Will Yevgeny Prigozhin be forgotten? I think he will be, just like all the rest of Putin’s individual victims over the decades, even though individual deaths often stand out from a statistic (and no, there’s no evidence Stalin said that) and even though he was the leader of a paramilitary group vital to Putin, the Wagner Group.

Incidentally the August 23rd plane crash that killed Prigozhin also helped denazify the Kremlin by killing his right-hand man, Dmitry Utkin, who actually founded Wagner and got rewarded by Putin for helping deal with all those Ukrainian Nazis – while sporting Nazi tattoos. No Bond villain ever looked as scary.

The writing was on the wall for Prigozhin the moment he started a mutiny against the Russian Army on June 23, but which looked like a coup against Putin as the Wagner Group advanced on Moscow, shooting down several Russian Army helicopters. Prigozhin protested that he was moving against “the government”, which, together with the Army, had been a target of his for months in expletive-laden videos on Telegram social media sites. He had to die:

“They got him in the end.” This was a common reaction to the news about the private jet crash that, at least according to Russian officials, killed the warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the infamous Wagner mercenary army. There are many theories about what actually happened, but the fundamental point is that President Vladimir Putin no longer had any need for Prigozhin, a man he publicly described as a backstabbing traitor during Wagner’s short-lived mutiny just two months ago.
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The way in which Prigozhin was apparently killed suggests the Kremlin wanted to show how it deals with traitors. Whatever actually happened, the Russian elite will see the air crash as retribution for Wagner’s armed uprising. Some will be scared, but others will be pleased: among conservatives it will be seen as justice.

That article goes to describe in detail the steady takeover of Wagner’s assets, including people and connections, especially in areas like Syria and parts of Africa that are considered vital to Russia. It amounted to a “smooth transition” to the Russian state while Prigozhin flew around spending money and having fun.

But all of this, including all those many, many strange deaths among important Russians since the Ukraine war started in 2022, are merely a continuation of how things go in Russia – and how they’ve always gone.

For example, here’s a 1 hour long YouTube video of a talk given in a San Francisco bookshop in 2016 by one David Satter, a Russian-speaking, longtime observer of Russia who has lived there in Soviet and modern times (the video is also embedded below).

One part of the talk specifically dealt with the strange series of apartment bombings in Russia in 2000 as the Yeltsin government was coming to a close, events that greatly aided the already fast-rising Putin in becoming President. There are those who claim that Satter is pushing a conspiracy theory about Putin and his cronies, which I think is weird given that blame could easily be laid at the foot of Yeltsin cronies looking for a way to avoid the fallout from their corruption in the 1990’s. But in light of all the important-people deaths that have happened on Putin’s watch since he came to power, and in the last year especially, all as mysterious as Prigozhin’s plane crash, I’d say these conspiracy theorists have a solid file of evidence to back them up.

But watch the video and you can judge for yourself the credibility of Satter and his claims. I’ve added a transcript for the key portion dealing with the bombings, which starts at 22:36 in (the video start is also queued that)

The Russian officials said there’s a Chechen trail in the bombings. Three hundred people blown up in the middle of the night, while they slept. But the wording was interesting itself: it said Chechen trail? No proof! Where’s the proof? But that trail, that so-called trail, was enough to begin the second Chechen War, which was even more bloody than the first Chechen war and which elevated Putin overnight into the national savior.

All talk about revising the results of privatization – punishing the people who were responsible for the pillaging of the country, settling with the Yeltsin entourage – was quickly forgotten as the country united behind the decisive, young leader who was going to avenge this attack by terrorists who were so cruel as to blow up ordinary people in their own homes.

Putin’s popularity skyrocketed and he was elected President – and with the overwhelming approval and support, I must add, of the international community, including the United States, and without any questions.

Satter strikes me as a fairly typical centre-Leftist who was not fooled by Soviet Communism but who was very unhappy about the neoliberal corruption of Russia that occurred under Yeltsin – corruption that is condemned by many Putin supporters also – and who is not exactly impressed with the West.

But there was one incident, and this would have been actually quite successful, but the FSB is not the KGB – and I tell you this as one who has known both of them.

The FSB, for all their brutality, is a little short on competence, and they made a critical mistake, because there was a fifth bomb. A fifth bomb was placed in a basement in the city of Ryazan, on the night of September 22nd and it was discovered, unlike the other bombs, and it was tested and it was disarmed.

All of Ryazan was cordoned off, no one could enter or leave, and that included the railway stations, the airport, the roads. Every window in the city was plastered with a composite sketch of the bombers, who were seen by local residents, and they were captured.

A telephone operator overheard a telephone conversation that seemed to her very suspicious on the inter-urban line. In those days – this was long enough ago that they still were making calls through operators in some parts of Russia.

In any case, the person on the line said that, “they’ve got the whole city surrounded. How do we get out of here?”, and the person on the other end of the line said, “split up and get out one by one”.

The operator was sure she was listening in on the terrorists. She gave the number to the local police, who were not clued in as to what was happening. They called the number. Turned out to be the central headquarters of the FSB.

Very incompetent. But it gets better:

Hours later they arrest the terrorists. They produced FSB documents. So this created a problem, and the head of the FSB got on national television and said I want to congratulate the residents of Ryazan. This was a test of vigilance. Congratulations. You did a brilliant job in demonstrating your vigilance. They even organized a ceremony in which they gave a new color television set to the operator. Only in Russia can something like that happen. All very funny of course – but the entire district had been cordoned off. Everyone had spent the night on the street.

Sounds like an episode of Blackadder!. Here is a video documentary exploring all this, and the TV coverage of the FSB head is seen there at 16:00, followed by a spokesman for the FSB months later on TV saying that it was an exercise.

But back to Satter’s talk where he gets stuck into the USA and Europe for averting their eyes from all this:

It is a tribute to the unwillingness to know and to face the truth – that no one raised this issue. Not the US. Not Europe. Russian society, Russian civil society was disorganized. A war was going on in Chechnya. A new election was coming up.

And despite efforts to ask, well what are you talking about, who put that bomb in the building? It was successfully covered up, Putin was elected President and the whole incident was all but forgotten, except for a few people who continued to investigate and formed a committee to find out the truth about the Ryazan incident.

Of those people I was in contact with almost everyone. And I myself decided that this is just unbelievable, and I went to Ryazan and I talked to people. I talked to the Police. I talked to the residents of the building that was supposed to be blown up. And there was no one who believed that this was a training exercise. And there was no evidence to support the idea that this was training exercise.

On the contrary, the gas analyzer which tested the bomb, tested positive for hexagen, the high explosive used in the other bombings. The detonator was photographed and time-stamped, and it was a real live military detonator. There was really no doubt that this was no training exercise. This was an attempt to bomb the building, and the building had three hundred residents, and it was on a hill, just above another building with three hundred residents. Had it been blown up it would have hit the neighboring building with the force of an avalanche, carrying away six hundred lives.

It didn’t happen, thank God. But that didn’t interfere with the regime’s plans, because the next day they began bombing Grozny.

A number of the investigators Satter worked with are now dead, some murdered, some in ‘accidents’, as he wrote about here in National Review. You can also read about other mysterious deaths of Russians in the 2010’s, as partially documented here in The Atlantic, focusing on one in particular:

Perepilichny jogged through a neighborhood of homes once owned by Elton John, Kate Winslet, John Lennon, and Ringo Starr.

He collapsed on Granville Road, within 100 meters of the house he was renting for $20,000 a month. Police and medics were called to the scene, but within 30 minutes, Perepilichny was pronounced dead.

Police told the press the death was “unexplained.” A 44-year-old man of average build and above-average wealth had simply fallen down and died in the leafy suburb he’d recently begun calling home.

The number of prominent, connected Russians who have died in such strange ways over the last thirty years – ways not usual for crime syndicate killings – is quite large, and still growing of course. But strangely enough, the people who regularly quote Russia Today, Sputnik, Veterans Today, The Saker and other such news sites – and who seem to love this sort of stuff – are nowhere to be found on these issues.