If Putin were to fall sometime soon, Zygar says, he could be succeeded by extremely hard-line elements supported by the security services, or a “relatively” more liberal clan represented by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and the mayor of Moscow, Sergey Sobyanin.
The atmosphere is somewhat reminiscent of the latter days of Joseph Stalin, in the early fifties, when he was planning yet another purge (against Jews, “rootless cosmopolitans,” and other perceived enemies) while rivals such as Georgy Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev “waited patiently” for the old man to die so they could make their move. Putin, Zygar suggested, is acutely aware of how autocrats like the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have exploited coup attempts to carry out mass arrests, crack down further on media and information, and reorder the government. He could follow suit. The usual voices on social media have been a cacophony of speculation all day long. That will not end soon.
The drama, of course, is taking place while Ukraine has begun a counter-offensive against the invading Russian Army. “This is a historical chance for Ukraine,” Zygar said. “They need to attack right now. This is the moment when the Russian Army is busy with internal problems.”
But, at the same time, there is no guarantee that the current chaos in Russia is purely good news for the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky. Zygar is concerned that after such a domestic embarrassment like the Prigozhin affair Putin might lash out abroad and escalate the war in Ukraine.
As we finished our conversation, I asked Zygar whether it has been possible, now that he has fled Russia, to report well and accurately about what is happening in the highest echelons of power there. Zygar cautioned that some of his sources were telling him that they were not yet sure that Prigozhin had, in fact, retreated. Despite the advantages of modern communications, Russian political life remains enigmatic.
“It’s always been hard to know what’s happening,” he said. “I left Russia last February after the war started and I feared that all my contacts and sources would be lost. Who would want to talk to me, a ‘foreign agent’? But there is a psychological phenomenon in the bureaucracy, among people who can be considered accomplices. They want to think of themselves as decent people, and their hidden protest is that they are willing to talk and share information and what they think. It’s a way for them to clear their consciences or to have the illusion that they are O.K., and not criminals. So, it’s still possible. The wall between inner Russia and virtual Russia is not that huge. It’s still possible to get a lot of information from inside the country.” ♦
