Prigozhin's Terrible Charisma

And why Vladimir Putin may be more terrible still.

“Imagine a watercolor painting of Moscow besieged by an army,” I typed into a Midjourney prompt. The bot coughed up the above art.

Imagine, indeed. Who would have thought that the events of this past weekend would unfold as they did! It’s long been speculated that a strongman would succeed Vladimir Putin at some point. But most of us Russia-watchers suspected it would happen behind closed doors. An ailing—or flailing—Putin would leave the Kremlin “feet-first,” as the saying goes. He would meet his end outside of the view of the public, and after a bunch of vicious bureaucratic infighting and murderous palace intrigue, a new, perhaps even more ferocious warlord would take his place.

Putin, of course, survived his ordeal. But the ordeal took place in full view of the global public, as mercenary warlord Yevgeniy Prigozhin sent a column of several thousand of his troops to Moscow—largely unopposed!—in a seeming bid to overthrow the existing regime. I won’t pretend I ever saw it coming.

I’m in Zagreb finishing up a week in the Balkans, where I was reporting on a story that has thus far largely flown under the radar of the Western press. (Stay tuned, the story is still live!) The Balkans, regular readers know, is a land of leaders with outsized personalities. It’s where you can see just how far the power of personal charisma can get you. And it’s the question of charisma that has been at the forefront of my thoughts as I watched events unfold the past few days.

When Prigozhin started announcing his putsch on social media, I at first couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Announcing a coup is the last thing one should do if one hopes to succeed, Edward Luttwak teaches us. The coup is announced after you have, at minimum, secured the capital and most of the mass media. Luttwak’s playbook predicts that we’d first hear from Prigozhin seated in the Kremlin, surrounded by his lieutenants, assuring the public that everything will be OK.

Instead, he just… he Telegrammed it out!

But maybe, I thought, things had somehow changed fundamentally in this age of social media. After all, it’s not like Prigozhin had been coy about his dissatisfaction. He had been screaming about it on the internet for months. He had publicly criticized the rationale for the war in Ukraine, presumably to build credibility with Russians who could see the fight has been more costly than authorities let on but dared not speak about it. His regular audio dispatches from the front on his Telegram channel were often breathtakingly frank. I started to wonder if, like with Trump, I had missed the full power of his approach.

And not only was Prigozhin speaking the unspeakable, and therefore demonstrating a kind of raw courage. He was doing it in an absolutely blood-curdling way. Here’s a clip of Prigozhin spewing a remarkable string of vile profanities at top generals in front of a field of fresh corpses, furious at having been denied resources to fight the war.

Watch it, and ask yourself, “In what world would I ever dare to oppose this man?”

As footage of Prigozhin’s troops blowing past checkpoints outside of the southern city of Rostov-on-Don started surfacing, I thought it all started to make sense. It reminded me of a famous encounter toward the end of Napoleon’s storied career. He had just escaped exile on Elba, and was leading a small group of veteran loyalists on a march to Paris to reclaim the throne. On his way, he encountered a much larger regiment of royalist infantry. The scene was memorably depicted in Sergey Bondarchuk’s Waterloo.

Here’s part of an entry describing the scene above from the journal of Admiral Sir George Cockburn, who spent hours talking to Napoleon aboard a ship taking him to final exile on St. Helena:

[Napoleon] observed, that, on his arriving within a few leagues of Grenoble, soon after his landing in France, a detachment of troops, of the 5th Regiment, showed an inclination to resist him; that he put himself immediately in front, and throwing open his great-coat, to show himself more conspicuously, called to them to kill their Emperor, if they desired his death. This had the effect he expected: they all immediately joined him, and afterwards, he received nothing but congratulations and proofs of attachment, all the way to Paris.

Of course Prigozhin was not at the head of his column on the way to Moscow. And Napoleon, for all his ruthlessness and battlefield prowess, was not known as a monster on a personal level.

Still, maybe Prigozhin had figured out something genuinely new. Maybe he had amplified his charisma online. Just as no one dared fire a shot at Napoleon, maybe Prigozhin appeared larger than life to any Russian battlefield commander who was ordered to stand in his way this weekend.

But then, just like that, Prigozhin stood down. He withdrew his forces, claiming he had achieved what he had wanted—the sacking of the top leaders in the Russian army, and amnesty for himself and his troops. At time of writing, none of those demands appear to have been fully met. It’s possible the fight could spin up again. But whatever happens next, Prigozhin unmistakably blinked this past weekend. He was stared down by Putin and scampered off like a cur.

UK intelligence sources apparently told the Telegraph that the FSB had threatened the families of various militia leaders in a bid to make them halt their attack. Such a threat may have played a role at the margins, but it doesn’t feel like it would do the trick on its own. These mercenaries are hard men—soldiers of fortune and convicts. Professional murderers. If they even have families, I can’t imagine they are all that attached to them.

Prigozhin himself said that he surveyed the situation some 200 kilometers outside of Moscow and concluded that going further would entail massive bloodshed. What’s perplexing about that statement is that he had not encountered any resistance up until that point. It’s possible that the Russian army had managed to get its act together and had finally massed its forces, and that as a result Prigozhin finally saw that he was hopelessly outnumbered.

But I wonder if, instead, it didn’t come down to a breathtaking threat from Putin. It could have included tactical nukes, but didn’t need to. Maybe it was a simple pledge to wipe out a few square miles of Rostov, including the military command of the Southern District where Prigozhin had established his base.

What might have made Prigozhin blanch was not the threat of death per se, but the audacity—to be ready to destroy a city to save one’s rule. “He wouldn’t dare…” Prigozhin might have said to Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko, the go-between in the negotiations. “Try him,” Lukashenko would have replied.

I doubt reality was quite as dramatic and decisive as I’ve sketched out above. But something must have happened in this stand-off between two big-dick alphas to cause the flow of events to change course so abruptly. The idea being floated, that neither saw a path to easy victory and that therefore both flinched at the same time, doesn’t ring true. It’s not how animals like these behave.

Maybe in the coming days, weeks, and months, we’ll become a bit wiser about what really went down. But as the dust settles on this latest episode, I find myself reflecting on a lesson I’ve been taught repeatedly here in the Balkans. And that’s that our civilized, intellectualized, Western approach to politics misses something essential about this most basic human activity.

And that’s the personal element—the force of the individual, and his (or her) capacity to compel others to do their bidding. In Russia, we see the animal aspect laid bare, and we look down on it.

As liberals, we talk about the importance of persuasion, and think that this more primal kind of stuff is in our past. As if we humans are rational beings. As if even the best democratic leaders didn’t appeal to something much more visceral and fundamental in us, even if that something is calling to our better angels.

Sorry, that’s not how charisma works.