Yevgeny Prigozhin, Shakespearean Rebel

I've tried to use Shakespeare to understand Russia before

The Death of Alcibiades

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In 2011 and 2012, I wrote a screenplay adaptation of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens set in late Yeltsin-era Russia, right around the turn of the millennium. The project started out as a theater piece actually. It was going to be a very spare production, with only 10 or 11 actors and a lot of doubling, and the actors would put roles on and off with small pieces of costume that would be hung around the stage. But when an actor wasn’t in a scene at all, and so didn’t have a signifying piece of costume, they would transform into dogs, and prowl around the edges of the stage. I even imagined adding a number of dumbshow scenes to the play that took place in the “dog world” as opposed to the human world. The only character who would never transform into a dog was Timon himself.

The idea was to make the pervasive dog imagery in Timon more concrete and visceral, and to marry Shakespeare’s text to something more movement based. I also wanted to connect the play to Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, a satire of the “new Soviet man” that hasn’t lost a bit of its bite. I felt the conjunction of Shakespeare and Bulgakov would together form a great lens through which to understand the dynamics of post-Soviet Russia and the rise of a new authoritarianism. (I take a far darker view of the character of Alcibiades than is the case in any production of Timon of Athens that I’ve ever seen; they mostly take him seriously as a figure of liberation, which is wildly at odds with the historical accounts that Shakespeare had access to, and also, I think, at odds with the play itself.)

Anyway, the production never got off the ground, but I couldn’t get it out of my head, which is why I wound up adapting it into a screenplay, which necessarily became a whole different animal. Far from being spare, I think the screenplay could only be executed on a fairly substantial budget. I also wound up ditching the idea of dumbshow in favor of new scenes written in a contemporary film dialogue vernacular which coexisted with Shakespeare’s text. The result is something in between the Ian McKellen Richard III film and My Own Private Idaho in terms of how fast and loose it plays with Shakespeare.

I’ve never known what to do with the script. But every time Russia is in the news, I wonder whether it might not have some kind of future. The events of the past few days feel especially resonant with a story about a dog-eat-dog world without loyalty in which a general feels insulted by the way a political system treats his troops swoops, is exiled when he confronts them about it, and then almost effortlessly swoops in to conquer the city that banished him.

I will frankly admit that I know next to nothing about Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group who launched an abortive bid to seize power in Russia. But the kind of thing he was trying to do is very familiar from Shakespeare. It’s what Bolingbroke pulled off against Richard II. It’s what the Percy family tries to pull off against Bolingbroke after he’s become King Henry IV. It’s what Alcibiades pulls off against the Senators of Athens who banished him, what Coriolanus tries to pull off against the Tribunes of Rome who banished him, and what Marc Antony tries to pull off against his fellow triumvir Octavius. The Tudor centralization of power began England’s transition out of the feudal world of multiple power centers with private armies, but the memory of the War of the Roses was still fresh when Shakespeare was writing, and his plays are haunted by the prospect of civil war driven not by ideological, regional or class conflict but simply by the existence of ambitious men with their own armies to command.

And that, apparently, is Russia’s world today. I’m still kind of flabbergasted by Prigozhin’s audacity, and more so by how initially successful his gambit was. As someone commented, for the Wagner Group to seize Rostov-on-Don without firing a shot is roughly equivalent to Blackwater seizing San Diego. The fact that they were able to advance menacingly close to Moscow without ever facing direct resistance is even more astonishing. But I would have been more surprised still if he had actually succeeded. If I understand correctly, Prigozhin’s quarrel was fundamentally with the regular Russian military command, who, however incompetent and corrupt they are, not only massively outgun his mercenaries but also have direct access to government funding. I’m sure Prigozhin has all sorts of business interests, but unless he was able to set himself up as the quasi government in some part of Russia, keeping his troops armed and provisioned was inevitably going to become a problem. (That’s another reality familiar from accounts of Shakespeare’s rebels; in Alcibiades’s case, Shakespeare provides him with a deus ex machina in the form of gold that Timon digs up while looking for roots to eat.)

Realistically, Prigozhin could only have succeeded by either convincing the regular military to come over to his side against Putin—which would be very surprising given that he was explicitly attacking them—or by convincing Putin to side with him against the regular military, which would have been an exceedingly risky move for Putin to make. Putin, an intelligence man, surely remembers that NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria’s downfall was precipitated by a conflict with the Soviet Army. He’s put a lot of energy into preventing the Russian armed forces from becoming an independent source of power, with consequences that are ready to see in Russia’s poorly-executed war in Ukraine, but once Prigozhin forced the question I can’t see how Putin could have openly sided with his protégé.

In retrospect, the whole thing feels more like a demonstration than an actual attempted coup—and yet what it demonstrated most clearly is that nearly nobody is Russia cares enough about who’s in charge to put up a fight. Nonetheless, most surprising of all to me would be if Prigozhin’s exile to Belarus is the end of the story. Rebels in Shakespeare who disband their armies and trust their enemies’ promises of clemency don’t tend to survive long, and I can’t imagine that Prigozhin would expect any different if he were relying entirely on Putin’s good will, which suggests he’s relying on some common understanding of mutual interest, whatever that understanding may be. We’ll no doubt find out what it is soon enough, when we next hear Prigozhin’s name in the news.

And what about us, here in America? How should we be reacting to these astonishing events? To be perfectly frank, I don’t see how our reactions matter much. Actual chaos in a country with over 4,000 nuclear warheads could lead to a true global catastrophe, but it’s not clear what we could do to prevent Russian state authority from collapsing if that’s where things are headed. That includes by disengaging from Ukraine; what’s happening in Russia is the product of its own pathologies, and if we had an opportunity to coax the country down a more peaceful path, that opportunity likely passed in the Clinton years, and we cannot undo those mistakes now. All we can do is recognize the tragic reality of the situation, and try to avoid deluding ourselves into believing either that we can help, or that these events can somehow help us.

That includes helping us in the war in Ukraine, which a number of commentators have suggested might benefit from the revelation of just how precarious Russian power is. Putin shockingly raised the specter of 1917 in his comments on Prigozhin’s rebellion, but it’s worth remembering that while Ukraine briefly achieved independence after the fall of the Tsar, that independence was swiftly snuffed out, and the subsequent decades brought horror upon horror for the Ukrainian people. Ukraine can only be free and secure in the context of peaceful coexistence with its neighbor, and I can’t see how the collapse of the Russian state could help them achieve that. I don’t actually think the Russian state is about to collapse, and I don’t think we can do much to prevent it if it is. But if we’re inclined to cheer for the prospect, well, maybe let’s remember how that kind of cheering for destruction feels once the costs of that destruction start to come due.