Yevgeny Prigozhin’s story is one of stark transformation – from prisoner to one of Russia’s wealthiest and most influential power players. Quietly amassing a sprawling business empire under Vladimir Putin’s regime, Prigozhin remained largely in the shadows until 2022, when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought him into the global spotlight. As the head of the private military contractor the Wagner Group, Prigozhin wielded influence far beyond Russia’s borders. Wagner operatives had been active across Africa, providing security for high-profile politicians, running misinformation campaigns for state clients, training militaries and fighting on behalf of allied governments – often in exchange for lucrative mining rights. But the Ukraine war changed everything. Prigozhin became embroiled in a high-profile dispute with senior Russian military leaders, culminating in a dramatic and ill-fated mutiny. Just months later, Prigozhin and other senior Wagner leaders died in a mysterious plane explosion over Russia.

Professor Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian politics and organized crime, has written extensively on Russia’s complex power dynamics. In his latest book, Downfall: Prigozhin, Putin and the New Fight for the Future of Russia, co-authored with journalist Anna Arutunyan, Galeotti explores Prigozhin’s turbulent rise and fall. In the last episode of our podcast series Underworlds, Galeotti sits down with the GI-TOC’s director, Mark Shaw, to discuss Prigozhin’s life, his fraught relationships within the Russian elite, his posthumous image as a Russian patriot, his place in Russian history and the uncertain future of the Wagner Group without him.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mark Shaw: Mark, it’s such a huge pleasure to have you discussing the book. I’m not a Russia expert, obviously, but the book shattered a couple of stereotypes that I had. One, that Putin is this incredibly decisive figure who makes a whole lot of decisions. The second, that Prigozhin himself had a lot of agency. He operated, he was independent, he moved around, he was not a key player, but he was on the outside. But still, he determined his own fate. At least that’s what I took from reading this book. And I have to say the book is fantastic. It’s an absolutely great read, filled with action, humour. You just couldn’t ask for anything more. Is Prigozhin a decisive figure in Russian history? Your conclusion says some interesting things, but you portray him in part as a big figure, and in another part, as a… Is it too strong to say streetwise, not the brightest guy, but as somebody who’s got courage, he steps forward, he speaks truth to power. What is he? Or is he all of these things?

Mark Galeotti: To a degree, he is all of those things. Again, none of us are the simple stereotypes. When Anna and I were thinking about writing this book, we were thinking, ‘Do we really want to devote a chunk of our lives to chronicling this deeply unpleasant entrepreneur thug?’. Then we thought, ‘Well, not so much for Prigozhin’s sake, but because it’s a way of illustrating how this whole system emerged and evolved, and the degree to which it relies on people like Prigozhin’. To go back to your point about which of these things Prigozhin is, he is a man who clearly had a certain skill set. He clearly knew how to flatter people in power and also how to control in often very brutal ways people beneath him. He never learned how to deal with peers, which is one part of his downfall.

But also, this is a man who in some ways was custom-built for the 1990s. He came out of his time in the prison camp system clearly highly entrepreneurial. He’d even managed to set up a business while behind bars, but at the same time had no real constraints. He wasn’t held back by family connections or anything else. He could reinvent himself for the 1990s as exactly the kind of gangster businessman that the times demanded. I think this was the thing. It’s that someone like Prigozhin was in many ways a man of his times. The key point is the degree to which, despite the much more orderly veneer of Putinism,bthe key drivers, this lack of any meaningful law-based state at the high levels of society, the fact that business was simply seen as a way of making money regardless of how you did it, all of these actually were very much the 1990s phenomena, but now put in a smart suit and now with their own media advisors and everything else. This is why Prigozhin was interesting. He ultimately failed because of the limitations of his skill set. But he was someone who managed to both help shape the Putin era, but above all was a product of it.

MS: You say some interesting things about how at least somebody who tried to write on Prigozhin before, the threats came thick and fast. This seems a strange question, perhaps, but the fact that he’s dead, did that make it easier to write a more complete, rounded story from your perspective? Or did you suddenly think when he was dead, ‘Oh, my goodness, this key figure is gone, this makes it even less relevant’ or whatever the case.

