Dan Snow's History Hit - Prigozhin: The Fate of Russian ‘Favourites’

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

Russian history is defined by the rise and fall of favourites. Peter the Great had Menshikov, and Nicholas II had Rasputin. It's part of the architecture of Russian regimes that those close to the ruler enjoy immense power and influence. But sometimes, they overstep the mark.For this episode, Dan is joined by the renowned historian of Russia, Simon Sebag Montefiore. To help us better understand the relationship between Putin and Prigozhin, Simon sheds some light on the way Russian power works at its centre.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Autocrats have their favourites. It's part of the architecture of these regimes. People emotionally, personally, sometimes physically close to the ruler who come to exercise enormous power over the government. Sometimes they grow too big for their boots. They rebel, are deposed, murdered, destroyed. Sometimes when the ruler dies, their influence dies with them. And very

occasionally, these favourites are able to manage the transition from one ruler to the next. Russia in particular is famous both for its autocracy and for its favourites. Rasputin, both for its autocracy and for its favourites. Rasputin, the imperial favourite who ended up poisoned, stabbed, shot and drowned by jealous aristocrats who despised his influence over the imperial family. You've got Menchikov, who went from being a pie seller on the streets to Peter the Great's favourite and the effective ruler under Peter the Great's widow. Biron was born into minor gentry, penniless, and he became the hereditary ruler of Courland, thanks to being Tsarina Anna's favourite. Paul I turned his barber, Pavel Katyasov, into a great and powerful magnate, who was later stripped of his offices as well.

The rise and fall of Russian favourites, a subject we're all suddenly very interested by this summer, thanks to events in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. And here joining me on the podcast to talk all about them is Simon Sebag Montefiore. He's written a series of astonishing books about Russia and more widely he wrote Stalin, the Court of the Red Tsar. He's written about the Romanovs and most recently he's written The World, A Family History of Humanity, in which, as you'll hear, there are plenty of autocrats and plenty of favourites. It's great getting Simon back on the podcast to shed some light on the way Russian power works at its centre. Enjoy.

T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Simon, good to have you back on the podcast.

Always good to be here. What is it with favourites in Russian history? What is it about the nature of Russia that means that the Tsars, the leaders, have these favourites, and then they fall out, and then they try and launch coups and mutinies? What is it? Well, I mean, I think that the Kido understanding the Prigozhin story, which is far from a simple one, is just putting him in the context of the long, long tradition in all absolute monarchies. But because Russia has used that system longer than anyone else, a tradition that runs through all of Russian history right up to the present. And those of us who study English history from the medieval times, the Plantagenets, know how important favourites are in those sort of monarchies and what leaders will do to protect their favourites and how they use favourites. But to put it shortly, in Russian history,

a huge bureaucracy, a huge army has meant that often czars and autocrats find it hard to get stuff done. They find it hard to have their own people that are loyal to them. And so they promote friends, if you like, friends from outside the system to positions of importance. And those people owe them everything. So the idea is that they're very loyal. The idea also is that they can get things done that other people can't get done. The Russian bureaucracy is extremely incompetent and cautious and slow and sluggish and sclerotic at the best of times. So, you know, to understand the Evgeny Prokhorin, one can look back at Russian imperial history and see that, you know, the promotion of favourites is something that allows the Tsar, the autocrat, to show their absolute power. I mean, the oligarchs, the businessmen that made it in the 1990s, they're also favourites and usually more minor favourites.

And the key thing to understand in Russian autocracy is that these people aren't necessarily important. These people aren't necessarily important. What's important about them is that the creation of these people, raising them up from nothing to wealth, to power, to status, reveals and illustrates the immense mystique of the power of the autocrat. But they can always be destroyed too, which also illustrates the mystique of the autocrat. And we're seeing a bit of that sort of game going on in Russia this last month. So they can be destroyed by the autocrat. Can they represent a threat to the autocrat as well? Is there a history of these favourites going rogue and starting to look after their own interests? They can also go rogue. I mean, the key thing to understanding what's happened in the last month is that Prigozhin is normally presented in the Western press as sort of, isn't it bizarre,

