The Stateless Warlord: Prigozhin and the Privatization of State Violence
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. ...