MG: To be honest, that was part of the solipsistic initial response to when he died, that sense of, ‘What does it mean for us?’ That’s inevitable. The interesting thing is we actually signed the contract to this book two weeks before his mutiny. When we originally pitched the idea and signed it, he was still very much a key figure within this system, even if increasingly – this was after all summer of last year – on the ropes. Then there was this mutiny, and unsurprisingly and perfectly legitimately, that’s the point where the publisher said, ‘We really would quite like this book out and fast’. But there was that point where we think, ‘Well, actually, this is what really makes him interesting’, because this is someone who has been such a beneficiary of the system. In some ways, almost a poster child for the Putin era, not the oligarchs, but the minigarchs who are the real foot soldiers keeping this system running. Then, of course, two months later, there was his mysterious, but not so mysterious plane crash. So, yes, again, there was that sense of, ‘Okay, what does this mean for us?’.

But I think it was very useful for two reasons. One, on a purely book writing technical level, it did allow us to write a final chapter that was a final chapter, and it wasn’t full of ‘who can tell’ and such like. But also, I think it really does mark the point at which Prigozhin matters, because, up to that point, he was a representative of a particular element within the Putin elite. But the very fact that he turned against it, for his own reasons, and that the system itself chose to devour him, even though he was an insider in due course, is where his real historic importance lies. First of all, by his mutiny, he reveals certain weaknesses within the Putin system that hadn’t been obvious before. Secondly, by his murder, and I think that is what it was, it’s the very first time that the Putin system had repudiated a deal made with an insider. That will have long-term implications. In that respect, that nice Mr. Putin did us both a favour by actually, by his own actions, making Prigozhin more important than he could otherwise have been.

MS: Very interesting, Mark. When you and Anna heard about the mutiny, you have a peak in the story. Did you have a sense that this was also his death warrant? I’m not linking the book to say you were relieved and this helped you. It’s a genuinely analytical question. While, this is both, obviously, an explosive case situation step, this may be the end of the main character. Was it your sense then at that time? How did you read the mutiny?

MG: It was an extraordinary period to see that happen, and particularly just how easily they were able to take this key city of Rostov-on-Don and then move towards Moscow. But yes, at that point, I think it was fairly clear that no one really ought to be offering Prigozhin life insurance. It was a very quick process from start of the mutiny to the deal that ended it. Once that deal had been struck, I anticipated that Prigozhin would have maybe a year or so, either to demonstrate his loyalty and to buy his way back into the fold or for the regime to have decided, ‘Okay, he’s now no longer in so much public view. We can dispose of him more safely and quietly’. I hadn’t anticipated there’d be such a quick turnaround from traitor, to invited to tea in the Kremlin, to falling out of the sky north of Moscow. But nonetheless, I think it was fairly clear that it was unlikely that this was going to end well in the long term.

MS: For people who haven’t read the book, there are a great couple of paragraphs that analyze his decision to take the step to mount the mutiny. Can you talk about that? Because that’s a little bit what I was saying, that’s agency, right? He steps outside of the system and he does this decisive thing and he knows the system. He himself must have known that this was a profoundly dangerous thing to attempt.

MG: Obviously, it’s very hard to actually crawl inside someone’s head, especially once they’re dead, and try and work out exactly how it operates. The evidence is contradictory, but it could well be that Prigozhin hadn’t wanted to be the face of Wagner in the first place. Way back in 2013, when the Kremlin had wanted to create a mercenary organization, they decided, ‘Okay, Prigozhin’s the guy that’s best for us’, and he couldn’t say no. So this is an interesting thing. He was in many ways pitchforked into this role of mercenary condottiere. But over time, it increasingly became something that he was engaged in, fascinated with. I think it played to his macho persona that he liked being the idea of this tough guy and the terror of the West. Then when he went out and recruited prisoners from the labour camp system, it’s interesting what the prisoners themselves would say about it, that they felt that Prigozhin spoke to them as one of them. They were able to be recruited because this is a guy who’d been through the zone, the prison system. They basically felt that there was a guy who had their interests at heart, and I think he did.

At the same time, he was willing to use them as human ammunition in these horrific ‘meat wave’ attacks. But nonetheless, he felt that he and they were being taken for granted. Much of this became personalized in terms of his relationship with the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu. This is where that point I made earlier about the fact that Prigozhin knew how to relate with superiors and inferiors, but never with peers, comes in. Shoigu was actually stronger, but essentially a peer. Prigozhin couldn’t really handle that. He kept trying to basically bring Shoigu down, which was not going to happen because Shoigu was a personal friend of Putin’s and also had a much greater institutional power base. Eventually, Shoigu, who’s a much better behind-the-scenes political operator, manages to create this situation in which all the Wagner mercenaries are going to have to sign contracts with the defence ministry, which would be the final emasculation of Prigozhin.

This is all just warmed over pop psychology, but this is where I think both his own character and also the culture that he clearly did absorb from the prison system [come in]. There’s this very brutal, very macho type of culture there where one of the things is you never back down, because if you back down once, you’re going to spend your entire term behind the razor wire backing down. In Prigozhin’s career, he’d never actually been defeated by a peer. He obviously knew that he wasn’t as strong as the state. But basically speaking, this is a man who had gone from success to success and wasn’t very good at metabolizing the idea of a defeat.

And final point, we think this is extraordinary that Prigozhin might feel that he could challenge the state in this way and get away with it. But the point is, A) in historical terms, it’s not at all surprising how mercenary companies try to renegotiate their contracts with the boss. But even within the Russian context, in Chechnya, you have Ramzan Kadyrov, this wilful dictator, who every time there’s even some hint that the huge amount of federal subsidies that go to Chechnya (and that help him ensure the quality of life from which he’s become accustomed and also pay off his elites and build vanity projects and so forth) – anytime anyone makes a hint that maybe it’s time to scale those down slightly, he throws his weight around. Whether he just says, ‘Oh, well, maybe it’s time for me to retire’, or in one case, he actually invaded a neighbouring Russian republic over a territorial dispute. Each time, he gets away with it. Each time it’s the state that backs down.

Kadyrov and Prigozhin ended up being in very different situations. But nonetheless, I could see why Prigozhin might be able to convince himself that if he moves fast – and he was thinking that he was going to be able to capture Shoigu and his chief of the general staff, Gerasimov – and essentially presents Putin with a fait accompli, Putin will take the line of least resistance, because that is often how Putin operates, and side with him against Shoigu. I think all of these things together – a mix of desperate hope, macho unwillingness to give in and a sense of a genuine commitment to his boys, as he’d come to think of them – all of those came together for him to think, ‘Okay, well, I either submit or I give one last throw of the dice’. And he fatefully went for the latter.

MS: Is Prigozhin a familiar figure in Russian history or is he an outlier? You’ve mentioned another parallel, the renegotiation of mercenary contracts. Is he a simple product of his time, or can you think of others? Because you use this language, the serfs. Some of the language in the book is a historical analytical language to place him, hence my question.

MG: I think two historical parallels are worth drawing. One of them is that there’s a constant conflict in Russian history between what we could call the boyars (in other words, the upper aristocrats, the most powerful figures) and the gentry, the people who are actually running the country, whether they’re a colonel of a regiment here or a large landowner there. Often the role of the tsar, the monarch, has been to play these two social strata off against each other. He needs the boyars, he needs the gentry, but so long as he can basically keep them fighting against each other, then he can control the situation. Prigozhin was ultimately at best gentry. Shoigu was definitely a boyar. I think that there was an element of, for want of a better word, a class relationship there.

But more to the point, if one looks at the great rebellions that have characterized Russian history, particularly coming from or originating from Cossacks, people like Pugachev and the like, almost invariably, these are people who were once servants of the state. They were loyal, and then they felt the state had betrayed them, had taken their loyalty for granted, had not observed the social contract. And thus they had turned against the state. I think that’s the tradition into which Prigozhin falls, of the loyal servant of the state who ultimately feels that the state has screwed him over and that he’s not going to take it. Because often actually these rebellions were not about toppling the tsar. They were about actually grievances that they wanted sorted and that sense of, ‘If I create enough trouble, the tsar will have to deal with me’. It’s very much Prigozhin’s thinking.

But [there is] also a third posthumous historical parallel that has emerged. We’re just over a year since Prigozhin’s death. It’s not just that Prigozhin’s grave has become a shrine where people leave flowers and things. But there are these constant claims, particularly in social media, among the so-called turbopatriots, the ultra-nationalist wings, of sightings of Prigozhin. He’s been seen in Chad. He’s been seen in the Central African Republic. He was seen for some reason at a school assembly in Tyumen. Again, this speaks to a long tradition. If one thinks after the death of Ivan the Terrible, there were not one, not two, but three false Dmitrys who claimed to be Ivan’s younger son. People flocked to them, not because they necessarily thought that they really were Prince Dmitry, but because they represented something different. A chance to rebel legitimately, to think that you’re rebelling, but you’re doing so in the name of something that is right. I think this is what’s interesting now. Prigozhin is being reinvented in certain circles as the ultimate patriot, the man who was willing to, as you said, speak truth to power, but also roll up his sleeves and do what the motherland needed without enriching himself, when, actually, he enriched himself on a massive scale.

