The Horror, the Horror: Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Mr. Kurtz of Russia
A discussion with the writer and public-policy analyst Candace Rondeaux about her new book, "Putin's Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos"
A ski-jump prodigy injures his knee, which leads him to a life of crime, which lands him in Russian prison for most of his twenties. He gets out of jail, goes into the hot dog business, winds up as a restauranteur who owns both a fast-food chain and the fanciest eatery in St. Petersburg. He becomes the caterer of choice for the Russian government, especially his primary benefactor, rising star Vladimir Putin, and serves exquisite meals to foreign dignitaries and world leaders. Although he has no military training at all, he winds up overseeing his country’s most powerful private mercenary force: the shadowy Wagner Group. Oh, and in his spare time he organizes the Internet Research Agency, the hacker outfit that spams the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Yevgeny Prigozhin is the sort of character that, if encountered in a novel, would shatter one’s suspension of disbelief.
During the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he and his Wagner Group guns-for-hire are the tip of the spear. As the Russian military reveals itself to be a disorganized mess, sinking in the quagmire of the Donbas, he is there on the front lines, most notably in Bakhmut, the bloodiest battle in Europe since the end of the Second World War. And he makes damn sure everyone knows it.
Does he have an American analog?
Prigozhin is “a mix of P.T. Barnum and Curtis LeMay and Erik Prince. But anybody who’s seen Apocalypse Now—I always just say he’s like Colonel Kurtz,” says the writer and public-policy analyst Candace Rondeaux, author of the superb new book Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast. “He’s got the bald head. He kind of goes crazy….At the end of his life, he’s in this horrible—you know, ‘the horror’—he’s in these battlefields, there’s corpses behind him. For me, he’s the Colonel Kurtz of Russia.”
After many months in the soup, Prigozhin snaps. He does what no one in Russia has dared to do—he undermines Putin publicly. In a series of Telegram videos best described as “unhinged,” he lets Moscow have it, calling out the defense ministers.
And then, in June of 2023, he does something even more unthinkable: he and his Wagner Group forces stage an uprising. They set out for Moscow, with the ostensible purpose of taking out Putin. As Rondeaux writes in her book:
In all his twenty-four years in power, Putin had never looked so weak. The man who had set Putin’s table for decades was now holding a knife to the president’s throat, urging a hired gang of mercenary killers to tear down what it had taken Putin nearly three decades to rebuild. While images of Prigozhin posing defiantly like a modern-day gladiator aspirant in front of the cameras, ricocheted across millions of mobile phones and TV screens, Putin was nowhere to be seen. Instead, as newscasters around the world breathlessly reported that Russia—the second-most-powerful nuclear-armed country in the world—was on the brink of civil war, the only sign that anyone in the Kremlin was still in charge was the warrant for Prigozhin’s arrest issued by the FSB hours after the mutiny had begun.
Both in retrospect and in the moment, this was bonkers.
“I think the Kurtz variant was really prevalent by then,” Rondeaux tells me. “So we’re talking now almost four or five months of trenchant online trolling of Putin indirectly, where Prigozhin is standing in front of a battlefield strewn with corpses and screaming at the defense minister, Sergei Shoigu…I mean, there was just this constant drumbeat of drama. And at the same time, I think he recognized that he was being squeezed out.”
Almost as soon as it started, the uprising was over. Prigozhin pumped the brakes on the coup attempt. Instead of going to Moscow, he went to Belarus for some reason. And on August 23, 2023, exactly two months after the mutiny began, a plane carrying Prigozhin and the senior leadership of the Wagner Group was blown out of the sky—the Russian paramilitary version of the Icarus myth.
“Did he want to replace Putin? I actually don’t think so,” Rondeaux says. “I think he went mad.”
The story of the Wagner Group, which is also the story of Prigozhin, is as fascinating as it is timely. Putin’s Sledgehammer is nothing less than a tour de force: impeccably researched, beautifully written, and urgently useful in making sense of the chaos in Russia. Rondeaux has been obsessively watching the Wagner Group for almost a decade and a half, and her keen interest in the subject is infectious.
Here are her answers to three questions I asked her during our discussion. (Note: I have edited the transcript for clarity.)
How did you decide on this career path?
[CANDACE RONDEAUX]:
I suppose the short thumbnail version is through an accident of fate. I grew up in Chicago and my mother was an educator. She was obsessed with kind of gaming the system for public schools. And she got me into what was then a pretty interesting magnet program. It was circa 1984, so that’s dating me a little bit. So: kind of toward the end of the Cold War or the beginning of the end of the Cold War. And it was a program to train future diplomats and spies. (I’m not either of those things. Although some people seem to think I am.)
The high school program taught hard languages. That was the concept. So one year you might enter and do Arabic, or you might do Japanese. The class I entered happened to be the Russian year. And I failed miserably because I was a 14-year-old distracted teenager. But I became kind of obsessed [later on] with this idea of having a party trick. You know, when I got to college, I thought, “Yeah, nobody’s going to expect this Black girl from Chicago to speak Russian.”
…So I fell in love in with the language, with the culture, with the literature. And I ended up spending my last year in St. Petersburg, at St. Petersburg State University…it was ‘95, ‘96—again, dating me. But it just so happened that a young KGB agent had just become deputy mayor of the city. His name is Vladimir Putin….
I can’t say that I really paid attention to city politics. I was much more aware of national politics. But nonetheless, he was, you know, just becoming a new political figure on the city scene and national scene. And unbeknownst to me, another young man, or youngish man, named Yevgeny Prigozhin was also returning home to St. Petersburg, where he got into the hot dog business. Again, I don’t think I knew either of these characters, but what I did know is, Russia was experiencing something that was familiar to me as a Chicagoan—just a really extreme period of mafia violence. It really resonated with me. And it was against this backdrop of Imperial Russia, you know, just gorgeous architecture.
And it stuck with me, and Russia became very important to my career.
There’s been some failures in U.S. policy, I think, with how we’ve handled Putin under a series of presidents of both political parties to get to where we are now. What could we have done differently?
[CR]:
Well, it’s difficult to distill some 30 years into, I think, a simple calculation. I actually might date some of the failures, maybe one of the first, to George Bush’s pullout of the INF Treaty, which in a way uncorked what was this sort of simmering dissatisfaction in Putin over the expansion of NATO against his wishes—and I think even the wishes of some within NATO, notably France and Germany, that had some serious trepidation about extending an invitation to Ukraine and Georgia in 2004.
So I would mark actually this [as the] turning point in the relationship between the United States and Russia. Somewhere around that time, I really think the Iraq war was…the match-light of disagreement between Putin and Bush. And despite very vocal protestations…Bush went ahead with it. And I think Putin felt like this is the end of our relationship…the distrust was so high.
And from there [came] the color revolutions, and Putin just saw everywhere, you know, the shadowy hand of the West interfering in Russia’s traditional sphere of interest.
What happens if Putin dies or is removed from power? Who takes over Russia?
[CR]:
Well, here’s what I think. I think that the drone attacks that we saw Ukraine pull off just last week were a pretty good sign that the Ukrainians have strong networks inside the country, inside Russia. And we’ve seen now a few interesting surprise moments, right? We’ve seen Kursk, we’ve seen the strike on the Crimea bridge a couple of times, the Kerch Bridge.
And we’ve also seen some interesting assassinations take place. I mean, notably—these are little things that people like me who are geeks care about—there was a general who had been very instrumental in helping build the Wagner Group. His name was Yaroslav Moskalik. And he was blown up…A month ago, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s advisor and negotiator with Putin, had arrived literally that morning, and then this massive car bomb goes off in the middle of Moscow.
So what I think is that to have that kind of penetration, you need insiders. It’s not to say that there’s thousands of insiders. Who knows how many there are? If there is going to be some sort of counter-movement, counter-revolution, it resides in those networks. We just don’t know how large they are. And they’re certainly depleted by all the years that Putin has chipped away at the free media, at artists, at free thinkers and speakers and journalists.
So I think that is not the pathway. I think what we’re more likely to see is an ultra-nationalist counter-revolution, because this has been the pattern in Russian history dating back to the 1700s, 1800s. That tends to be the path of travel. I expect that that would happen again if Putin died or was assassinated. There would be both this kind of ultra-nationalist far-right seizure, and finally maybe kind of an elevation of a tsar.
And in terms of who’s next—you know, these kind of parlor games are difficult, but I do lay my money on Aleksey Dyuman, who is Putin’s longtime bodyguard and now resides in the State Council….He also was, of course, intimately involved in the formation of the Wagner Group and had a relationship with Prigozhin that dated back years. So I think he’s an important figure to watch.
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
Greg Olear talks to Candace Rondeaux about her book “Putin’s Sledgehammer,” which delves into the Wagner Group mercenary group and the complexities of Russia’s political landscape. Rondeaux shares her background in journalism and her journey into understanding Russian geopolitics, particularly through the lens of the Wagner Group and its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The discussion covers the origins of the Wagner Group, Prigozhin’s rise and fall, the influence of figures like Alexander Dugin, and the implications of the Internet Research Agency's actions during the 2016 election. Rondeaux also reflects on US policy failures regarding Russia and the future of democracy in Ukraine, the US, and beyond.
Candace Rondeaux directs Future Frontlines, a public intelligence service for next generation security and democratic resilience, and the Planetary Politics initiative at the New America Foundation. A writer and public-policy analyst, Rondeaux is a professor of practice and fellow at the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies and the Center on the Future of War at Arizona State University. Before joining New America, Rondeaux served as a senior program officer at the U.S. Institute of Peace where she launched the RESOLVE Network, a global research consortium on conflict and violent extremism and as a strategic advisor to the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Rondeaux has documented and analyzed political violence in South Asia, and around the world for the Washington Post and the International Crisis Group. Before going abroad for the Post in 2009, Rondeaux covered criminal justice in Maryland and Virginia, where she covered capital punishment and was part of the Pulitzer Prize winning team of Post reporters who covered the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre.
Buy the book:
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/candace-rondeaux/putins-sledgehammer/9781541703063/?lens=publicaffairs
Follow Candace:
https://x.com/CandaceRondeaux
https://bsky.app/profile/CandaceRondeaux.bsky.social
WIN A COPY
We’re doing a book giveaway! If you’d like to enter, just send an email to gregolear at gmail dot com, subject heading SLEDGEHAMMER.
Photo credit: Prigozhin as Kurtz.
He just went crazy…the new highly contagious world wide epidemic apparently.
It’s TUESDAY🎉 Great work on Saturday, everyone👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻.