[this is a longer version of a piece I wrote for openDemocracy]

I was one of few observers who thought the fallout over Prigozhin’s ‘mutiny’ in June 2023 might take a while to occur. I guess I was half right. Many seem surprised it took so long for the consequences of Prigozhin’s march on Moscow to catch up with him. Others immediately focused on the implications for the Ukraine conflict: that his demise proved that it had been worth Ukraine fighting for every inch of Bakhmut, or that his violent death showed that agreements with Putin are futile. Like one of the most carefully balanced observers, political sociologist Samuel Greene, I think these takes largely miss the point. And like him, I think ‘unresolvable whodunits’ are fruitless. Instead, ‘we should be focusing on understanding how the story develops within Russia itself, how people understand and interpret it, and what they do with those understandings and interpretations’, Greene comments.

As with any violent event in fraught circumstances, some will look for the simplest explanation while others will entertain elaborate conspiracy theories. The point is that every person’s preference for interpretation reveals a lot about how they view the conduct of the war and the effectiveness of the state. But for me, the main take aways are the increasing fractious state of Russia’s internal politics and the usefulness to quite different people (to Putin, to the FSB, to Ukraine) of the ambiguity over the sources and reasons for violence. And indeed, that is the meaning of Prigozhin’s death, just as that was the meaning of his march: inter-elite ‘political communication’ by violent means – as I wrote in June for Open Democracy and discussed in more detail here. Communication doesn’t have to be unambiguous: sometimes its advantageous to let others unpack the message, or read more into it than was there in the first place.

So, Greene’s points are useful to jump off into a few reminders. The fact that prominent political figures who are a potential threat to the stability of the regime are killed should not lead to simplistic arguments about ensuing anarchy, or a break down in the rule of law. And it doesn’t mean ordinary Russians are just passive bystanders. They also will act based on their different interpretations of Prigozhin’s death. Experts on the Russian security services, courts and police have long noted – not the inconsistency in the ‘monopoly on violence’ exercised by the state – but how messiness serves political and material ends. So, of relevance is the obvious point that the shocking death of Prigozhin serves disseminate broadly the message that the regime does not like the communication it received in June – regardless of whether it carried out the assassination or not. Prigozhin said what no one else inside Russia dared say: that the war has been waged incompetently and unjustly to Russians themselves (let alone Ukrainians), and that the reasons for it were entirely bogus. This, it turns out, was the message from Prigozhin that couldn’t be stomached, but the question of by whom is not so important. Searching for which part of the ‘regime’ responded and trying to trace a chain of decisions back to Putin is fruitless.

This is because decision making in the Russian regime is never linear or clear. An unfortunate effect of scholars and journalists who propose that Russia is a ‘mafia state’ is the image this conjures about a ‘boss’ handing out the tasks of enforcement to his capos. That the military and other security agencies had it in for Prigozhin is neither here nor there. That Putin may have felt personally threatened like never before is also no reason to trace immediate and direct causes back to the Kremlin. The point is that there’s no necessary proximal cause or even a specific ‘order’ to get rid of him, just that his death expresses the immovable violence of the state when the regime, as a paradoxically fractured totality, faces the truth. In other words, Prigozhin had to be put out of the way. But this could have been done in any one of a dozen ways, including by him leaving to exile. Assassination was never a certainty until perhaps the last moment. It was never inevitable. The point is that political communication in Russia, even violence, is ambiguous and contingent – one event does not inevitably lead to another. A possible alternate reality: Let’s say Prigozhin’s plane was destroyed without him in it. The ‘message’ would still be received. Prigozhin goes to live in his beloved Africa, or perhaps Switzerland, which has been perfectly happy to continue to host the relatives of war criminals with dual Russian and European passports. He becomes an effective podcaster on the war and makes lots of money that way. More outlandish variants are also possible to imagine.  And on contingency, the fate of Prigozhin reminds us that while we think of Putin and Putinism as inevitable, they too were the result of chance shuffling in the elite in the dog days of the 1990s. By a recent account, the domestic terrorism in Russia in 1999 which many thought were orchestrated by the FSB, were in fact an attempt to delay elections, declare a state of emergency and prolong Yeltsin’s rule. This might sound outlandish, but it is a good example of how many events from the last 25 years are still pretty opaque to us.

Many people have motives to carry out extreme acts like the killing of Prigozhin, and it turns out that many have also the means. This means, instead of looking to conspiracy theories, we should just remain open to new evidence. Only a year ago almost everyone thought the US or Russia had bombed the Nord Stream near Bornholm. In Denmark fingers were pointed at Russia and but according to German sources it now looks like Ukrainian secret services were responsible. Here too we should not underestimate their increasing effectiveness at carrying out covert and violence actions in Russia. Recent drone strikes on military and other infrastructure in Russia were likely only possible because of Ukrainian covert presence in Russia itself. The strike on a military airbase far north of Ukraine was particularly spectacular.