MS: Fascinating, Mark. This is obviously a podcast on organized crime, illicit markets. That’s a constant thread through the book. Prigohzin himself has a criminal background. There’s the St. Petersburg mafia, there’s organized crime in Russia more generally, there’s the activities of Wagner in Africa compared to criminal activities, etc. Can you piece that together for us, this refrain of organized criminality, what it means, how it shaped the actors on both sides?

MG:  Well, yes, this is the interesting thing. It speaks to the whole definitional question that the field has grappled with time and time again of what is organized crime, particularly in the context of states in which the rule of law is weak. Russia is a very bizarre state in many ways, because essentially, it is a modern institutionalized bureaucratic state that just happens to have a medieval court sitting on top of it. For most Russians, a fair degree of rule of law does exist. If someone welches on a contract, if someone bangs into your car or whatever, you can go to the courts, and it’ll be sorted the way it will be anywhere else. But as you go further up the system, the power of the rule of law becomes more and more attenuated. Prigozhin’s strength was his ability to navigate this strange hybrid realm of places where the personalistic relationships matter above all, rather than the niceties of the law, and other areas that were still, to a large extent, dominated by contract and so forth. It’s the very hybridity of the Putin system that creates the opportunities for people like Prigozhin, but also creates the problems for people like us who are trying to look for neat definitions.

Wagner is a classic case in point. Wagner is a mercenary organization that is essentially created by the state. Much, though not all of the time, its primary customer is the state, whether it’s in Ukraine or Syria or elsewhere. Yet, Russian law expressively prescribes private military companies. In some ways, it is an illegal venture from the get-go. But in many ways, it operates in Russia as if it were a perfectly constituted legal venture. It signs contracts with its soldiers or its suppliers, and in the main, follows those contracts. It behaves as if it’s legal. But then when you look at its operations, particularly in Africa, they’re it’s great strength. And one of the reasons why I don’t think it will in the long term survive in a post-Prigozhin world and under its new branding of the strangely tone-deaf ‘Africa Corps’ (what they decided to call it) is precisely because you had a mercenary organization that operated like so many others. But the point is, what really made it different was the whole back end, the fact that it was part of Prigozhin’s wider business empire, the Concord Group, which meant that you could hire it without having to pay cash on the nail, but instead by providing rights to a gold mine here or a diamond concession there.

Much of the money was then transferred through what could be politely described as untransparent and non-traditional channels. But this was an organization that had no problem at all paying kickbacks. Indeed, the expectation is that whoever signs a contract with Wagner can anticipate a certain amount flowing back into their private accounts. And Prigozhin himself was at the heart of this, because of his capacity to, on the one hand, be legitimate enough within the Russian system that he could speak with a certain amount of authority, and people would treat him as a representative of the Russian state in many ways, but on the other hand, was sufficiently deniable and illegal that he [could] use all these questionable ways, whether it’s smuggled gold heading via United Arab Emirates to reach Russia and such like. Again, hybrid state begat this hybrid structure that was a bit like an organized crime group, a bit like a regular private military company. It could morph from being more one thing than the other as circumstances required.

MS: Given all of this, what do you think Putin, the Russian elite, learned from the Prigozhin series of events? There are very interesting bits and pieces in the book after the mutiny, before, how he was dealt with, the thinking or the orientation of different actors. What do you think the lessons that would have been drawn are?

MG: If one thinks about Putin and the actual state, I think the lessons they learned were essentially very narrow and very technical. For example, there continue to be private military companies fighting in Ukraine, but it is clear that they’re a very different sort, that they’re really just simply using private military companies as structures through which to recruit more warm bodies for the war. And although these private military companies may technically be owned or sponsored by business people, business groups, local governors, a whole variety of different actors, none of them have anything like the personal stake, let alone command authority, that Prigozhin had. So no more private armies. That’s a very practical technical lesson that’s been learned.

On the other hand, the Putin regime has deliberately chosen to ignore the much bigger political questions about what happens when you have an essentially personalistic system that relies on constant struggles, and Putin’s role as the grand master of this game of divide and rule. The fact is, he’s going to throw up figures like Prigozhin who are going become increasingly problematic in fighting their own struggles.

Finally, if one looks at lessons that the elite has learned, it’s quite interesting the degree to which the Putin regime came out of this very badly, and Putin himself personally did. When the mutiny happens, as is usually the case for all the bare-chested machismo of the formal portrayal of Putin, in a crisis, he tends to hide. This is exactly what happened. We, first of all, had a period in which no one really knew what the hell was going on. He may well have been evacuated out of Moscow at the time, though officially he stayed there to rally the forces. When he eventually does emerge, that’s when he calls Prigozhin a traitor. That’s the point where Prigozhin realizes that his gambit has failed and he needs to negotiate. But Putin is clearly so desperate for this whole crisis to go away that he gives Prigozhin what I think it’s fair to say is too good a deal. If you just described someone as a traitor, why give them a deal that says, ‘Look, you can hold on to most of your businesses. Just go to Belarus, keep on operating in Africa, and everything will be fine’?

That lacked credibility, frankly. That made Putin look weaker. One of the reasons for that is because the security apparatus that we and Russians, and I think Putin himself, had always thought was the final backstop of his regime, proved notably unwilling to actually support the Kremlin against Prigozhin, nor were they willing to support Prigozhin. He himself had thought that half the army would back him. Well, I think he had 90 guys defect to his side, that’s all. But the main thing is most of the security apparatus was just willing to basically sit it out and just see what happened. I think that was a particularly chilling shock to the regime and not one they really know how to respond to. Finally, the very fact that Putin welched on a deal. He clearly had reached an agreement with Prigozhin that allowed Prigozhin to survive. Now, Putin may be a man who breaks international law every day before breakfast, but nonetheless, like any mob boss, he’d understood the importance of loyalty within the gang. This is the first time, really, that Putin had actually broken a deal with an insider, not some dissident, not some foreign businessman or whatever, but an insider. That broke the ponyatno, the understandings that are central to this personalistic regime. That really was a shocking thing for the elite, to have Putin now break a deal, which means that next time there’s a deal, will people think, ‘Well, will Putin hold to it or not?’.

MS: When Prigozhin died, there was a sense that Putin planned this the whole time. That this was very strategic, [following] a lot of the attributes that are given to [Putin] and which I think a narrative is built around. But actually, when you read the book, it’s not clear that his death was inevitable. Am I wrong in that? In the sense that he did a deal, it was a good deal, as you say. Do you think when negotiating that deal, Putin had already decided [Prigozhin] would die, or was this just like an incremental set of decisions later and then it was done? Because at the time, people sat back and said, ‘I told you so, Putin’s strategic, this guy was asking for it’. You make a very apt point on the mafia boss equivalency, which is he’d broken the unstated agreement, which shakes everybody up and undermines trust, which is core to holding the centre together. But I guess the question is, in your reading, was his death an inevitable issue when the very negotiations were taking place?

MG: I suspect that [it was] probably inevitable in the long term, but I don’t think for a moment that Putin was thinking, ‘Right, we’ll sign the deal, lull him into a full sense of security, and then I’m going to kill him’. Because firstly, Putin is not strategic. We see that in so many other ways. He is a tactician rather than a strategist. He responds to the moment, and sometimes that works well, and sometimes that works badly. Secondly, he had many other opportunities to dispose of Prigozhin before that point, and he didn’t have to even do it in such a pyrotechnic way. He could have had Prigozhin arrested, put on trial. Or indeed, Prigozhin could have fallen out of the metaphorical window when the next week he was invited to the Kremlin for a meeting with Putin, accompanied by about 50 of his field commanders. There were so many times in which Prigozhin was entirely within the grip of the Kremlin. They didn’t need to do it at this time and this way. It’s very hard to obviously crawl into the deep dark recesses of Putin’s brain. But nonetheless, my sense is that no, there wasn’t any specific plan or timeline.

Prigozhin himself clearly thought he got away with it, at least for the moment, and he was going to throw himself into his Africa ventures. I suspect he thought this is how he can buy his way back into the Kremlin’s favour, because it’s clear that the Kremlin did appreciate the whole Concord and Wagner operations in Africa. They had economic, but above all, political value. He’s moving back and forth between Belarus and Russia without hindrance. We also know that there was debate within the government circles about what to do. By all accounts, one of Putin’s closest henchmen, Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, was a guy who had drawn together a plan for how Prigozhin could be killed, but that he had drawn it up on his own authority. In other words, he had a plan ready to push on Putin rather than because Putin had said from the beginning ‘Make sure that we’re ready to kill him’. I think that this is classic Putin, he makes decisions and then he changes his mind. We have a sense that somehow everything always works out the way Putin wants, because in some ways, Putin is this grey blur. I say this as someone who’s also written a biography of Putin – a grey, dull man. His very greyness makes him a Rorschach ink blot, over which observers can overlay. If they want to see him as the grand master of geopolitical three-dimensional chess, they can see that in him. I don’t.

