What Become of Flyora?
One of the most haunting images in cinema is the stunned face of Flyora, a young Belarusian boy, in the 1985 Soviet anti-war film Come and See. The young and inexperienced Russian actor Aleksei Kravchenko conveyed trauma, amid the horrors of Nazi war crimes, so vividly that if you close your eyes, having seen the film, you can recall his features in a striking instant.
Jack Margolin’s The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army is a gripping exploration of the rise of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private empire. Deeply researched and elegantly written, it provides fascinating and appalling insights into the conflicts of the modern world.
For years, Wagner inhabited the shadows — a menacing force in Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa, which was known yet never officially acknowledged. As a private military company (PMC), supporting African and Middle Eastern regimes against insurgents, it extended Russian power without dirtying Putin’s hands.
Its methods were ruthless. In 2017, for example, a video captured Wagner’s mercenaries torturing and killing a Syrian Army deserter. The man was beaten to death with a sledgehammer.
The sledgehammer would become an iconic Wagner trope. In 2022, Prigozhin, Wagner’s boss, sent a sledgehammer to the European Parliament — packed in a violin case, in a reference to the Wagner codename “the Orchestra”. Dark humour, alas, can be a close companion of actual brutality.
Prigozhin was a bad man but a very interesting and ingenious one. He spent years in prison for violent theft and emerged in 1990, before a decade of social and economic chaos, with a thirst for success. Beginning, by his own account, with a chain of hot dog stalls he built a culinary empire and became one of Putin’s favourite restaurateurs. In a photo from 2002, Putin can be seen dining with George W. Bush, with Prigozhin standing behind them — the picture of a proud entrepeneur.
But Prigozhin didn’t just want financial success. He wanted power. He earned government contracts to feed schoolkids, and then government workers, and then the military. (There is, undeniably, an art to increasing the level of one’s influence.)
All this helped to fund his “Internet Research Agency” — an organisation of trolls and disinformation artists who tried to poison the well of European and American political discourse. Sensibly, Margolin downplays the argument that Russian trolls have had the power to flip elections and upend political systems. But that doesn’t mean that they are not a problem.
Wagner emerged during the Russian annexation of Crimea. Prigozhin worked with an ex-military commander Dmitry Utkin — codename “Wagner” — who had a cold stare and neo-Nazi tattoos. Wagner’s men — most of them veterans who were attracted to its higher wages and the promise of adventure — fought in the low-level conflict between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainians, before backing Assad in Syria, Nyusi in Mozambique and the Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar. Many of the people they were fighting, it must be said, were extremely bad men, but Margolin argues that their ruthlessness, as well as being inherently immoral, fuelled the local grievances that would ensure that violence continued.
Reading these chapters, I couldn’t help wondering if Chinese PMCs have a significant role to play in the future. As far as I know, Chinese private security companies are mostly used for guarding Chinese assets. But China has significant interests in Africa and it needs fighting men with experience. Watch this space, I suppose.
The invasion of Ukraine brought Wagner out into the light. Prigozhin had been stubborn enough about its secrecy that he had planned to sue Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat for calling him its boss. Amid the war, though, he was delighted to be recognised as a military leader — appearing in foul-mouthed, khaki-clad videos.
Wagner’s ranks swelled as Prigozhin was allowed to recruit from prisons, promising violent inmates money and freedom if they survived the war. Used as assault troops, thousands of the convicts died. (One has to admit that there is a brutal logic to sending the most unloved elements of a society into the war machine.)
Wagner, with their experience and dedication, were successful — key, for example, to the capturing of Soledar and Bakhmut. Legendary Wagner commander Alexander “Ratibor” Kuznetsov was seen hoisting the Russian flag above the ruins of Bakhmut. Truly, he was the King of Rubble.
But Prigozhin was unhappy. For years, it had annoyed the men of the Wagner Group that their furtive status meant that they were denied the credit that they thought should be theirs. Amid the war in Ukraine, Prigozhin thought that his men were being taken for granted — and he saw a chance to increase his own status. He began to vehemently criticise Russian politicians, and then generals, and then Putin himself, for alleged incompetence and complacency.
