Prigozhin

There is a comfortable way to talk about the FSB, and almost everyone uses it. In this telling the agency is Vladimir Putin’s instrument — his sword and shield, the loyal apparatus through which a single man projects his will across eleven time zones. He commands; it obeys. Frighten the dictator and you frighten the service; remove the dictator and the service goes slack. I want to argue that this picture is not merely incomplete but inverted. The FSB is not Putin’s tool. It is a mafia operating at the scale of a country and reaching across the world, and Putin is one of its assets rather than its owner — the most valuable asset it holds, but an asset all the same. The relationship is not master and servant. It is a partnership between a frightened man and the organization that profits from his fear, and the organization is the senior partner. ...

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. ...