When Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash near Moscow last month, Russian propagandists were quick to seek a foreign culprit. But external observers soon agreed that his death was revenge by the Kremlin for his attempted insurgency in June. It was also a signal to the Russian elites: being loyal means abstaining from defying Vladimir Putin. Discontent can no longer be hidden beneath patriotism.
Contrary to what Russia’s military commanders had initially hoped, Kyiv did not fall after three days or even a month. The war against Ukraine has dragged on, and Russian society is not hugely enthusiastic about it, as shown by the public’s reaction to partial mobilisation in autumn 2022.
Now the Russian authorities face a dilemma. Should they choose full mobilisation, sending more and more Russian soldiers to the front and switching the entire economy to support the war effort? Or should they maintain the illusion that life can be peaceful ‘back home’?
The second would involve claiming that the invasion is merely a “special operation” rather than a war, prioritising Russia’s social stability and economic interests rather than frontline successes, and gradually rebuilding the country in the hope that Ukraine will agree to a peace deal or to freezing the conflict.
In short, they face a choice between putting everything on the line for a (relatively) quick victory, and normalising the war and learning to live with it for a (relatively) long time.
Mobilisation supporters vs state patriots
In society, this dilemma has manifested itself in a split among supporters of the war – between those calling for full mobilisation and state patriots.
The full mobilisation crowd are most clearly represented by the frontline ‘war correspondents’ – including Semyon Pegov, Roman Saponkov and Alexander Khodakovsky, all known for their Telegram channels – and a group of writers close to author Zakhar Prilepin, who led a volunteer battalion in 2017 in the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DPR).
This group openly calls for total mobilisation and dreams of building a new Russian-led world order, weapons in hand. Their ‘Russian Empire’ claims to be tolerant of ethnic minorities and migrant workers from South Caucasus and Central Asia, but only if their representatives join the war. In this world view, only a ‘Russian with a gun’ can become a full member of the ‘renewed nation’, in which killing Ukrainians is the main criterion for citizenship. Although muted, their anti-elite sentiment is poorly hidden. Ultimately, they want the war to transform Russia according to new but poorly articulated principles.
A key value for supporters of full mobilisation is the brotherhood experienced on the frontline, with its cult of bravery and duty. The Wagner group gave a face to this sentiment.
Sociologist Alexandra Arkhipova has studied the relatives of Wagner fighters and stresses how important the notion of family is for them.
“Take Maria, whose son is in prison, which is quite shameful,” Arkhipova writes. “She is (to some extent) an outcast. Her son goes from jail into the [Wagner] army, and through Wagner’s chats she finds other women who have relatives in the same situation, and they find an extended family, which gives them support and respect. And that’s why they call their relatives fighting with Wagner ‘our heroes’ and genuinely mean it.”
Arkhipova continues: “This is how a corporation is formed, which is described in terms of an ‘ideal family’. And this ideal family has two frightening properties: it has many family members, and they are overprotective.”
The full mobilisation brand of patriotism originated primarily from the ‘military correspondents’, who saw themselves as the voices of the fighting army
The other group, state patriots, borrow a lot from the supporters of total mobilisation. They mix the state, Russians and the Russian Orthodox Church to create a blend of meanings. Their kind of patriotism has few demands – for state patriots, it’s enough to stay in Russia and support Putin publicly. The main thing is to believe the authorities are right, then you can be declared a ‘loyal son or daughter of the Fatherland’.
This approach was manifested in a series of new history textbooks written by Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky and Anatoly Torkunov, rector of the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), which present the war against Ukraine as simply one of the twists in Russia’s long history, making it clear that, due to “historical reasons”, victory will still be “ours”.
Silencing the critics
The full mobilisation brand of patriotism originated primarily from the ‘military correspondents’, who saw themselves as the voices of the fighting army and in 2022 repeatedly attacked the Russian armed forces for their failures.
These critics have been silenced, with moderate critics co-opted into structures close to the government. For example, influencer Alexander Kots became a member of the Presidential Council for Human Rights, while correspondents Pegov, Evgeniy Poddubny and Alexander Sladkov joined the government commission on the interaction between authorities and mobilised citizens, headed by the secretary of the ruling United Russia party.
In 2023, the number of patriots supporting a harder line – one that includes measures such as full mobilisation – has decreased without any apparent efforts from the authorities. Several well-known figures, such as military bloggers Igor Mangushev and Vladen Tatarsky, were assassinated. Prilepin survived an assassination attempt in May.
Igor Girkin (who goes by the nom de guerre Igor Strelkov), a former battlefield commander in eastern Ukraine, had become a popular Telegram blogger and war commentator who fiercely criticised the Russian military for being “ineffective”. He was arrested in Russia in July and faces up to five years in jail for “extremism”.
Yevgeny Prigozhin himself tried to harness public support for hardline Z-patriotism earlier this year. To boost his popularity he could count on his own media empire (a troll factory and at least 16 online publications, including the RIA Federal News agency), Wagner fighters’ success near Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, and his fierce criticism of Russia’s military command. He was the fifth most-trusted public figure in Russia, according to polling. And he did not hide the fact that he was ready to turn Russia into North Korea for the sake of victory.
