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‘The mascot of the special military operation’ Eight months after his death, Yevgeny Prigozhin has gained a cult following among Russian teenagers

Source: Baikal People

It’s been 10 months since Yevgeny Prigozhin led an aborted rebellion against Russia’s military leadership and eight months since he died in a fiery plane crash near Moscow. To ensure Wagner Group never stages another coup attempt, the Kremlin has consolidated its control and reportedly shifted the group’s focus back to Mali. But while Prigozhin’s name rarely appears in state media or official public discourse anymore, the authorities haven’t banned it like they have pro-Ukraine slogans or symbols associated with opposition groups. As a result, the murderous mercenary leader has become a cult figure among a contingent of Russian teenagers who admire his supposed candor as well as his “memeability.” Journalists from the outlet People of Baikal recently looked into this phenomenon. Meduza shares an abridged translation of their story.

‘The phrase ‘special military operation’ is already a meme’

Eighteen-year-old Katya has long pink hair and is studying to be a digital content producer. Her bedroom is covered in string lights and posters of anime characters; one wall has a sign reading “Hentai God.” Katya loves memes, pop music, and Internet culture. She also loves Yevgeny Prigozhin. Across from the “Hentai God” sign hangs a Russian flag alongside a flag containing a skull in crosshairs: the Wagner Group logo.

“Most of my peers are liberals. These flags show that their owner is different — not like everybody else,” Katya says. “When I told my classmates that the liberal agenda goes against traditional values and that that’s a bad thing, it really got under their skin.”

Katya doesn’t explain why liberal values are worse than “traditional” ones; she simply prefers the latter because they “bring her closer to her friends and family.” She says everyone in her family is a “Z-patriot,” so when her parents saw the Wagner Group flag in her room, they just “laughed.” Katya’s older sister, Anya, also has a Wagner flag in her room, but she put hers up out of a sincere admiration for Prigozhin; Katya, meanwhile, did it with a touch of irony. She says her favorite thing about Yevgeny Prigozhin is his “memeability”:

Katya says Vladimir Putin doesn’t share Prigozhin’s “memeable” status since, unlike Prigozhin, he doesn’t “have a funny reaction to everything.” Ukraine’s corresponding “mascot,” in Katya’s view, is Volodymyr Zelensky — also because of his frequent appearance in memes.

“I see it from the point of view of a Zoomer,” Katya explains. “Everything that happens in the world is a meme.”

Indeed, Katya almost never stops talking about memes. Rather than reading traditional media outlets or mainstream news channels on Telegram, she gets most of her news from Vladislav Pozdnyakov, the founder of the Russian far-right hate group Male State, because his channel is “funny,” she says.

Katya’s been looking at war-related memes since the very first hours of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “I was at a party and I got up at 4:00 a.m. and the memes were already everywhere,” she says. “My friends and I knew that what was happening wasn’t funny, but we were surviving on these memes, trying to understand what was going on.”

Katya prefers to use the Russian authorities’ official euphemism for the war: “special military operation.” “What’s happening isn’t horrific enough to refer to it as an actual war,” she says. “And the term ‘special military operation’ has already become kind of a meme itself.

Katya explains what she admires about Yevgeny Prigozhin:

As for Prigozhin’s criminal past, Katya says she prefers not to think about it:

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Prigozhin’s online legacy

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s public criticisms of Russia’s military leadership began at the very start of the full-scale war. After Wagner Group forces captured the town of Soledar, however, the mercenary leader lost all restraint. A video from Bakhmut that shows him standing in front of dead bodies and lambasting Sergey Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov went viral not just on Telegram but also on TikTok and Instagram. In the months that followed, some Internet users wrote erotic fanfiction stories about Prigozhin, Shoigu, and Putin.

On June 23, 2023, Prigozhin accused the Russian Defense Ministry of carrying out a rocket strike on a Wagner Group camp and declared a “march of justice” towards Moscow. Over the following 24 hours, Wagner fighters took control of Rostov-on-Don, shot down a plane and several helicopters, and didn’t stop until they reached the Tula region, just a few hundred kilometers from Moscow. On June 24, after negotiations with Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko, Prigozhin announced that his forces were turning around.

Two days later, at Moscow’s School No. 1511, high school students showed up to their graduation ceremony waving the flags of the Russian Empire, the Russian Airborne Forces, and Wagner Group. In their graduation photos, some of the students flashed the shaka hand gesture, which the paramilitary outfit has adopted as a symbol.

According to a former administrator of one Wagner chat group on Telegram, many teenagers got into arguments with adults on social media about Prigozhin, defending him both before and after his march on Moscow.

When Prigozhin died in a plane crash in August, many of his fans released eulogies for him. One video showed teenagers vowing to avenge their hero’s death. “We’ll find them, punish them, and do everything necessary,” a young man says to the camera. Next to him stand three children holding a Wagner Group flag.

Today, Prigozhin fan accounts on TikTok continue to post videos and memes about the mercenary leader alongside clips ridiculing Russia’s opposition figures. Often, subscribers to these accounts also criticize Russian officials, such as Defense Ministry Sergey Shoigu. Some of these pages also incorporate monarchist symbols.

Putin, Trump, and Prigozhin

“Prigozhin fits the archetype of the trickster. He stands for the non-canonical good. He’s kind, but at the same time, he does things his own way,” explains Alexander, an 18-year-old from Siberia who counts himself among the Wagner Group founder’s fans. He collects Wagner Group patches and badges and wears them in public; according to him, they almost never elicit a negative reaction.

