The myth and memory of Yevgeny Prigozhin

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny, when his Wagner mercenaries seized the city of Rostov-on-Don and sent a flying column of several men towards Moscow. You would scarcely know it, though, because while Russian social media is full of discussion, eulogies and conspiracy theories, the state-controlled press is largely pretending this never happened.

The closest thing to a recognition of the anniversary has been the arrest on extortion charges of two senior figures from Prigozhin’s media – and trolling – arm. One, Ilya Gorbunov, seems to have been the coordinator of the media coverage of the Wagner ‘march of justice,’ who even tried to organise street protests in support of what was really a heavy-handed attempt to induce Vladimir Putin to abandon his erstwhile defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and continue to allow Prigozhin to run Wagner as his own private army.

Otherwise, this is an official non-event, even though there was a heavy National Guard presence at St Peterburg’s Porokhovskoye cemetery, where Prigozhin’s grave has become a shrine for a growing body of nationalist critics of the regime, who smother it in flowers and even hammers, a distasteful reminder of how the sledgehammer became a symbol of Wagner when a defector from its ranks was murdered with one.