Yevgeny Prigozhin May Yet Have the Last Laugh

A piece in The Atlantic by Anne Applebaum looks at the long list of murders and assassinations that has marked Vladimir Putin's dictatorship in Russia.  The lesson to be drawn is oppose Putin, then one needs to plan to die or at best be imprisoned.  This lesson appears to been lost on Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group leader who staged an abortive coup of sorts back in June, who by all appearances was assassinated in a spectacular downing of his private jet which was either hit by a missile or had a bomb placed on board.  While Putin may have rid himself of a would be challenger and embarrassment in the short term, Prigozhin's very public murder may over time help set in motion forces that will usher in the end of his regime (some messages from the Wagner Group have included threats of retribution for Prigozhin's murder).  Another column in The Atlantic looks at Putin's apparent thinking and the forces he may unwittingly have set in motion, hopefully to his extreme detriment.  In the interim, Russia continues its run of brutal dictators who have ruled since the October Revolution in 1917 and put personal power over the interests of the nation and the Russian people.  Here are highlights:

Initial reports suggest that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the ruthless mercenary leader of the Wagner Group, has been killed. Although confirmed details are scant, his private plane has allegedly crashed or been shot down, an event that many have interpreted as an assassination. Prigozhin probably knew to stay away from windows in high buildings, so it seems plausible that Vladimir Putin took him out at 28,000 feet instead.

Coup plotters rarely die of old age. Prigozhin sealed his fate in June when he launched a failed mutiny against Putin, which fizzled hours after it began. No dictator can afford to tolerate that kind of disloyalty: Every moment that Prigozhin lived made Putin look weaker, a dictator seemingly forced to accommodate a man who had directly challenged him, simply because Russia needed the Wagner Group for its disastrous war of attrition in Ukraine.

Putin likely knew that letting Prigozhin live risked emboldening enemies within to mount additional threats. In an interview earlier this year, Putin said that leaders must be able to forgive, but that not everything can be forgiven. When the interviewer asked him “What can’t be forgiven?,” Putin’s answer was immediate: “Betrayal.”

And so Prigozhin has apparently gone down in his private plane. The Kremlin could easily have staged a less conspicuous death that would be more likely to dupe outsiders into wondering whether Prigozhin had died of natural causes. But dictators don’t usually want plausible deniability. When they use deadly force against their enemies, they want everyone to know—a shot across the bow to other would-be plotters—which is why Russia’s enemies abroad have been killed with highly controlled radioactive substances that point directly to the Kremlin. If you’re going to send a message, make sure everyone knows who sent it.

Prigozhin’s death, if confirmed, is very likely Putin’s calculated method of trying to reassert his strength. But if so, Putin has made the classic error that all dictators make: wrongly conflating ruthless violence with strength. True strength—and lasting power—comes from regimes that are resilient. The apparent death of Yevgeny Prighozin instead reveals a brittle dictatorship with cracks and divisions that will continue to grow over time.

Today’s events are almost certain to have unintended consequences, as Putin falls further into what I call “the dictator trap”: In authoritarian regimes, every act comes with a trade-off, and those intended to shore up power nearly always wind up undermining it. Short-term displays of brutal strength ensure long-term weakness. In the immediate future, loyalists will fear Putin more—and they will understand that betraying him comes with the ultimate price tag. But in the medium to long term, two fresh threats will likely emerge.

First, senior loyalists in Russia’s regime will now rightly wonder whether they could be next. When dictators start to kill top-level insiders—even those who have challenged the dictator’s authority directly—an intensified paranoia sets in. And who could blame those in Putin’s inner circle for worrying after all of the “mysterious” deaths over the past two decades of Putin’s reign of terror? Some might contemplate whether they’d be better off living in a Russia without Putin, so long as they could define its terms. If insiders fear for their own safety, a palace coup becomes more likely. In that way, getting rid of Prigozhin just shifts and delays the threat. Eventually, every dictator meets his end.

Second, the quality of Putin’s information pipeline is about to get considerably worse, which could lead him to make avoidable errors, because he’s not being told hard truths. That pipeline was likely already compromised after two decades of brutal rule, in which Putin—like all dictators—purged honest advisers who upset him and promoted fawning lackeys who told him what he wanted to hear. Many advisers learn that the best survival strategy when working for a ruthless autocrat is to be a bobblehead. Putin, in one of the biggest blunders in modern history, listened to the bobbleheads who told him he’d capture Kyiv in a few days. That venture has blown up in his face.

But when a dictator assassinates a senior official and not just journalists, opposition candidates, and dissidents, well, then the fear impulse goes into overdrive. Trusted advisers who used to speak honestly but cautiously soon start to bite their tongue or provide overly optimistic assessments, which creates a vicious cycle of bad information and bad decisions. Over time, catastrophic miscalculations become more likely—and, eventually, one of them triggers the end of the regime.

None of this is to say that Putin’s murderous regime is now in its death throes. But once the long-term costs of today’s apparent assassination have been accounted for, the late Yevgeny Prigozhin may yet have the last laugh from beyond the grave.