A peculiar cult of Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group has been flourishing in Russia for some time. And this is despite the June 2023 mutiny and the mysterious death of “Putin’s cook” in a plane crash, most likely the result of a Kremlin-planned assassination attempt. Moscow’s own propaganda is largely to blame for this.
The fascination with the Wagner Group and its leader can be seen very easily in Russian social media, where iconographic elements of Russian mercenaries are still very popular. Young people are eagerly photographed next to Prigozhin’s grave, even when visitors are searched by the militia. Even monuments to him are being erected. One of them – depicting Wagner Group co-founders Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin – was erected in Krasnodar Krai, in southwestern Russia. Although they are built with private funds and the local authorities shun these initiatives, few things happen in Russia without the knowledge of the services. This means that the cult is in practice tolerated by official factors. Additionally, this is evidenced by the fact that if Prigozhin and the Wagner Group appear in the pro-Kremlin media today, it is rarely in an explicitly negative context.
This is due to the prior popularity of the Wagner Group and its head in Russian society. It is largely the responsibility of the mercenaries themselves, who even before 2022 had built up their own myth mainly through social media, but also through films, literature or comic books, creating the so-called Wagnerverse. They continued these activities with great success in the first period of the open invasion of Ukraine.
But Russian official propaganda is also an accomplice here. It co-created the myth of the Wagner Group as an extremely efficient, “fearless” and effective combat formation. It did so for very practical reasons. The idea was to attract the recruits needed to fight against Ukraine, especially those who were reluctant to serve in the regular army, which was associated with widespread corruption, disastrous treatment of soldiers and disorder. The nymph surrounding the Vagnerians was also meant to induce prisoners to sign contracts with them.
The second piece in this puzzle is the myth of Bakhmut, co-created by the Kremlin media. It saw the city as an almost impregnable fortress, a key frontline location whose capture could have a significant impact on Ukraine’s eventual defeat. And Wagner’s Group was portrayed – including through the propaganda it created – as the only formation that made progress in this section, beat the Ukrainians, and finally captured the city. It’s nothing that it accomplished this largely by means of “meaty assaults” carried out by the zeks, and heroic, weeks-long battles were fought over, for example, a dog run or a garden store. Wagner’s message was eagerly seized upon by the official media and pro-Kremlin trolls, contributing to the construction of an image of mercenaries as the first assault column of the Russian Federation.
This image was not shattered even by the Prigozhin rebellion. And it was simply linked to the scant success of Russian troops at the front. The Kremlin is in desperate need of people who could be made war heroes in the mass imagination of its own people to persuade them to participate more in the war effort and accept losses and sacrifices. And the candidates for such heroes are simply not there. Hence the tolerance for the burgeoning cult of Prigozhin and the Wagner Group, who continue to “do” for such figures. This is all the easier because Prigozhin and his aides – at least officially – did not directly act against Putin, but against his evil “boyars.” Russian propaganda thus found itself in a kind of trap. The Kremlin would probably be very eager to do away with the Wagner Group myth, but there is simply nothing to replace it with.
This situation once again proves that Russian propaganda is not immune to numerous mistakes in its operations, and the message fixed in people’s minds is difficult to change, even if circumstances are radically transformed. And disinformation and the creation of propaganda myths can be a double-edged sword. After all, it may happen that over time the Prigozhin cult will shift from a pro-war aspect to a rebellious one, directed against the incompetence of the authorities and the military. Besides, for some Russian milbloggers and Telegram channels such a shift is already taking place. For the name of the erstwhile “Putin’s cook” falls there in the context of complaints about irregularities in the internal functioning of the Russian Federation’s military and the entire state system.
