28 August 2025
by Vic Peterson
Vic Peterson reviews: Anna Arutunyan and Mark Galeotti, Downfall: Putin, Prigozhin, and the Fight for the Future of Russia, Ebury Press, 2025, Paperback, 272 pp., £10.99 $29, ISBN9781529927382
In Downfall: Putin, Prigozhin, and the Fight for the Future of Russia, veteran Russia watchers Anna Arutunyan and Mark Galeotti have produced a fascinating study of the onetime ally and mercenary leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Prigozhin made international headlines in 2023 when he turned his private army away from the front in Ukraine and marched on Moscow. Ostensibly, his motivation was a wartime betrayal by Putin’s military upper echelon, who he claimed failed to supply adequate munitions and support. Whether his resentment-driven rebellion had further ambition remains unclear. Two months after the march on Moscow was called off, Yevgeny Prigozhin died when his plane crashed in what Vladimir Putin publicly implied resulted from drug use and volatile behavior.
Westerners often view time served in Russian prisons romantically, as the price paid for freedom, with examples from Dostoevsky to Sakharov and Navalny. Most of the criminal types Prigozhin encountered in the penal colony were of the small-time, hardened type, and it was in this training-ground that Prigozhin first made his mark.
Prigozhin came from a modestly privileged family. His mother was a doctor, and his father was related to a famous uranium-mining engineer. Although he started off with some advantages, he did not follow the hoped-for path of a child of the Soviet intelligentsia. After graduating from an elite sports high school, he became mixed up with the wrong crowd. Matters escalated, and Prigozhin wound up in prison, where he encountered hardened criminals. His prison years were a proving ground for his later thug-like public persona.
After prison, Prigozhin chose a cleaner living selling hot dogs at local venues. The hot dog business developed into catering, which led to growing food service industry gigs and, finally, restaurant ownership. Possessing ambition, he built the restaurants into a catering empire that included exclusive eateries in Moscow frequented by local politicians and government officials, including Vladimir Putin. The catering business exposed the budding entrepreneur to a range of important business activities such as real estate and supply chain management, private security, and shady accounting and tax practices.
Somewhere along the way, possibly as an offshoot of his marketing business arm, Prigozhin developed a cadre of internet trolls whose purpose was internet influencing. In the mid-2010s, the Kremlin sought to isolate the ascending liberal left, including figures such as Alexander Navalny. Prigozhin’s company made a name for itself targeting Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. Prigozhin himself came to international notoriety when he was indicted by US Attorney General Robert Muller for attempting to affect the outcome of the election. Although never brought to the US for trial, the entrepreneur’s reputation flourished in certain sectors of the Russian populace.
Only a few years before the 2016 election, however, Prigozhin had founded a private security firm, Wagner, named after the 19th-century German composer. Although the venture may seem idiosyncratic, Prigozhin possessed the requisite assets and skills honed in earlier ventures. The exact motivation for founding Wagner is murky, apart from the general ad-hoc nature of elite business in Russia during those years, and the dynamic of laws driven by the personality of the president, Putin. All this, Arutunyan and Galeotti argue, created a nearly medieval system of vassalage and power-bartering.
Prigozhin built the capacity of Wagner by handling political situations in Africa, Syria, and elsewhere that required ruthless execution of missions combined with plausible deniability by the Kremlin. When Putin invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, Wagner was poised to support it. 25,000 Wagner mercenaries entered the war, composed largely of zeks, penal colony prisoners who signed up to fight for a contracted period to have their sentences commuted. However, despite his long-term close contact with Vladimir Putin, Prigozhin never entered the small trusted circle of the Russian president. In court intrigue that involved upper echelon generals, support for Wagner ebbed. War supplies failed to materialize. Soon Prigozhin was begging for bullets and armaments in videos posted on the internet. Accusations flew, and the leader of Wagner held little back.
By March of 2023, Prigozhin had had enough. He turned his mercenary army tens of thousands strong away from the front, forming a column aimed at Moscow. Wagner moved rapidly, with dexterity. The mutiny was short-lived, however, defused by Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko. An agreement was struck for Wagner’s forces to stand down, saving face for Putin and, seemingly, Prigozhin. Two months after the mutiny, however, Prigozhin mysteriously died in a plane wreck.
Prigozhin’s story is fascinating, not only for the theatrical standoff with Putin’s military and political proxies. It also provides a window into the ad hoc, limitless power-seeking governance of Russia since the collapse of the USSR. Arutunyan and Galeotti have done a remarkable job piecing together the secret persona of a villain hidden in plain sight; that is, in fragments on the internet and through reliable Western and dissident journalistic sources. This book is essential reading for readers seeking a deeper understanding of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s dramatic rise and fall, and for the cultural environment under Putin in which he flourished.
