If Leo Tolstoy were to write a novel about autocrats, he would start with: “every happy autocrat is happy in his own way, but all unhappy autocrats are alike”. That’s what I thought to myself as I watched a tired old man relinquish a glass of water from the hand of a bodyguard. It was necessary to pass the same glass to the son of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, so that the Turkish president did not die of thirst, a few hours before his re-election. All autocrats are so afraid of dying of poison that they prefer to die of thirst.
Joseph Stalin died of constipation. Alone in the room, He was too fond of watching movies, eating hard-boiled eggs. Vladimir Putin, sybaritic but solitary, rarely accepts treats from others. He doesn’t like eggs and he doesn’t have a son, but he had a trusted chef. The latter held the life of the president in his hands for so long that, little by little, from a cook, he became the leader of the people, of whom Putin is the little father. It is said that Yevgueni Prigojine does not have the level to be at the table of the Russian president, but if, of all Putin’s entourage, it is necessary to find a person socially and intellectually close to him, it is Prigojine.
The two men were born in Saint Petersburg, a strange city, falsely European and impeccable, like any construction without historical roots, built on human bones in record time, like an Olympic village of a poor country wanting to fill the eyes of the leaders of rich countries. The underworld of the ancient capital was the subject of the work of the great Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It is in these lowlands that “Volodya” and “Genia” grew up, like all street urchins, until the day when they each met the men of their lives. For Putin, it’s Anatoly Rakhline – a distinguished judo trainer. For Prigojine it is his father-in-law, Samuil Jarkoi, a cross-country ski instructor. Putin, small and weak, learned to fight back and was accepted by a group of friends who have remained united to this day. Prigozhin, thanks to the trainings of the stepfather, entered the sports college of the Olympic reserve, a boarding school where he studied under the swimmer Salnikov and the gymnast Ditiatin, future three-time Olympic champions of Moscow.
Organized sport, a new social class
Putin was lucky. Sport forged him and offered him friends much smarter than him. Prigozhin went to prison two years after high school.
Formally, Putin is considered to belong to the special services system, but his rank (lieutenant-colonel) shows that he was not really successful in his career. He was not a spy either, whether or not fans of the genre like it, victims of reading Balzac, whose phrase “Spy, what an energetic noun” is probably at the origin of the popularity of former KGB or Soviet ex-diplomats (from the KGB, too), who flood French bookstores with their works of dubious taste. As for Prigozhin, given the time he spent in prison, he must belong to an important social class in Russia, that of the underworld.
In reality, the two Petersburgers belong to organized sport, a social class that emerged after the fall of the USSR. Sport is an integral part of totalitarian regimes. Pushing patriotic pride to the limit, which quickly turns into nationalism, sport is the substitute for war. Winning is an obsession. If democratic and professional sport generates money, totalitarian and lucrative sport is an invasion of intellectual and ideological territories through entertainment. The citizen’s body becomes state property. It is used to build human pyramids, glorifying the regime, displaying swastikas, wearing uniforms or synchronizing the mass “heil Hitler”. You have to train tirelessly to become a living advertising object. The muscular flesh serves as the patriotic cement inside. Abroad it promotes the regime. Applauded in the West, Soviet sportsmen were true missionaries, propagandists of the socialist spirit. But as is often the case with propaganda, propaganda that uses champions is a lie.
Totalitarian sport recruits from early childhood. Following merciless training, the supple child bones are quickly covered with adult musculature, thus creating monstrous deformations. These practices lead to physical and moral dramas. Once their role is completed, the champions are abandoned by the system. Without income or any other profession, they fall into oblivion and end badly. Their name is legion, because there were many of them playing the Soviet anthem in front of international audiences standing at attention.
But the system perished under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. It was at this time that sports missionaries came together as a gang, forming a new social class, comparable to organized crime. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his strength, such could be the adage of the elite of sportsmen. From the past, all they had left was physical strength, so the champions came down to town. If organized crime respects rules and hierarchy, organized sport is a fight without rules. Russian capitalism began with raids by boxers armed with baseball bats. Many athletes have become contract killers. In turn, Russian democratic liberalism expressed itself through the presence of organized sport in places of power. Michail Gloutchenko, the boxing trainer, first becomes a “thief in law” (a supreme rank in the Russian criminal world) and head of the Tambov criminal organization, one of the most powerful. Faithful to the Olympic motto, “Citius, altius, fortius”, he was elected deputy in the ultra-nationalist party (LDPR) of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. It was he who organized the assassination of Galina Starovoitova, a great lady of the political world.
Serguei Skorochkin, vodka baron, criminal and deputy, is a former boxer. Deputy Anatoly Bykov, organizer of several murders and director of the aluminum plant in his spare time, also comes from boxing. Irina Viner, director of the gymnastics federation is the wife of the biggest businessman Alicher Ousmanov, close to power and now targeted by sanctions. The influence of this woman is so important that one wonders which of the two serves as the other’s cover. According to the former president of the Union of Journalists Igor Yakovenko, there were, under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, nineteen deputies in the Duma who were former sportsmen, openly criminals, sponsors or executors of assassinations .
Cooking the Kremlin lords
For more than a year, Russians have viewed the bombings in Ukraine as an MMA match. Those who thought that the arrival of drones on Russian territory would change the behavior of these lovers of combat without rules were mistaken. The explosions in Moscow’s upscale neighborhoods provoked cries of joy approved and even provoked by Prigozhin. He understood that bloodlust is neither racist nor patriotic. She is barbaric. Talking to the enraged crowd, Prigojine knows how to do it. While Putin was studying law in college, he studied the science of prison survival. He was able to tame Putin’s paranoia, which ate out of his hand. From now on, the president’s chef calls to cook the lords of the Kremlin. When you lose to the external adversary, you have to find an internal enemy. Why not the former judoka Putin? Has the endurance of cross-country skiing got the better of the grips of martial arts?
Meanwhile, far from Moscow, a certain White Rex, Denis Kapustine, head of the Russian volunteer corps, is spreading terror on the Russian-Ukrainian border. Amateur of MMA and organizer of the fights between the supporters of football in Germany and in France, it is today prohibited on the whole of the European territory. Openly neo-Nazi, he wants Putin’s skin.
Never has Russian sport been so political as in the last thirty years. Is it the apology of force in a country where no institution works, not even that of totalitarian power?
*Natalia Turine is a journalist, photographer and editor. She is the owner of the Globe Russian bookshop in Paris.