Call Russia What It Is: A Mafia State
President Biden and the Allies need to jettison diplomatic niceties and label Vladimir Putin a mobster. Anything less makes them complicit in his charade.
Yevgeny Prigozhin’s high altitude assassination over Russia this week has already launched the news media’s latest miniseries featuring a cast of characters and a plot as predictable as any Hollywood sequel.
To say that the Wagner Group warlord’s fall, in this case from 28,000 feet, came at the hands of Vladimir Putin isn’t a spoiler for readers and viewers of the reporting to come. Nor are predictions that Embraer, the aircraft maker, and international safety officials will be lucky if they get their calls returned, much less their hands on wreckage itself. And just like the remains of the Brazilian business jet-turned-smoldering scrap heap, as the story cools no one will be surprised when what’s left of the murder mystery recedes from view, replaced by the commentariat’s usual analysis about what Prigozhin being lethally let go really means.
The arc of the story is clear enough—a drama for a few weeks followed by long-form Sunday pieces and news items below the fold. A cynical view of its trajectory isn’t a criticism of the journalists reporting on Russia, or on the aviation business. It’s a reflection on the fact words are powerful and for their parts, the Biden administration and most all its allies have augmented Putin’s power by failing to use theirs. The result: Putin’s success in normalizing not only how his violence is depicted but more important, thanks to their simpering language, the fact he runs nothing less than a mafia state.
Let’s stipulate that using murder to maintain power is hardly unique or confined to Russia. Assassinations, executions summary and otherwise, clandestine killings, and mass exterminations, whether genocidal or equal opportunity crimes, abound. A targeted hit like Prigozhin’s is just one means among many to a homicidal leader’s ends. In Putin’s case, however, there is good reason to single him out: from Chechnya to Ukraine and points in-between, murder as a tool is embedded in his regime’s every venture, whether repression at home or aggression abroad, over its 20-year span.
More to the point, his murderers, the security services, are both his homeboys and his chosen elite. Installed by Putin, their agents and alumni are the backbone of his regime, holding economic and media as well as coercive powers. While a few may come from elsewhere, such as the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, the vast majority are KGB old boys with ties to the past that includes a 100-year history of murder as stock-in-trade. The trigger pullers, radioactive cocktail makers, and work-a-day jail guards whose loose grip on suddenly“suicidal” detainees allows them to jump from top floor windows aren’t the issue. The KGB-agent-turned-Kremin-czar is.
The record that establishes Putin as godfather of Russia’s mobocracy is the impressive breadth of his victims. As the murders testify, there are no boundaries to his demand for obedience or the consequences for those who stray. A retrospective by Radio Free Europe correspondent Steve Gutterman this week provides a small sampler. From Sergei Yushenkov and Anna Politkovskaya, a leading opposition politician and journalist respectively, both shot dead in their homes, to Sergei Magnitsky and Boris Nemtsov, the former, a lawyer murdered in custody, the latter, once deputy prime minister, shot beside the Kremlin’s walls, the variety makes the point.
Presidents and prime ministers, of course, are reluctant to abandon protocol, according tyrants and tribal royals their titles no matter the nature of their regimes. It matters, the diplomats would argue, not least because dishing out disrespect has its downsides, including making turn-about fair play. Take millennial Middle East monarchs who murder annoying journalists; they control oil supplies. Or China’s communist mandarinate. They may corral its Muslim minority in concentration camps, but the Middle Kingdom also accounts for 24 percent of total US global trade.
History, however, presents another lesson. In June 1934, Hitler ordered the murder of Ernst Röhm, the head of the Nazis’ Sturmabteilung, the SA, hundreds of its stormtroopers, and an assortment of the Führer’s enemies in a week-long bloodbath. Like Prigozhin, Röhm, an erstwhile Hitler ally, was an ugly character. But the slaughter wasn’t just about eliminating potential rivals, real or perceived. “The Night of the Long Knives” cemented Hitler’s control over the German state, its military, and the Nazi Party. It also was an unambiguous sign of worse to come.
Hitler’s murders shocked western leaders, but not into action. In a Britain divided and with its own fascist sympathizers, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain ignored the Nazis’ homicidal politics. So did President Franklin Roosevelt whose attitudes at the time were no less temporizing in reaching out to the new German regime. The conclusions Hitler drew are matters of record, including his contempt for his future adversaries and sense of license.
From the suspected FSB hand in the 1999 Russian apartment bombing blamed on “terrorists” that killed hundreds, boosting Putin into the presidency, to the explosion of Prigozhin’s private jet, two decades of murders are more than a series of horrific stories. Under Putin, they are Russia’s night of the long knives without a dawn.