there's this maverick chef who's a bit of a joke figure to us, a sort of terrifying, sinister, but also preposterous. But in Russian terms, he isn't. The point about him is that he met Putin early on in Putin's presidency. He met Putin through his restaurants, but it could have been any way. I mean, Paul I's favourite, Kutaisov, was literally his barber and valet, literally put his clothes out every day and ended up as really the kind of one of the dominant ministers in his reign. And, you know, he met him early in his reign and he identified him as someone, I guess, who can get things done. And we're not saying Bogosian isn't a war criminal and isn't a brutal character in every way he is. He also comes from a semi-. Prigozhin did that efficiently. When Putin wanted a foreign policy on the cheap, using military forces that were deniable by the Russian state, Prigozhin set up Wagner,

which proved extremely efficient in Syria and in other places in Africa in projecting and promoting Russian power. And when the war started, this disastrous, terrible, brutal, unnecessary war, when that started, Prigogine provided troops that were actually proved to be the only forces that achieved something like a stalemate or success almost in Bakhmut and other places. success almost in Bakhmut and other places. So Prigozhin is the classic favourite who the autocrat is playing off other organs and institutions in the constellation of the Russian state, particularly Putin's other favourite, Shoigu, his old hunting crony, and Gerasimov. So in some ways, Prigozhin is not an important figure. But in other ways, he's kind of more important than we realise. And, you know, he figure. But in other ways, he's kind of more important than we realize. And, you know, he's the classic favorite.

Obviously, he's always had access to Putin. Putin has encouraged him. Putin has funded him. The funding is astonishing. Putin revealed last week that it's $2 billion a year, a billion for the catering contracts that make him an oligarch, a billion for Wagner. These are colossal figures. And so Prigozhin has been kind of empowered by the Tsar to attack other parts of the system. And that's

the way Putin runs Russia. He runs it with competing baronies. And it is very like a medieval English court in a way. But Putin has mishandled it. And he's mishandled Prigozhin to a certain extent. But the key thing to understand is that autocrats hate losing these favourites. Favourites are hard to find. Favourites who are very good at what they do are even more hard to find. I mean, in Russian history, you have very incompetent favourites. You also have absolutely outstanding favourites. I mean, for example, Rasputin is an imperial favourite. I know there's all this mystique about him, you know, whether he has mystical powers or whether he was a hierophant or guru, whether he slept with Alexandra, which he didn't, by the way. But the point about him is he was an extremely incompetent favourite who, in political terms, was catastrophic.

On the other hand, my old friend Prince Potemkin, Catherine the Great's favourite, was really the greatest statesman of the three Romanov centuries of Russian power and achieved all the things that Putin has so far failed to achieve in Ukraine, among other things. So the favourites reflect their masters. And then what about the fall of favourites? Because favourites, they can become extraordinarily unpopular, can't they? I was reading that wonderful book about Suleiman the Magnificent with his favourite Ibrahim. Sometimes these ostracised say, well, they have to sacrifice their favourites or the favourites grow too powerful. What about the end of favourites? Well, the thing about favourites is both their rise and fall illustrate the power of the ruler. The key thing is to find, first of all, to find an efficient

favourite. You know, Ibrahim Pasha was extremely able. But the trouble with favourites is they come from nothing. And they're the best friend or very close friend of the ruler. And after a bit, they become over familiar. And they are also lightning rods, very useful lightning rods. It's rather like in the British cabinet, when there's a minister everyone wants to sack. It's very unwise to actually sack that minister, because you're next of your prime minister. So it's rather like that. So someone like Rogozhin was also a brilliant lightning rod to attract criticism and hatred from people. And in the end, the ruler can get rid of them.

They can become overmighty. They can become a threat. I mean, Ibrahim Pasha, for example, you mentioned him, is a very good example. I mean, he was super talented. But in the end, he was kind of calling himself sultan and actually kind of had pretensions to rule in his own right. That's what his enemies said anyway. And so he may have become a threat to too many people. And then he had to go.

