Yevgeny Prigozhin – ‘Putin’s chef’ who got ideas above his station
From a prisoner to a hotdog stand vendor to one of Vladimir Putin’s most trusted advisers – Yevgeny Prigozhin led a colourful and bloody life.
In Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese’s epic gangster film, Joe Pesci plays an ambitious, psychopathic hitman who thinks he is about to be “made” by becoming a mafia boss himself. In fact, the summons he has received is for his execution.
Why Yevgeny Prigozhin was flying from Moscow was unclear last night (Wednesday) but if Russia is the mafia state it so often appears, Prigozhin was its Pesci, a petty criminal turned violent agent of the boss’s whims, who apparently died after getting ideas above his station.
Prigozhin’s career started with a stint in a Russian prison camp in the dying days of the Soviet Union, after he was jailed for 13 years for armed robbery. Among his victims was a woman whom he throttled and mugged, taking her gold earrings after she fell unconscious.
After obtaining early release in 1990, he set up a hotdog stand in St Petersburg and then opened glitzy restaurants that were patronised by the mayor and his deputy, Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB man rising through the political apparatus.
As the former criminal became ever closer to the man who would lead the nation, he acquired a nickname, Putin’s chef, which obscures as much as it reveals.
He said in later interviews that he provided a more glamorous menu than such officials were used to from Soviet work canteens. However, restaurants are also a prime vehicle for money laundering.
He later moved on to government catering contracts, becoming fabulously wealthy, with a yacht, a dacha and a private jet, as so many of Putin’s circle did in the 2000s.
Whose idea it was that he should branch out from food into war is disputed. He denied for years that he any connection to the Wagner group, a mercenary force that emerged after 2014 as a powerful contributor to President Assad’s suppression of opposition and Islamic State forces in Syria.
As he became better known in the West, journalists who dared ask for comment on Wagner’s notorious behaviour received tirades of abuse in emailed responses.
By this time, under its military commander Dmitry Utkin, a former special forces lieutenant colonel, Wagner mercenaries were also fighting in Libya, leaving bodies and neo-Nazi graffiti behind. A rare photo of Utkin leaked to The Times showed this was no coincidence. It showed a deranged Utkin naked from the waist up, SS insignia tattooed on his neck. Utkin is also said to have been on the downed jet.
Wagner’s connection to the Russian state was always clear, even before it became a spearhead force in Ukraine in 2022. Its main base was close to that of GRU, the Russian military intelligence.
Prigozhin saw himself as a patriot. When he admitted that Wagner was his creation, it was to berate the defence minister Sergei Shoigu and his generals for not pursuing the Ukraine war with the psychotic vigour he forced on his men.
His success on the battlefield and willingness to stand alongside his men earned him a grudging respect.
Even before his aborted “March on Moscow” in June, an act of bravado that led to his political downfall, his gun-toting video appearances might have been a step too far for Putin’s once favoured pair of “dirty hands”.
It showed a certain honour among thieves but the moral of gangster films tends to be that in real life there is none.
The Times
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