MS: This point of elite competition in the Russian system, which the book covers really well. It’s a bit like a soap opera, and there’s a bit of humour in there that you deploy to great effect. Just explain Prigozhin, the military, the FSB [Federal Security Service], this personal competition. You’ve talked about the contracts, but this was something pending for a much longer period of time, from Syria, where, as you describe, the Americans were allowed to essentially destroy a part of a force. Just talk us through that, because this competition, this more than a triangle, was underway for some time. And as you portray it, Putin is above all of this, intervening. He doesn’t want to disappoint. In effect, he comes across as a weaker figure under which this competition occurs, and he doesn’t intervene to solve it. He uses it, as I read the book.

MG: This is absolutely central to how Putin manages the elite. In fairness, although I regard Putin as distinctly limited in many ways, one has to say this is where he’s really shown his skill. It’s creating this constant ferment within the elite, individual factions and institutions competing against each other, usually because of deliberately overlapping responsibilities and interests. Because that, first of all, means that no one can really unite against him. He remains the final decider at the top. Secondly, because he can go in and he can decide who wins this particular competition. If he gets to pick the winners and the losers, then that gives everyone a good reason to basically want to please and flatter and speak to the boss. Let’s be clear, the true currency of Russia is not the rouble, it is Putin’s favour. That is often politically very functional, even if administratively dysfunctional because you have all kinds of different competitions over particular areas of state activity.

The thing is, in this case, you got someone like Prigozhin, who is not in Putin’s closest circle – despite some of the talk, he was never a friend of Putin’s, he was one of many suitors to Putin’s attention. He was clearly trusted to a considerable degree or regarded as having certain competencies. But even then, we talk in the book at one point about when Putin just really gratuitously decides to put him down, walking past him in St. Petersburg and says, ‘Nice hairstyle’, and points to his head. That’s classic Putin. He likes putting people down just to make sure that they appreciate where they are in the pecking order. In that respect, Prigozhin is like so many of these, I call them ‘adhocrats’, whose responsibilities are just simply whatever the boss wants them to be. Hence, a catering magnate can become a trollmaster, and then in due course, a mercenary commander. You’re constantly trying to see how you can compete for the boss’s favour. Sometimes that means guessing what the boss is going to want tomorrow and providing it today, and sometimes it’s going to mean doing down your rivals. This is exactly where Prigozhin found himself.

But the point is, as he rose, he was getting into more and more dangerous environments. It’s one thing when he was largely a catering and real estate magnate, facing similar comparable figures. But by the time he was running a mercenary army, and particularly at the point where he really was making his name, both for the trolls and the mercenaries at around 2015, which is when they were going into Syria, now he’s up against much more formidable figures. Figures like Shoigu, who, as I said, are Putin’s friends. Shoigu famously would take Putin on holiday, hiking through Siberia, with added photo opportunities. This is the environment in which he finds himself. It’s one in which he can demonstrate certain primal skills. But ultimately, Prigozhin’s key blunder is that he’s never able to make alliances. When you’re operating at that level, you need to have allies, not just patrons and clients, but allies. He was never able to do that. That tells us something about the deinstitutionalization of the top of the Putin system, the degree to which it’s about personalistic relationships, your capacity to pitch your ideas or just simply your value to the boss. Today, he will support you. He might not tomorrow. Like a shark, you have to keep swimming in order to keep breathing.

MS: Can you talk about the sourcing for the book, if that’s the right word? This is an authoritarian regime, it creates its own narratives. Except what you have here in the book, what Anna and you have done is, well, there’s a lot of information available, or maybe not all of it is as valuable as some poor parts, but how do you work on Russia or a man like Prigozhin? Where do you get the material from? How do you weigh it and balance it as a researcher, scholar, academic? Are there things you think that you have hints of that will still emerge that you skirted over in the book and you didn’t have enough evidence, for example? Is it a struggle to piece something like this together?