And in Prigozhin's case, you have the feeling that Putin promoted him, encouraged him, not least because his troops were doing extremely effective and ferocious fighting, better than the army, more efficient than the army. So he used him against the army. But then, of course, what autocrat, what ruler is going to choose a tiny force of maverick mercenaries over the vast Russian army? One thinks also of Hitler in 1934 with the SA and Ernst Röhm. I mean, Hitler was friends with Ernst Röhm, he encouraged the SA. But when the SA suggested replacing the Wehrmacht, the actual German army, the sort of revered German army, Hitler had to make a decision who to support. And in the end, he supported the army because he

needed the army to do what he needed to do in Europe. And Putin, in the end, was not going to sort of turn the army over to Prigozhin. And that's what Prigozhin basically wanted, I think. I think he wanted to protect his Wagner troops. He wanted them to continue to be lavishly supplied. And he also wanted to replace Shoigu and other sort of rather inefficient, corrupt placemen who were at the top of the army hierarchy. If Putin had done such a thing, that would have placed himself in the power of Prigozhin, which he would be loath to do. That really would be the tail wagging the dog. So ultimately, instead of handling this kind of feud properly, he seems to have sort of gone into denial and just left it

there. And so not taking calls from Prigozhin, who had obviously gone too far in his attacks on Putin and the hierarchy. And what he should have done is dealt with it, because that's the autocrat's job. Putin's job is to handle these feuds that he's running between all these different barons. But what he seems to have done is refused to take Prigozhin's calls for ages while cutting off supplies. And so Prigozhin, on one hand, needed the salary for his troops. In another side of it, I think Prigozhin, after the extraordinary ferocity of the fighting in Bakhmut and other places on the front, I think he felt bloodied. He felt like a sort of Russian hero, Russian knight who had a sort of status now,

a special status earned in battle to criticize the leadership. And clearly, delusions of grandeur. Probably just what he wanted was just to be taken into the leadership somehow and to replace Defense Minister Shoigu. But anyway, he mishandled it. But Putin probably made the bigger mistake in failing to solve this conundrum between his own cronies. And so Prigozhin launched this sort of exhibition, if you like, to try to put pressure. There's no doubt that Prigozhin isn't just a sort of maverick chef as we present him in the Western press. His performance in the war, absolutely brutal, absolutely unacceptable, absolutely disgusting in every sense, using criminals and so on to fight. And, you know, using things like the video of the sledgehammering of a deserter whose head was smashed. All of this is kind of absolutely brutal, but he was effectively fighting the war. And so he would

have had friends in the military and other places that were helping him and that respected that, and who hated people like Shoigu back in headquarters. So he obviously was told by various people, you know, do this and we'll kind of support you. But typically for Russian power, when it happened, no one supported him. You listen to Dan Snow's History Hit, talking about Russian favourites, their rise and fall. All coming up. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on my podcast, Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, I try to make sense of everything that baffled our early modern ancestors. Like, what do you do with your waist? If you put your dunghill up against your neighbor's

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Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. You've mentioned Prince potemkin you've mentioned paul's barber what other favorites do you think we need to talk about from russian history and do favorites often end up dying in their bed

yeah a lot of them do one big problem all favorites have is that they're very dependent on the autocrat that they have. Favourites find it hard to transfer to other favourites. Buckingham in British history is a very unusual case who pulled that off. From James I to Charles I, very impressive. Very, very clever psychology somehow there from George Filliers, because to change from father to son with very different relationships is unusual, but not unheard of. In Russian history, I mean, the greatest favorite after Potemkin was Prince Menshikov, who was Peter the Great's favorite. And the third one, I guess, is Ernst Biron,

Empress Anna's lover and favorite. All three aspired to create an exit strategy where they could have a kind of independent status after the death of their patron, their autocrat. And Ernst Birol managed it. He became hereditary Duke of Courland and got his own little kingdom. Menshikov actually ended up ruling the whole of Russia through Catherine I, through the widow of Peter the Great. And so he pulled off an amazing rise from pie seller in the street to prince of the Holy Roman Empire and basically sort of semi-autocrat himself of Russia. But he ended up being exiled to Siberia when there was a coup launched against him. Potemkin was planning to be king of Poland.