In June, Prigozhin switched from media attacks on the Kremlin to attacks in the most literal sense of the word and launched an open armed rebellion – which resulted in the Wagner leader and his army of mercenaries being ‘expelled’ to Belarus.
Despite having accused him of treason, Putin did not immediately take serious action against Prigozhin, effectively pardoning him and allowing him to retain a significant part of his business empire, including in Africa. As it turned out, the reprieve was temporary – Prigozhin died in a plane crash on 23 August.
Reactions to Prigozhin’s death
The official reaction from the Kremlin to the Wagner plane crash was restrained. While US President Biden commented immediately, Putin waited a day.
On 24 August, during a meeting with DPR leader Denis Pushilin, Putin stressed Prigozhin’s merits and said their acquaintance dated back to the 1990s. The president glossed over the June rebellion by mentioning Prigozhin’s “difficult fate”, and acknowledging Prigozhin’s and Wagner’s contribution to the fight against the “neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine”. The obstinate subordinate, now dead, quickly received the honour of inclusion in the symbolic space of “official patriotism”.
The reaction among the ‘war correspondents’ to Prigozhin’s death was contradictory, and probably determined by the readiness of editors to filter messages according to ‘wishes’ from above. Those associated with Russian state media behaved like good little soldiers – they paused and didn’t write anything without the go-ahead of their superiors.
Perhaps the Kremlin’s attempts to deflate the Z radicals’ public presence will be successful. But the people who share their ideas will not go away
On the evening of Prigozhin’s death, journalists for RIA Novosti (a state broadcaster that is separate from Prigozehin’s RIA Federal News) who run the Telegram channel ‘Bayraktar Witnesses’ chose to talk instead about the success of Russian troops in Syria. It was only on the following day that they published a long post about the strategic importance of Wagner battles for Bakhmut. Then they called, cautiously, for the operating structure of Wagner to be preserved.
The more radical members of the Z-community were much more outspoken and were the first to suggest the Russian authorities were involved in murdering Prigozhin. Wagner’s Grey Zone Telegram channel claimed that air defence missile remnants were found at the crash site. Another channel, Military Informant, claimed it saw traces of missile damage from anti-aircraft guns in the initial photographs of the wreckage.
Subsequently, Grey Zone focused on glorifying Prigozhin and Wagner co-founder Dmitry Utkin, and also published clips of Prigozhin’s speeches where he criticised the authorities and speculated that he could have been killed for these statements
Others talked openly about the fact that the death of the Wagner command could have a negative effect on the troops. Roman Saponkov wrote on the evening of 23 August: “The murder of Prigozhin will have catastrophic consequences. The people who gave this order do not understand the mood in the army at all.”
The future of patriotism
Perhaps the Kremlin’s attempts to deflate the Z radicals’ public presence will be successful. But the people who share their ideas will not go away. Questions for the authorities from front-line soldiers are only piling up – and will soon become a constant headache for Putin. Many are still at the front, and in the future they will be ready to respond to the calls of any leader resembling Prigozhin.
But even with demobilisation, the problems will not be solved. In years to come, what will the Kremlin do with the thousands of men who have passed through the frontlines and who, if the war drags on, will lose their professional skills as they instead master the science of killing?
Under the Putin regime, at least one simple answer to this question appeared: to include them in Russia’s system of military and patriotic education. Cadet and Cossack classes, the Youth Army patriotic movement, hundreds of military and sports camps, historical or sports clubs, other programs of additional school education – all of this was given new life over the past decade.
The introduction of basic military training in all schools is an example of this. The state has already announced a special centre for retraining Ukraine war veterans as teachers for schools. Slow, inconsistent, very situational, but still, it worked. It raised many questions: why is patriotism defined through military feats and, of course, love for the authorities? What benefits does all this military pageantry provide for young people’s lives? The Russian state obviously did not want to turn patriotism into a school of civic education.
Now, there is a real danger that former frontline soldiers will enter this system with their own ideas, where fighting in a war of conquest will be justified at the very least, and could also involve spreading the idea of ‘military brotherhood’ among teenagers. The latter is dangerous: schoolchildren will be taught to live in a peaceful society according to wartime principles.
Of course, this is a threat for the distant future. For now, the patriots can celebrate their victory. In the public space, they dominate because of their forceful pressure on anyone who disagrees, rather than their own ability to imitate anything.
But in the ‘war for meaning’ that the Kremlin’s domestic policy curator Sergei Kiriyenko recently called for, the pro-war patriots are unlikely to win. After all, now they are busy with exactly the opposite: creating a curtain of noise against the repressions of the authorities.
The longer the war goes on and the louder the official patriots shout, the longer radical discontent will simmer in Russia’s pro-war media networks, now pushed to the periphery. It will break through as soon as the official institutions give up the slack.