MG: Well, the honest answer is yes, it is. Certainly, there are still some anecdotes and things that broke our hearts when we heard them and thought, ‘Oh, that’s a great story’, but we’ve got one source that claims it and not necessarily an authoritative source, so we can’t use it. First of all, I think there’s often a misunderstanding about Russia. On the one hand, yes, this is an information-controlled society, but I think it’s also actually one in which there is still a lot of pluralism within sourcing, even within the media, I’m not just talking about social media type stuff. I am continually astonished that there are investigative journalists, for example, who are still doing their job or trying to do their job, at least, even though being an investigative journalist in Russia has been demonstrated to be as dangerous as being a war correspondent. But nonetheless, they do it. So there is quite a bit of information that is still out there. Secondly, although we’re seeing an increasing rollback, there have actually been quite a few moves within Russia, until recently, to push forward transparency. So, in terms of corporate ownership structures and the like, there was actually a lot of information available.

Thirdly, one also has to rely quite a bit on social media, which is always a very questionable source because the risk is otherwise it’s all about you finding the quote or the post that suits the narrative that you already assume is there. So one has to treat that with caution. But nonetheless, there’s a lot of stuff there. But also there’s personal contacts. I’ve been working on Russia since – God help me – it was still the Soviet Union. My co-author, Anna Arutunyan, she had been political editor of The Moscow News. She was the senior Russia analyst for International Crisis Group. She had her own network. But the key thing is these are actually quite different networks. Mine had always focused largely on the security operators, the police and so forth. Hers was much more politics and business. Going back to your earlier point about what changed when Prigozhin died, it’s worth noting that there were several sources who wouldn’t talk to us at all while Prigozhin was alive because he was notoriously not just litigious, but if you happen to be in Russia, he would indeed threaten to have people killed and so forth. And others who were, after Prigozhin had died, suddenly a lot more open in how they spoke to us.

There was a funny moment in which, although we were right close to the end of when we actually needed to submit the manuscript, suddenly we’ll have people say, ‘When I answered that question, I wasn’t perhaps completely open about that’, and you’re suddenly factoring in a whole new amount of information. Obviously, it’s inevitably difficult. It’s like, for example, this whole question as to whether Prigozhin wanted or didn’t want to actually run Wagner. We’ve got the two perspectives. My own personal hunch is that he didn’t want to run Wagner. But the point is we haven’t got the data to prove that, so we lay out both possibilities. There are other times when we did just have to make a leap of faith and simply say, ‘Well, this feels like the right answer’. I think that when it comes to Russia, the interesting thing is that, although there are always certain specific bits, you’re never going to know what happens in Putin’s discussions with his security chiefs, for example. That is the blackest of black boxes. That’s not going to come out for 50 years, unfortunately. But beyond that, there’s a surprisingly wide range of information sources still available on Russia today.

MS: I’ve read your other stuff, Anna’s too. It’s my assumption that this is a different project for you, it’s very personalized around one individual. You slightly dismissively said ‘warmed over pop psychology’ earlier. I’m not sure that’s true, but there’s some very interesting analysis about the man being a human, competition, how people respond. How did the book evolve? The chapters are very interesting because the chapter structure – Thug, Entrepreneur, Chef, Minigarch, Trollmaster, Condottiere, Scavenger, Warlord, Rebel, Ghost – is the multiple personalities of the man. How did that evolve? Were there alternative ways that you debated about using the material, or was it just clear this was a man with multiple personalities, if you like, or ways that he could be pitched?

MG: To go back to your initial point about a different type of project, it is, and in some ways it’s because it is not just my project. It’s a hybrid of two people, and it was a very equal writing process. For most of the chapters, what would happen is we would discuss in advance, roughly speaking, what we thought it would cover, though there’s always discovery when you’re writing. Usually, Anna would write the first draft, but make sure it was well under word count. Then I would add in all the bits that I wanted to add in and so forth. Sometimes we’d discuss and I’m thinking, ‘Well, no, it’s not this’. Anna would say, ‘Yes, it is that’, or whatever. Whereas with the more military-oriented chapters, generally I would do the first draft and then Anna would do all the tinkering.

But also I think it was a different way of trying to approach it. There are so many books that try to talk about what Putinism is about and the Putin regime and such like. They tend to start from structure and then illustrate it with people. This is why we thought, ‘Well, this actually is an interesting alternative way of trying to talk about a system’, through the story of one person whose career, conveniently, does track through so many of the developments of the pre-Putin era and then the Putin era itself, and deciding to structure it around his different roles. It was a way of keeping to a relatively chronological span, which gives the reader an easy thing to hold on to and allows it more easily to demonstrate the evolving patterns of what’s happening in Russia at this time. But, fortuitously, one could periodize his life quite clearly. It’s not as if he stopped being an entrepreneur with his catering and real estate and marketing and everything else when he was running the trolls or running Wagner. They were constantly operating in the background. But nonetheless, there was this sense that he was meeting a variety of needs of the state, and that’s the crucial point.