And had he been king of Poland, I think he'd have saved Poland or Poland wouldn't have been partitioned, as happened after his death. But he died before Catherine, which was probably just as well. A good example is General Arekczew. Arekczew, who was the sort of brutal factotum of Alexander I and Nicholas I. And he was kind of more of a pregoginish character in that his whole point was to terrorize the military brass and the bureaucratic brass for those czars. And they used him to terrify their hierarchies and bureaucracies. He was probably talentless in battle, but very good at putting down peasant revolts and terrorizing bureaucrats and aristocrats. I mean, that was Prigozhin's role here, was really to goad and encourage and terrorize key figures who may have been coming too powerful. Favoritism is the key way to understand Prigozhin.

And it's also the key way to understand why Putin met him again after the coup. After the coup, astonishingly, Putin actually met Prokosin in the Kremlin. This just shows you that they have a relationship. I mean, I'm not sure he'll ever come back to any kind of position of any importance again. I'm not sure that he'll live to old age. But it's fascinating that Putin actually has met with him after being called a traitor on television, after the mutiny had failed, and actually received him in the Kremlin in secret. You know, what does this mean? We don't know. I mean, one of the key things about this to understand is that the so-called hot takes on Twitter, who are often finance bros, who kind of say they

understand what's happening in Russia, no one does. None of us know anything. The first thing I was told when I went to Russia is everything is a secret and no one knows anything. And you'll notice that all the people that actually know about Russia say that upfront pretty much. And so we simply don't really know what's happening in this secret little world of theirs. And it never appears in the paper and Western journalists often don't find out about it. So more is going on than we realise. But I think it just shows that meeting with Putin and Ghosn just shows that, again, favourites have a real personal relationship with the autocrat in a way that is inconceivable for the average bureaucrat. So that's interesting. And is that part of anything else? Is it just incredibly lonely being an autocrat in a way that is inconceivable for the average bureaucrat.

So that's interesting. And is that part of anything else? Is it just incredibly lonely being an autocrat to find someone you think you can trust, even apart from their utility and whether they're good at what they do? You're not making many new friends. You're not going down to the football club when you move to a new area and sort of hanging about. No, no. I mean, everyone wants to be your friend, but none of them can be. I think the thing about favourites is that they often meet their patrons early on in the regime, when they are open to meeting new people. That's probably true of Prigozhin. It is very lonely being a ruler. And the more absolute the rule, the more isolated and exposed the ruler is. In the Russian system, again, what people

don't realise in the sort of tabloid version, Putin is just all powerful, all to crack and do anything he likes. And it's true that there are few barriers and restraints on a Russian dictator. But the downside is there's also no protections. There's no system. You're very exposed. You can't really retire. There's no succession system. There's no protection against conspiracy from within the regime. And there's no way for people to project opposition in any other way except from internal conspiracy, because street protests very rarely work in Russia. And there are very few cases where regimes have been changed. Autocrats have fallen because of street protests very rarely work in Russia. And there are very few cases where regimes have been changed. Autocrats have fallen because of street protests.

But actually always it's internal because the security forces are so powerful and strong. So, yeah, it's a lonely thing. When Putin was offered the presidency by Yeltsin, the first thing he said was, how do I protect my family? And the only way to protect your family is to be autocrat. You can't leave or retire. Once you're in power, whether it's sort of the Romanovs or the Rurik family, and you're a sort of hereditary family in power, a dynasty, or whether you're like Yeltsin and Putin or an outsider who becomes an insider and becomes the autocrat. But either way, the people who come with you, if they're their own family, you just trust them, probably dislike them. You want to find your own family. And if they're your

old pals who are your equals, Shoigu and Patrashev are the two of those in the Russian leadership now. They're trustees, but they came up with you. They don't quite respect you as much as you perhaps should be respected. You want to find your own family, you want to find your own friends that owe everything to you, that don't have a career beforehand. That's the definition of a favourite. And that's why favourites are essential. You know, I was just reading about Richard II, and he had de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, I think he was, he was this kind of essential person. And he never recovered from losing him. I don't think Putin has a single person like that. I think he's got many people. He's got Kadyrov in Chechnya.

