Prigozhin’s Legacy

THE YET-TO-BE-CERTAIN death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder and leader of the Wagner group, the most successful and renowned mercenary army of the present, in a plane crash came with little surprise, including pos­sibly to Prigozhin himself. It was almost certainly an assassination because men like him don’t die of accidents. Was it committed by Russian President Vladmir Putin against whom he attempted a coup? Was it a Western intelligence agency trying to end the ex­pansion of Wagner to Africa as a private army for sale, for after all this was no rag­tag militia but a force that could match just about anything that a developed country could put up? We will probably never know who it was with certainty either. What we can be sure about is that no one in the mainstream of geopolitics is going to be mourning and with that we come to the great anachronism that Progozhin represented—a modern army of no government.

An anachronism because once upon a time this was more the rule than the exception. Kings outsourced fighting to feudatories until, if they could, they tried to exert back control and history marched through a give and take of this phenomenon. But then the nation state was born and there was no ambiguity anymore. The monopoly over soldiers would be with the government. Oc­casional civil wars would test this but any new government would still insist on it. Putin allowing Prigozhin was a desperate move to allow him to bypass the agreed rules of war. Even he now recognises the genie let loose was just not worth it. Generals and colonels with divisions under them have a lot of coups under their belt but a clever dictator can still prevent it because the soldiers are ultimately beholden to the nation, and so, to him. But a private army only has loyalty to itself and its leader.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to appreciate what such a force let loose on the African continent—a place where no Western superpower is interested in sending its soldiers—could do. Merce­naries have been around forever but the scale of what Wagner represented just couldn’t be tolerated unless a desperate patron like Putin gave it sanctuary. Now, wiser, he is not going to make the same mistake again, and which other dictator will, having seen what happened in Rus­sia? India has had its fingers burnt too similarly though in an entirely different scale and setting when it turned villagers into militias to fight the Maoists, and the effects soon became apparent there too when Salwa Judum’s violence increased in proportion to the loss of control over it by the agencies that created it. That is just the nature of armies. They are made of people living under the extreme stress of potential death and there must be great fear or reward that keep them going in a controlled fashion. A govern­ment does this with ideas like honour and pension. Someone like Prigozhin only offers profit and power, ensuring that sooner or later, the structure must descend into mayhem.

About The Author

Madhavankutty Pillai

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