![]() (The British police have been cloddishly slow to realize that Russian agents were using all methods, including efficient poisons, to kill victims in Britain.) Escaping into exile, his death reportedly by hanging in the bathroom of his Surrey mansion may have been either a howl of despair or an efficient mission by Putin’s assassins. Fatally he played some role in anointing Yeltsin’s successor, Putin, who swiftly resented Berezovsky’s presumptuous interference. The great favourite of the last reign, Boris Berezovsky, a Jewish mathematician charmed the ursine, cantankerous, crapulous President Boris Yeltsin and vitally his influential daughter Tatiana, with his nervy worldly dynamic style, made billions from owning Sibneft and Aeroflot. But when these favourites lose the protection of their patron, their falls are vertiginous for their power and wealth arouse vicious jealousy amongst the traditional elites. ![]() Some imperial favourites were amazingly talented-Catherine the Great’s co-ruler Prince Potemkin was the greatest statesman of the Romanov dynasty-and some not-Nicholas II’s Rasputin was the most talentless. The rise of Prigozhin (‘Putin’s chef’, ‘hotdog-seller’) is not some exotic freak of nature: he is just the latest in a long line of court favourites whose ascendancies are the inevitable result of personal power at its most supreme. Putin acquiesced in Lukashenko’s shadowy agreement and even met Prigozhin who was allowed to fly around the world, recently visiting his Musicians in Africa, wielding a Kalashnikov and full desert fatigues. Nicholas I facing the mutiny of elite Guards regiments in the streets of Petersburg bombarded them with artillery. Catherine the Great unleashed her generals to crush the Pugachev rebellion-they sailed floating gallows down the Volga. Peter the Great rushed back from his Great Embassy to Europe to torture thousands of rebel musketeers in specially-constructed torture chambers. Russian rulers are accustomed to face rebellions and crush them but they generally did so with considerably more elan-and more vivid violence. We may never know the real deal brokered by Putin’s client Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko to stop the advance, but Putin, ashen and lacking his trademark swagger, was forced to go on TV to denounce Prigozhin’s treason. Yet it turned out Putin was inept at running his own court and could not prevent Kremlin rivalries playing out online and then exploding into open rebellion on 23 June 2023 when Prigozhin led his forces to seize Rostov and then advance on Moscow. His decision to "roll the iron dice"-Bismarck’s great expression-of war has not only led to the death of an estimated 500,000 people, many of them innocent Ukrainian civilians, but also placed his own rule under impossible stress, revealing a decaying state dominated by coercion, feuding, incompetence, mendacity, and venality. ![]() Putin has shaped a modern version of autocracy, held together by his personal power, ability to play off his potentates, and offer glory and stability to his people. One cannot say dictatorship is the only way Russia could have developed and that democracy is impossible far from it, but its tendency is overwhelming. It also chronicles the depletion of autocratic prestige, state power, and competent management, and it further raises the threat of the disintegration of Russia itself.įirst, all of this is a symptom of personal power, one man rule, the habitual system of autocracy in Russia throughout its long history. The rise and fall of Prigozhin reveals many threads that run throughout Russian history and remain acutely relevant now. Russian rulers are experts in targeted violence that can be both entirely predictable but kinetically surprising. Given the rules of power in Putinist Russia, no one is surprised that Prigozhin was killed, only that the interval between his mutiny and his killing was so long-two months-and so tortuously inconsistent that it exposed the weakness of Putin. We have not seen Prigozhin’s body and his death cannot be confirmed but both the Russian state and Wagner sources say he is dead-so he most probably is no longer amongst the living. It is clear that so far even supposed "security experts" are just reading the same Telegram accounts as the rest of us. But as usual in today’s Russia, we know very little about what is really happening within the tiny inner circle of the Putin court.
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