It’s strange because when you really dig into a person and you’re watching all of their social media videos and any interviews they give and so forth, there is a weird cognitive dissonance that creeps in, and you start to become a bit of a partisan. He’s still a horrible man, but then there are times when you think, ‘There he has a point’. But Prigozhin’s brilliance was the capacity to spot these evolving opportunities, which were in themselves, invariably, products of the evolving state. This is not just simply about how a market evolves, it’s how a market is shaped by a political structure. In some ways, Prigozhin gave us that structure through his activities, and that gave us something that helps make the book comprehensible.

MS: You end with Ghost, but you also have this fascinating concluding chapter about the future of the Russian Federation and whether this will be viewed historically, the mutiny or Prigozhin himself and his role as a breaking point, or whether this was more continuity. What do you think it means for the future of Russia? How will this be read?

MG: Whenever you write something, you always want to be able to claim that this is absolutely pivotal and the whole world changed when this happened, which may prove to be the case, but is likely to be something of an exaggeration. But on the other hand, I do think that Prigozhin, by his rise and above all by his fall, did demonstrate some fundamental weaknesses of the Putin system. Not just to us, we’re not the important ones, but I think also demonstrated them to the Russian elite and the Russian population as a whole. The degree to which Putin, who for so long had been the man who could manage the elite and the rivalries within them, failed to manage this, even though so many people have been telling him that the Prigozhin–Shoigu rivalry was becoming crucially dangerous. The fact that he was unable to rely on his security apparatus in this particular crisis, and the fact that he ultimately broke a deal with an insider, all of those are things that have become very much noticed.

They leave Putin in a weaker position for the next crisis, because this is a regime that, in my opinion, is strong but brittle. It can handle the day to day, even with this ghastly war taking place in Ukraine. But on the other hand, it’s demonstrated itself, at the best of times, not to be very good at dealing with the unexpected crises. The one thing one can say about politics is there will always be an unexpected crisis coming along. We don’t know when and what. That’s the whole point. That’s why it’s unexpected. But in the past, the regime was able to cope with crises, thanks to three strengths: Putin’s personal legitimacy, his capacity to throw huge amounts of money at problems, and ultimately, his control of the security apparatus. Well, the money issue is already under pressure. His authority, his legitimacy, has been demonstrated to be much weaker than might have been thought, and indeed has been weakened by the mutiny. More to the point, this is the first real test of the security apparatus’s willingness to put itself in the line of fire for him, and it showed that it was actually not that keen, thank you very much.

So going into the next crisis, the regime will be that much weaker. Now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the next crisis will bring it down or the one after that. But the point is, it is a progressive degradation. In this respect, I think one can say that Prigozhin hammered some cracks into the edifice that may in due course, under other pressures, break open. But the final point is – and this is something that Anna, speaking as someone who is Russian and had been living in Moscow, and obviously got out quickly when the invasion happened, was much more insistent that we should include, and I think she was absolutely right about this – the sense that one of the things that Prigozhin also highlighted was the moral intellectual vacuum at the heart of this regime. For all the attempts to build the current conflict to some grand civilizational struggle and so forth, no one really believes that. There is that sense that this is just a self-interested bunch of often deeply incompetent figures running it. For Prigozhin, by doing one of the most dangerous things for an information control authoritarianism, which is actually telling the truth, or some of the truth, about what was going on in the war, that helped explain why he was popular, but it also helped explain why he was dangerous.

And although Prigozhin didn’t really offer anything else – he was not revolutionary, he was just a self-interested thug who ultimately ended up on the wrong side of the state – what happens now is that people have mythologized Prigozhin. The people now see him as a certain figure who fulfils some of the needs of the Russian people. They want to have something in which to believe. Putin is no longer that thing.

MS: Thanks, Mark. That’s excellent. I really appreciate the discussion. The title is Downfall. From what you’re saying there, that’s the downfall of Prigozhin himself, but potentially the downfall of much more. It’s a fascinating read, Prigozhin, Putin, and the New Fight for the Future of Russia, Anna Arutunyan and Mark Galeotti. And we’ve been speaking to Mark. A great read, Mark. Thank you very much for the candid back and forth about the book, how you structured it, how you worked on it. It’s really, really a great read.

MG: My great pleasure. Good to talk to you.