I just wrote a piece on the Prigozhin farce for oD [link to article]. There, I talk a little about how frustrated I am with how social media is ‘event captured’ leading to people uncritically echoing grifter takes and no-nothing hacks. I also say a little about how the ‘march of justice’ on Moscow shows how easily we are pushed off balance. People immediately assumed a coup and the collapse of the hyperventilating paper-bag that the Kremlin appears to be at the moment. I am writing in my book right now about how difficult it is to separate the regime as a political constellation of players and interests from the ‘state’. The state is often seen through a rather narrow lens of complete dysfunction, or narrow coercion, or just incompetence and infighting. And sure, all those things are there. In my book I detail many examples of improvised governance that belie a simplistic framing based on notions of ‘state effectiveness’ and ‘state capacity’ – both of which are actually much harder to clearly define than you would think.

Of course there’s a lot going on that is opaque, but on one level Rob Lee best summarised things: this was a ‘factional dispute’ that became a public challenge and which gained a temporary solution (Prigozhin goes into internal exile in Belarus and his motley crew are somehow subordinated to the army). Joshua Yaffa wrote that Putin’s rule rests on cynicism and detachment – hence Yaffa saying that many were sitting on the sidelines. I argued that focussing on factional elite conflicts leads to those aspects overdetermining the picture. In simpler terms, sure, ‘politics in the absence of politics’ matters, but so do institutions, even in Russia. And my gut turned out to be right – institutions of state, in a lacklustre manner, still have a shape and an agency of their own. I pondered whether this was more than just Prigozhin versus Shoigu as a political conflict. In reality it saw the army as an institution ‘win’ in terms of who is running the war. Ultimately this means Putin backtracking on a major decision to dangerously flirt with allowing a suspension of the idea that the state is the only legitimate monopoly on violence. And I noted that this is entirely of a piece with Russian history – with the army as a trusted institution that balances between extremes. This seems perverse. People don’t trust their kids to the army because it is corrupt and brutal. But they do trust it as an institution because, as we saw in Gorbachev and Yeltsin’s time, it correctly perceived which faction had broad legitimacy. Under Putin the promises of genuine military reform gave way to more cronyism and corruption. The army is a shadow of its former self under Shoigu which should give more than pause for thought about the nature of his political identity. Despite that, it’s remarkable how little attention is paid to the army as a genuine institution with its own identity, history, and preferences. It still is a world apart from the security services. And by ‘institution’, I am mainly talking about how many rules, shared-assumptions and agreements persist and reproduce themselves informally within the shell of the formal institution – a state of affairs that needs much more attention in all social science on the Russian state.

Similarly, it seems we have it all the wrong way around with thinking of Prigozhin as this widely popular populist warlord. Sure, there’s a constituency that would like him as one in a long line of outsider extremists (although he’s consciously playing a part there too). These are, frighteningly, the war supporters – that minority who genuinely believe in a fated and fatal mission. Yesterday though, Prigozhin was little more than a chthonic Karen, driven to shooting down some defenceless aircraft and bleating at two extremely experienced and integrated elite military figures that they were ‘dissing’ him. He was, by the way, armed and in his usual cosplay fatigues, while they, not needing to try to appear something they were not, were in loose military office attire, disarmed, but merely mildly discombobulated and a bit embarrassed. For me this showed that Prigozhin remains that wannabe capo not quite in the mob. He’s carried out a series of murders and the boss smiles at him from time to time, but he’ll never be a made man, let alone sit in the poker game with them. And these, rather non-descript military men knew that, even as he made a theatrical flourish of holding a gun to their heads. Prigozhin is a buttonman and a bagman needed for the emergency stage in the war, but probably no longer. And while he verbalized his Karen complaint to the authorities, because he can’t get through to the boss, he really understood the writing on the wall and quickly acceded to the offer of internal exile. No one will forget he was just a petty crook and hotdog seller, stirring up mustard in his mother’s apartment.

We know that the army did not want this war. We know that before the war less than 10% had any enthusiasm for military action, let alone invasion. We know that the war is at best seen as a massive challenge by the military. At worst it’s privately acknowledged as a mistake and even a disaster. The regime insists, but the state persists. This of course is highly disturbing to the vocal Anglophone war bros, hence the enthusiasm among them for a coup. Short-sighted and highly counterproductive to Ukrainian interests, that outcome was never likely. Even now, looking at this as weakening the regime is misplaced. It might hasten the departure of Putin himself, but that may not change very much at all.  This was the classic Russian bunt [mutiny], or miatezh [insurrection]; spectacular (but not necessarily extensive) violence as a form of political communication. As a ‘complaint to the authorities’ in a land where politics has to take place without Politics. Everyone knows they up-there are largely indifferent, but there is always a dirty protest one can make and who knows, it might have an effect.

If Prigozhin served as the Chthonic Karen, the war machine nomad who wants to undo the state to keep on moving through smooth space and break all the rules, then what is the regime? The Chthonic flip-flopper who doesn’t really know what to do but knows it wants to survive? Meanwhile the real plasticity and improvisation is observed in the institutions of state – they have their own agendas, their own interests in continuing the charade. They see that Prigozhin type figures are a threat to the continuous state-formation, its sedimentation – as Deleuze and Guattari characterise it. And what about the people waiting for selfies with the main character of the hour? Observers mistakenly seemed to think there was broad support for a potential populist replacement for Putin. On the contrary, there’s little enthusiasm for Prigozhin. Here again we have a great example of the problem of online punditry and social media analysis. There were scenes of jubilation and the greeting of Wagnerites, but others with local knowledge tell a more convincing story – of widespread fear and the understanding that Rostov was now ‘hostage’. But there was a kind of ecstatic discharge of tension, as it became clear that Rostovians were not going to have to share the fate of Mariuopolitans. After all, Russians are well aware of what their state is capable of. Whether it acts coherently or not.