He's got Shoigu in the defense ministry. He had Prokhorin as a sort of roving military and trolling ally, magnate, you might say. And he's got many other people, too. But these people are very hard to find, people you, you might say. And he's got many other people too. But these people are very hard to find, people you've trusted for decades. And so, among other things, I mean, he'll be disappointed. He's lost a key figure. When you say that's a classic Russian thing of somebody sticks their head above the parapet and everyone says, go for it, and then no one else turns up. And it's not quite the same, but it reminds me of when you described Stalin's sinking into kind of lethargy and perhaps breakdown at his dacha when he, after Operation

Barbarossa starts in 1941. It feels like he was toppleable there, right? But nobody stepped up. Yeah, he probably was toppleable. I mean, I think we were referring to as in 28th of June, 1941, after the German invasion, it was Operation Barbarossa. First of all, 1941, after the German invasion, it was Operation Barbarossa. First of all, Stalin had made a colossal mistake, the biggest mistake in modern history, really, where he thought that Hitler would not invade yet, and really had no plan to deal with it. But he thought he was a sort of military, talented military commander, Stalin did. So he just ordered counterattacks everywhere, none of them happened, because the whole Russian Soviet army was in free fall, in mass retreat, I mean, encirclements and so on. So finally, he went over to the defense ministry and Minsk had fallen. All of these great cities

were falling to the Germans. And it suddenly looked like they were actually ultimately going to approach Moscow. The road to Moscow was open. And so he went over to the Defence Ministry, where Zhukov was chief of staff. And there was just panic over there. And Zhukov admitted that they had no contact with their troops. They didn't know what was happening. And astonishingly, the granite-hard General Zhukov wept and burst into tears and ran out of the room. And so then Stalin realised that they were really in big trouble. The whole thing was about to collapse. And then he stormed out, called for

his car and drove to his dacha, which was his real home, just as Putin doesn't live in the Kremlin, lives in his dacha. He went out to his dacha and just stayed there and waited. And he waited for three days. There were no orders given to the Russian army. No one knew what to do. No one dared move against him. And that probably was the weakest point in his entire rule. But because he'd killed the entire military elite in 1937-38, and sort of so savaged the elite of the government and party as well, no one dared move against him. And so in a sense, the terror had worked as he'd wished it to work, which was that he was untouchable. And finally, Molotov led a group of leaders out to the Kosovo and they said to him, please come back. In a sense, without ever saying it, all is forgiven. And Stalin then came back to the Kremlin, took control, appointed himself Supreme Commander in

Chief, appointed himself Defence Minister, and from then on, micromanaged the war with great confidence until victory. I mean, his bungles and disasters and follies lost millions of troops. No other state on earth could have survived the losses. But when he started to get it right, just before Stalingrad, it started to come together. And so maybe there's, yes, there's parallels with the Prigozhin mutiny. He'd been told he had support of several people, probably. Though we know nothing about it, in fact. We only know what sort of appears on the old telegram chat, which is leaked to us. We really don't know.

But it looks like that there were people in the military, top generals, who said, yeah, we'll support you because this really can't continue, and your troops have done so well. And then, of course, when it came to it, no one did anything, and Prokofiev was left to hang out, to dry. And the rest is history. Sometimes when favourites rebel, they are strangled or killed. Other times, strangely, they're kind of forgiven.

Obviously, we don't know, we don't know anything. What's your gut? What's your gut, Simon, having're kind of forgiven. Obviously, we don't know. We don't know anything. What's your gut? What's your gut, Simon, having read and studied Russian history? My gut is that Prokofiev isn't finished yet in some way. I don't know if he'll have command restored to some part of Wagner or whether he will retain some sort of status. It doesn't look like it, according to all the rest. I mean, I think one has to take one's guidance from Russian TV, which is now denouncing him regularly. And, you know, the police have raided his mansions and his compounds and so on, and sort of made a mockery of him. But he has met Putin again. I mean, Putin did not need to see him. So he's preserved some minor importance. And, you know,

a lot of it is just personal. One has to ask, you know, with these favourites, they really are sometimes the dearest friends that these rulers have, or the most useful friends they have. You know, you just have to ask, is he still important to Putin? Is Putin still fond of him despite everything? That is a question we just have to look into Putin's stony heart. Brilliant. Well, Simon, thank you very much for bringing all that expertise. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.