This culminated in the most dramatic episode of the war — the Wagner Group’s abortive coup. Perhaps, Margolin speculates, Prigozhin was believing his own bullshit. He thought the Russian Army would share his frustrations and would rally round him. “It was a strange reflection,” Margolin writes, “Of Putin’s own delusions that Ukraine would crumple from the first days of the Russian invasion and that Russia could easily install a puppet government.”
Perhaps, too, Prigozhin had come so far — in criticising not just Putin’s allies but Putin himself — that there was nothing for the former restaurateur to do but escalate. There was no withdrawing from his rhetorical offensive.
Margolin’s book is less strong on why Prigozhin stopped. Perhaps, he implies, he had wanted to intimidate Putin rather than unseat him. He had hoped to demonstrate the impotence of his generals and, in doing so, force Putin to take his side. Perhaps, on the other hand, he had realised that the conventional army was not rallying around him and his fight would end up being unwinnable.
Either way, he might well have thought that the deal that President Lukashenko of Belarus helped to strike was a demonstration of the generals’ impotence. After all, Prigozhin had led a mutiny and was allowed to live.
Until he wasn’t. Prigozhin’s private plane was blown up in the air, killing all its occupants: Prigozhin, Utkin, Valery Chekalov (another key Wagner figure), their bodyguards and the hapless pilot, co-pilot, and flight attendant.
The official Russian claims that the Wagner men might have been playing with hand grenades and accidentally let them off almost dare you to contradict them. Right-wing commentators often hold forth — and correctly so — on the mortifying effects of the Western managerial insistence on accepting politically correct falsehoods. But the elements of those right-wing commentators who are liable to cast a sympathetic eye eastwards should imagine being forced to nod along to the idea that veteran officers and oligarchs would be playing a quick game of hand grenade catch. Prigozhin, of course, who had been planning to take Eliot Higgins to court over something that was clearly true, would have been ill-placed to condemn the lie.
He would have been ill-placed to condemn the brutality as well. The attack — because I’m very much assuming that it was an attack — was brutal. If nothing else, the pilot, the co-pilot and the flight attendant had done no harm to anyone. They were just collateral damage in a ruthless demonstration of the lengths to which the Kremlin would go for revenge. But the Wagner Group had spent years torturing and killing civilians to send a message to their enemies.
If you come for the king, you’d better not miss.
Of course, it would be a mistake to suppose that all of the people one dislikes are just malicious and venal. The world doesn’t work like that. Margolin discusses Vadim Gusev, the founder of the Wagner Group’s predecessor the Slavonic Corps, saying that his grandmother had told him that nothing was more important than ensuring that “children don’t see a war in [their] country.” By displaying Russian force abroad, Gusev suggested, PMCs were making sure that Russia’s enemies “twice before they come and poke us”.
There isn’t nothing to the argument — at least in theory. But the aggressive is easily confused with the defensive. Two and a half years after the invasion of Ukraine, with tens of thousands of people of dead, I think that Gusev’s successors would struggle to argue that Russians have been made safer.
Other young Wagnerites had a taste for purpose and camaraderie. By all accounts, war can be a thrilling experience. It can provide someone with a lot more meaning than a normal life. This sounds innately horrible until one finds oneself on the victimised end of a defensive war. Then, quite suddenly, one needs a lot of people with at least something of a taste for violence.
Still, it is hard to imagine that the thirst for “meaning” can be satisfied as vividly when it involves less actual fighting than cowering in a ditch as a drone hovers overhead. Besides, it is horrible when it fuels unnecessary aggression. There, the “meaning” in a young soldier’s life tends to be inseparable from the deaths of people who had very different dreams, and the fatherlessness of children, and the rape of women, and the ruination of cities.
At the beginning of this review, I mentioned Aleksei Kravchenko’s haunting youthful performance in Come and See. Sadly, Margolin reports, some of Kravchenko’s more recent roles have been in Wagner’s propaganda films.
To be fair, one could appear in pro-war films as well as anti-war films without contradiction. Some wars are just and some are not. Yet there is very much a bitter irony in being the face of the trauma that resulted from indiscriminate Nazi war crimes and then being a propaganda tool for the men who march between villages gunning down civilians.