Putin, Prigozhin, and Russia’s Long, Bloody History of Fallen Favorites

The tangled plot of Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin’s relationship may look bizarre to those of us who live in Atlantic democracies. It is tempting to endow this opéra bouffe with extra layers of conspiracy. But their intimate and now venomous double act is in many ways a microcosm of the way Putin has ruled Russia for the last 23 years, through a court that is designed to keep the autocrat in control. By playing rival magnates and factions off against one another, and by precariously managing overlapping bureaucracies, he thought he had made himself unassailable and coup-proof. The Putin-Prigozhin drama is, in some ways, a modern story singular to our era of internet trolls, Telegram accounts, and thermobaric weapons, but it is also a tale as old as the Russian czars. One way to look at it is this: Set during a merciless war, late in the reign of an isolated, ailing, deluded autocrat, it is the story of the rise and fall of an imperial favorite.

Let’s start with the events of last weekend. On Friday, Prigozhin, the brutal, cantankerous commander of a ferocious mercenary legion fighting in Ukraine, mutinied against his former patron, Putin. He seized the strategic city of Rostov-on-Don, then headed north to threaten Moscow itself—and force out his rivals defense minister Shoigu and chief of staff Valery Gerasimov, whom he rightly blamed for the appalling conduct of Russia’s savage Ukraine war. In the excitement of events, naive Westerners romanticized Prigozhin as a brave rebel, when in fact the sledgehammer-wielding ex-con is as murderous a warmonger as the rest of his grisly Kremlin crew.

Prigozhin was certainly a maverick in military matters, but he was also a veteran insider of Putin’s gaudy and carnivorous court. His rise was made possible by his relationship with the autocrat. A boy from a secret-police family, Putin grew up rough in the Leningrad backstreets, then joined the KGB in time to witness and mourn the downfall of the Soviet/Russian empire. Remaking himself in the chaotic presidency of Boris Yeltsin, he proved adept at ruthless bureaucratic intrigues. Yeltsin rewarded Putin’s personal services by installing him as successor.

As president, Putin, like every czar before him, sought energetic henchmen to outrank the sluggish, sullen bureaucrats who occupy the desks of state institutions. The Russian czar—whether Putin or his predecessors the Alexanders and Nicholases and Stalin—must manage and overawe the powerful, change-resistant bureaucracies to maintain his own supremacy. His power may seem boundless, but in a system without limits he is vulnerable: He must exist in a state of constant trigger-ready vigilance with multiple, huge security organs and palace guards all spying against each other. Every potentate at his court must have a counterbalance.

For all his splendor, a Russian czar depends on coercion to remain in power, creating personal guards and secret police to rival the army. His greatest fear is always that a popular general will threaten him. In 1937, Stalin massacred three of his five marshals and approximately 40,000 officers to ensure military loyalty: his top commanders Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Vasily Blyukher were savagely beaten to death under interrogation. Both Stalin and Khrushchev feared the prestige of the great World War II paladin Georgy Zhukov: To preserve their power, the former demoted him in 1946, and the latter fired him in 1957.

The czar’s solution to both threat and apathy is to recruit outsiders into the elite whose meteoric ascendancies demonstrate the prestige of the emperor: the imperial favorites. In absolutist systems, closeness to the ruler translates into personal power. They are the public manifestation of the sacred czar’s mystical power to make anyone he chooses into a potentate: often favorites were lovers of female empresses who appointed them their chief ministers and princes, even rulers in their own right. Empress Anna’s lover Ernst Biron became independent Duke of Courland; Catherine the Great’s Potemkin planned to become King of Poland or Dacia (Romania). Sometimes the favorites were chefs or even barbers: Emperor Paul was given an enslaved Turkish boy as a gift, renamed him Ivan Kutaisov, employed him as his barber and valet, showered him with riches, and promoted him to count—the ultimate favorite. But the czar can just as easily unmake them. The mistake often made by well-meaning US/UK journalists is to exaggerate the importance of oligarchs in the Kremlin. Rich businessmen are important in the West, but oligarchs are just favorites whom the czar—Yeltsin or Putin—made rich and powerful. When the czar unmakes them, they become irrelevant.

Dictators get the favorites and cronies they deserve: Putin and Prigozhin are interlinked. Prigozhin, like all favorites, is the ultimate insider-outsider.

Even his start as a chef and restaurateur in St. Petersburg resonates with Putin’s own family origins. Prigozhin was known as “Putin’s chef,” but the autocrat’s preeminent chef was his grandfather, Spiridon Putin, whose curriculum vitae belongs in a historical novel. This most world-historical of chefs cooked for Rasputin at the Astoria Hotel in St. Petersburg, then for Lenin and Stalin as a member of their secret-police service staff.

Perhaps this inspired Putin’s fascination with imperial history: When I published my history Catherine the Great & Potemkin in 2000, I was contacted by the new president’s aides to discuss his interest in how Catherine and her favorite and partner Prince Potemkin annexed Crimea and Ukraine, creating cities like Sevastopol, Kherson, and Odessa. Putin admired the successful empire-building Russian rulers—Peter the Great, Catherine and Potemkin, Stalin. As the FT reported, when the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was asked who had advised Putin to invade Ukraine, he replied, “He has three advisors, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great.”