Alexander first became interested in politics in 2020, when he decided he wanted to fight for “equality and equal rights” after reading Marx. He also sympathized for a time with Russian nationalism but ultimately found it disappointing. Now he considers Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to be the world’s best contemporary politicians. He believes that Putin is working to make sure other countries can’t “walk all over Russia” and that Russia is inseparable from its current ruling authorities.

Alexander first started paying attention to Prigozhin in January 2023, when Wagner Group captured Soledar. The battle for control of the city had lasted almost 1.5 years and had been one of the bloodiest of the war so far. The fight for Bakhmut was similarly brutal: even semi-official channels referred to it as the “Bakhmut meat grinder.” Alexander was inspired by stories from Russian propaganda sources about the former criminals in Wagner Group’s ranks being kind to Ukrainian civilians. He was disturbed by stories of the group’s extrajudicial executions, but at the same time, he considers the practice justified: “Desertion is a terrible thing to do.”

Alexander attends “patriotic” rallies and makes “trench candles” and camouflage nets with his grandmother to send to Russian soldiers in Ukraine. The name of his main social media account contains a derogatory term for Ukrainians. He wishes he could go to the front himself — ”not for money, but out of conviction” — but his disability means he’s not able. Instead, he plans to become a history teacher.

Just edgy enough

Sociologist Svyatoslav Polyakov suggests two reasons for Prigozhin’s popularity among young people. The first is his brand of streetwise masculinity: “Prigozhin was larger-than-life, and he stood by his beliefs, to the point of launching a rebellion.” The second is Russian society’s demand for justice that extends beyond the country’s elites. Prigozhin successfully promoted an image of himself as a truth-teller who wasn’t afraid to criticize those at the top.

“He had convictions. They were completely barbaric and abominable, but they were convictions. And he was willing to own them,” Polyakov says. He also points to the mercenary leader’s PR skills: “He was an experienced media manager. He invested a lot in self-promotion, imposing his own image and symbols from the top down.”

As for why young Russians are turning to a figure like Prigozhin for “justice” rather than listening to the opposition, Polyakov believes it’s simply safer. “Liberal values are under intense pressure right now. It’s easier to join the value system of the majority, the ones declared by the elites, than to be an outcast,” he says.

Polyakov sees Prigozhin as just one more link in a long chain of popular outspoken military figures. Before Prigozhin, he says, there was convicted war criminal Igor Strelkov, and after him there will inevitably be someone else, though likely not a traditional military serviceman. “Military personnel exist in a system that doesn’t allow them to speak out of turn; they have to follow orders. So the next Prigozhin will likely be another independent, bounty hunter type,” Polyakov says.

A ‘father figure’

Ilya lives in St. Petersburg, where he’s repeating the ninth grade. He finds the things he’s taught in school “useless,” he tells People of Baikal.

“I don’t want to live like everybody else: go to school, start a family, retire. It may sound childish, but the fact is that I want to be a child forever. The guys at school say I’m a symbol of independence and nonconformity to them. If I’m not interested in something, I don’t do it,” he explains.

The only reason Ilya wants to graduate, he says, is to avoid disappointing his mother, who had Ilya at 16 after running away from home. For the first part of his life, Ilya’s grandmother was his primary caregiver. The family lived in the town of Krasnovishersk, which Ilya describes as being ”stuck in the 1990s.” He bitterly recalls the turf wars between drug addicts, a group that included his father. It wasn’t until Ilya was six and the family moved to St. Petersburg that his dad finally stopped his drug use. Nonetheless, he left Ilya’s mother soon after and hardly talks to Ilya now, despite living in the building next door.

“Prigozhin had a father-figure personality; I looked up to him as if he were my dad,” Ilya says. “After all, it wasn’t like I had anyone to look up to before. That’s why I ended up being such a reckless idiot. But fuck it, at least I’m happy.”

Ilya sees Prigozhin as an “anti-hero,” like his favorite comic book characters. For him, the fact that the Wagner Group leader served time in prison only reinforces this idea:

Ilya draws a distinction between himself and other Prigozhin fans his age. “A lot of teenagers at my school have said that they plan to join Wagner Group and kill people,” he says. “That’s idiotic. They’ll get scared and start crying after the first gunshot they hear. I, on the other hand, see Prigozhin as a person, a soldier, a smart and well-read guy.”

Ilya says Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, for example, doesn’t hold the same appeal; he simply sees him as “some friend of Putin’s.” Still, he says, he “respects and likes” Putin and considers Russia’s current political system to be a democracy:

Ilya doesn’t deny that the Russian government is full of corruption, but he believes this is the case everywhere. In fact, he tells People of Baikal, that he’s happy his money is being spent “on someone’s dacha or yacht instead of on tanks.” He considers the war in Ukraine to be “something from out of the Middle Ages.”

“The Nazis in Ukraine are gone; now they’re just sending ordinary men into battle. It’s just a business — it’s huge amounts of money,” he says.

Nonetheless, Ilya says he’d like to join the army as a means of “physical and moral development.” But he only plans to sign a Defense Ministry contract as a last resort. “If I feel hopeless, like I’m lost in life, then I’ll go,” he says. “At least it’ll be a way to earn some money.”