Collapse

Whenever I am asked what should be done with Russia after this war, I notice that the question itself contains a hidden assumption I no longer share. The question assumes there will still be a Russia to do something with — a single, intact state, stretching across eleven time zones, that we will somehow steer toward decency once the present regime is gone. Replace the leader, hold honest elections, draft a good constitution, and the country will at last take the European path it missed in the 1990s. I have come to believe this is a comforting illusion, and a dangerous one. The hard truth is simpler and far less reassuring: an intact Russia will keep reproducing the empire, because empire is not a policy this state pursues but the form this state takes. You cannot reform your way out of a shape. You can only break it. ...

There is a comfortable way to talk about Yevgeny Prigozhin, and it has the great advantage of making him small. In this telling he was a caterer who got lucky, a thug with good connections, a useful brute whom the Kremlin pointed at Ukraine and Africa and who then, in a fit of pique, briefly lost his mind and drove a column toward the capital before thinking better of it. File him that way and the whole episode shrinks to an anecdote: a colorful henchman, an embarrassing weekend, a tidy aerial death. I want to argue that this is exactly the wrong frame, and that the smallness is the point — because the comfortable reading is a way of not looking at what Prigozhin actually represented. He was not an aberration of the system. He was its purest product, and its plainest warning. ...