To return to the Prigozhin case, there is plenty of ‘agency’ outside the Kremlin’s gates to carry out sophisticated and targeted actions. And while people think of the Russian ‘deep state’ as hierarchical and focussed on continuity and loyalty, agencies are well known to pursue their own interests – even to the point of engaging in gun battles with rivals. In short, many actions are possible which are in the narrow interests of an organization (including protecting the sources of corrupt money), but which many be politically justified to higher-ups as carried out in the service of the state. ‘My service to the state is what I justify to myself as actions for the state’, could be the slogan of many a self-described patriot in epaulets. Once again, the absence of a monopoly on violence, or loose rule of law is because they serve themselves and the state at the same time. This is true at all levels. The lowly district Prosecutor sends the boys round to the local factory to pressgang workers into the army because she wants to hit a quota but also extract bribes. The FSB lieutenant in the provinces angles for a promotion to Moscow and that is why he’s on the lookout for an antiwar activist to arrest. The military intelligence colonel ensconced in disturbingly quiet Moscow offices ponders how to get one over on a competing agency by staging a ‘provokatsia’ (a false flag operation) of some kind by pro-Ukraine actors who do not know they are in the pay of the state.

Putin could not rely on a coherent response from security agencies in June. There are indications that agencies were in disarray, and most actions to counter the march were undertaken by regional authorities and even local people – such as those commandeering diggers to block highways. It is perfectly understandable that the state now is in a mode of chasing its own tail. Agencies in a crisis are meant to communicate and work with each other in an emergency, especially a security one. But Putin’s way of governing has been to encourage agencies to hinder each other and undermine each other while paying lip service to how technocratically effective the state it. This was very visible when it became clear how few specific elements of the security services were willing to get ready to defend Moscow using their weapons. As I’ve written many times, on the basis of my research, Russia’s state is as incoherent internally as it is purposive and effective. The war from the Russian perspective maps on to this – in unpredictable aspects (defence in depth in Zaporozhia region, use of mines and artillery) Russia has outperformed expectations, but in others it remains woefully behind (the armed forces still cannot supply basic equipment to new troops, leadership and training almost zero). Let us not forget the real lack of predictive power displayed by almost all experts and observers – even if they got lucky once (like me in predicting that Prigozhin would not precipitate a bloody showdown in Moscow). Or unlucky (like most people I didn’t think an invasion likely).

Since the war began, observers have imputed feelings and desires to Russians without much evidence: whether it was the view that their bloodlust was easily stoked by promises of a lightening victory and glory in Kyiv, or that sanctions would quickly break the spell, or that faced with a united Western front Russians would rally round the flag and stick with the devil they know. I early on tried to tread a path to a more sociologically balanced perspective. After initial shock and nausea at the hawkish elites mad and rash decision to invade, most people, while privately expressing immense disquiet, neither actively supported nor opposed the war. I used the term ‘defensive consolidation’ to express Russians’ sensitivity to the looming catastrophe and their search for ways to make sense of the senseless. The killing of Prigozhin merely accentuates once more the conflicting centrifugal and centripetal social forces at work: many people are further alienated and indeed disgusted by the elite and what they believe it is capable off, despairing of any material improvement to their precarious economic existence, with scant attention paid to the actual war itself beyond growing fear at the security state and knowledge of the precarious situation at the front.

At the same time, they look for sources of genuine political and social authority and leadership that might look to their immediate and longer-term material interests. These range from a village elder to the Moscow Mayor. The pensioner class and some other groups still think of Putin as their saviour, but support overall has collapsed. Russia’s leading political pundit in exile is the ebullient Ekaterina Schumann.  In a recent public talk in Germany she said that preparations for 2024’s Presidential elections in Russia show widespread dislike for militaristic and jingoistic messaging by candidates. She noted that Western journalists, including Russian émigrés, should wake up to the evidence that the war is unpopular, despite what survey polling appears to show. Already there is widespread criticism of the state benefits promised to the families of service-personnel. For example, in Higher Education, far from increasing spending to accommodate the right of veteran’s children to study in universities, rectors are looking to ordinary students and their families to subsidize these ‘Special Military Operation’ students by charging higher accommodation fees to the non-veteran families. Many elites welcome the way the war seems to help a project of neo-feudal state capital (noting the incongruity of such a hybrid) – with juicy appropriated foreign assets distributed to them in return for loyalty, like Kadyrov’s nephew being gifted Danone’s factories, and Carlsberg’s assets similarly ‘redistributed’.

The regime also tries to link entitlements for ordinary people to loyalty and service in the war. But as the example of university places shows, this is very divisive and unpopular. Furthermore, this is unlikely to substitute for a genuine social ‘deal’ in the face of the severe demographic and economic costs of the war. In any case, people are long used to the state making it as hard as possible to claim entitlements and breaking its promises. 

Political anthropologist Volodia Artiukh, in a recent post, argues that those who see domestic events in Russia as having implications for how we interpret the situation around the war in Ukraine have it the wrong way round: Putin’s international strategy is turning (we could say caving) inward. A kind of boomerang effect is occurring. Martial law and a cowed society in fear, open use of terror, removal of elite figures – these were things Putin intended to happen in Ukraine, not Russia. I similarly wrote a while back that the main logic of this war was revenge of the colonial periphery on the metropole. Donbas and then the whole of Ukraine was meant to keep at arm’s length ‘disturbing’ aspects of authoritarian militarism from the cosseted Russian middle class and even the rest of the country. Instead, every step of the way the ‘Special Military Operation’ has become a term of irony or bitterness because it has brought these things closer to home.