In Praise of Prigozhin

Some day our American Prigozhin will come

In late June of 2023, a furious Yevgeny Prigozhin commenced a march on Moscow. He got a lot farther than many expected. Waylaid at Rostov-on-Don, on the Sea of Azov, Prigozhin entered into heated negotiations with the object of his fury, Russian president Vladimir Putin. A day after Prigozhin’s gambit started, it was over. Belarussian president Alexander Lukashenko, an old friend of Prigozhin’s and also a trusted junior partner of Putin’s, had negotiated a truce of sorts. Prigozhin went on what might best be called a hiatus in Belarus. Prigozhin’s marchers, the A-Team mercenary group of Russian misfits known as Wagner, went back to the meat grinder in Ukraine.

The history of Wagner, and of its wily originator Yevgeny Prigozhin, is available for anyone to read if interested. I recommend it. It’s fascinating, especially in the wider context of Russian history.

But while news reports of Prigozhin’s salient against Putin—and not really Putin so much as those serving him whom Prigozhin thought insufficiently devoted to the war in Ukraine—have focused on the implications for the Russian state in the fallout of the daylong Wagner hole-up in Rostov-on-Don, I want to think about Prigozhin and America. Namely, why don’t we have a Prigozhin of our own?

What I think many readers who take the trouble to examine the details will find striking is that Prigozhin’s criticisms of the Russian military commanders and political elite, whom Prigozhin accuses of being indifferent to the suffering of his men in the Ukrainian hellscape, could be applied almost exactly to men and women in similar positions in Washington, DC.

“Shoigu! Gerasimov!,” Prigozhin recently raged, calling out by name Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov,  the Minister of Defense and Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, respectively. “Where is the [expletive] ammunition? They [i.e., Wagner troops] came here as volunteers and die for you to fatten yourselves in your mahogany offices.”

Prigozhin took the fight against his superiors in Moscow to another level by personally attacking Shoigu’s son-in-law online. Shoigu’s family member avoided service in the Ukraine war while regular Russian boys died in droves.

The premise of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was a lie, Prizoghin claims.

Regular Russian troops are cowards, Prigozhin says, and their leaders are “stupid.”

Prigozhin has long been vilified in the American and European press. This is not surprising, given the endless fake news about Ukraine. But even the fake-news reports are useful in thinking about Prigozhin in an American context. Whatever one thinks about Russia or the Ukraine war, one has to admit, I think, that Prigozhin raises very good points about how the decisions (and indecision) of faraway elites adversely affect men in trenches. Whether one wants Russia to win, lose, or draw in Ukraine, Prigozhin’s direct pointing to what appear to be the usual problems of wartime—idiotic commanders, inept supply officers, chronic bureaucratic lying, elite avoidance of war’s horrors, the indifference of politicians to dead and wounded nobodies—is in itself worth praising.

Prigozhin may be a bad man. But he is, for all that, a man. He stands up for those under him. He goes to war—with Kiev and with Moscow—for his boys. He calls bullshit as needed. He doesn’t play sycophantic games. He drives a hard bargain and shows real thymotic vigor in defending his own. He is punctilious on points of honor. He repays slights with extreme prejudice. He will gamble everything to stare down just one mealy-mouthed pencil-pusher in a distant capital. Bad man or not, Yevgeny Prigozhin is a certified badass. He steps up and kicks in. His men, as is clear by their willingness to risk their own skins in his June, 2023 mutiny, adore him. Wagner’s ragtag ruffians pay Prigozhin the highest compliment by following him, at their own great peril, wherever he leads.

I ask again, then. Why is there no American Prigozhin?

In the summer of 2021, the United States executed a disgraceful and dishonorable rabbit run from Kabul. The United States military followed orders, turned tail, and left people behind. It was, through and through, a self-inflicted catastrophe.

Only one person in the ranks, Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, Jr., of the United States Marines, spoke out publicly against the ignominious 2021 retreat. He was thrown in the brig, and eventually cut a path clear of his notoriety with a timely offering of Never-Trumpism.

The Afghanistan retreat was tailor-made for someone like Yevgeny Prigozhin to excoriate. Bureaucratic ineptitude and military lily-liveredness abounded.

But only one person in uniform said a word. One. And that was mainly limited to some videos posted to social media. It was hardly, in retrospect, a ringing endorsement of the quality of American soldiery. In fact, it was a tacit indictment of the American military’s careerism, at best, and probably plain cowardice more generally. Any man who can stomach running up the white flag to the Taliban and leaving Americans behind to be raped and butchered by barbarians doesn’t deserve to wear the American uniform. Or, sadly, maybe he does.

Either way, what was needed after the implosion in Afghanistan was just what Lt. Col. Scheller called for at one point: a revolution. At the bare minimum, someone with command of a lot of men and weapons needed to march on Washington to put a fine point on the heartbreak that millions of warfighters, veterans, and their families felt when that city cut and run in Afghanistan. At the bare minimum, some generals needed to go Roman Empire and turn around mid-campaign to make war on the criminals at home for a change, instead of the foreign enemy.

There needed to be a Prigozhin long before that, too, when Americans were dying in Afghanistan and Iraq due to the failures of their higher-ups. Michael Yon, a veteran journalist who covered those conflicts, pointed out flagrant abuses by American brass. The brass turned on Yon. Who in the ranks made the honorable decision to put God and country before promotion and hold Washington hostage so that Americans in the field would stop dying?

There needed to be a Prigozhin when Americans went off to fight in Korea under a United Nations flag. There was a Prigozhin, named Smedley Butler, when Washington betrayed fighting men after World War I. But he was the last of that line. Everyone since has been a ladder-climber. And we are infinitely the worse for it as a civilization.

The news coming out of eastern Europe and Russia about Yevgeny Prigozhin is not palatable. It could portend even more upheaval in that part of the world than we already have. That is all well worth our attention. We ought to keep a close eye on what Prigozhin does now, and does next.

But in the mirror darkly in all this news chatter is a commentary, if we will only choose to see it, on our own ruined country. We may look down on the Russians for their warlordism. If only we in America had even that. Yevgeny Prigozhin, rough and rude man that he surely is, had the balls to stand up and fight for honor and demand to be told the truth. Nobody in Washington or in the entire United States military today—nobody, despite having much more reason to do so than Prigozhin ever did—is capable of such a thing. To the careerists in the American military today, such honor and bravery, such manliness, are unthinkable.

--Jason Morgan is associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan