98. Putin’s Secret Army: The Rise Of Prigozhin (Ep 1)

14:15Gordon:friend of the pod you know who had a kind of middle class upbringing but very early on demonstrated absolutely no interest in following any of the normal paths uh that would lead from that and who kind of tilts into crime early gets involved in these gangs has his own sort of personal capacity for violence he's not just at arm's length it's it's very similar it's very He's smart enough to run things rather than be - The Soviet Union's changing while he's in prison.

14:43David:Yeah, exactly. So he's in prison in this period in the 80s. 85 Gorbachev comes to power. Younger generation of leaders wants to open up the Soviet Union. There's going to be political and economic reforms, new private enterprise, new freedoms, opportunities for the ambitious. Eventually, of course, as we know, that's going to spiral out of control. And Pagosian gets released in 1990. So that's effectively the last year of the Soviet Union before it's going to collapse. And there's going to be a coup in 1991 to try and halt the changes. But effectively, you've got the end of the Soviet empire, the end of Russia's control through the Soviet Union of places like Ukraine and the Baltic states.

15:22David:And Russia, as it hits the 90s, enters this wild decade. Economic collapse, massive social change, a kind of Wild West mafia capitalism in which business deals are done with threats of violence to accompany them, everyone trying to get rich as fast as they can, and get rich so they have enough power to stop them getting killed by a rival.

15:44Gordon:It's kind of brutal, violent world. Maybe it's less the case now, but when I was in school and I was learning about this era in Russia, there was a tendency to view it through the lens of this kind of attempted and ultimately failed experiment with liberal democracy. To some degree, that's true. But I think it's better or more accurate to see this as a bunch of people who were living essentially in a failed state. A government, a society, an empire in many ways that had collapsed. And the violence, you know, it's interesting talking to former agency officers who served in Leningrad and then St.

16:25Gordon:Petersburg in the 90s. You know, they would talk about regularly hearing gunshots, explosions. it's a sense of a place that had kind of come apart at the seams and that was very lawless. Yeah. You know, and I think that kind of, for a criminal entrepreneur, like Evgeny Pregosian, there's a lot of opportunity.

16:45David:Exactly. So everyone is trying to get rich. Everyone needs protection from someone more powerful to avoid being at the bottom of the pile. In some ways, I think, you know, all of this, as you said, is suited to Pregosian, who, you know, understands violence and business. In some ways, the outside world is now becoming like the world of the Russian or the Soviet prisons. The prisons. Yeah. You know, it's kind of mirroring some of that power structures in which having protection is actually, you know, translating into the business world of Russia. So he got this feel for it. So he's going to drop out of college.

17:17David:He's going to marry Lubov in 1991, works at a car dealership. But his side hustle, and I love this, is running kiosks in Leningrad selling hot dogs. Now, I mean, this is where some of his reputation as a hot dog salesman comes from. Sausages have been around for a while in Russia, the Soviet Union. But the key was... No bun. No bun. No mustard. No mustard. No ketchup. So you do that. And suddenly you take the old sausage, add those things, and you have something kind of cool and Western and new, which in the 1990s we do very well. It's the genes of the culinary world. It is. The hot dog. That's our first food reference.

17:55David:He says he mixes the mustard in his kitchen, and his mother, Violetta, helps count cash. She kind of plays a role. His wife isn't helping. No, but his mother kind of is there, actually, all through his career. It's interesting in the kind of background. She's got an interesting figure. But he's making money pretty quickly, and he says he's having to pay$100 per kiosk per month, protection money to the gangs. So you get a sense already that he's getting to know the gangs and understanding how to navigate that world.

18:24Gordon:This is maybe perhaps my only piece of knowledge that I'll drop on Russian criminality. I believe the Russian word, which I will horribly mispronounce, for protection is Kresha. Yeah, a roof. Roof. Yeah. An overhang, something over top of your head. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so he's paying for Kresha.

18:42David:And here in St. Petersburg, it's interesting. We were talking to an exiled Russian the other day who was saying, you know, Moscow, you have a central authority, you have the Kremlin, you have power. But St. Petersburg, you know, what had been Leningrad, it's a little bit wilder. You know, actually the thugs, the spooks, the businessmen have slightly freer reign and they're all kind of mixing together in this world as well, all using each other for kind of money, protection, muscle. Everyone's on the take. So Pogosian is starting to move with more senior gangsters. They can see he's got good skills.

19:13David:You know, they can see his ambition. So he moves on from hot dogs. He manages some grocery stores and then casinos. classic kind of gangster thing which of course the casinos are closely tied to the banks and to the gangs then comes the kind of the beginnings of the move into the the world of restauranteuring 1995 he's running a place called the wine club a bar he's got an english manager called tony which i guess makes him look classy well it does occasionally feature strippers as well so it's not that classy it could be classy it could be classy and then comes the big break because he He opens a restaurant called the Old Customs House.

19:49David:It's a fancy old 19th century building on the riverfront near the Winter Palace. Tony, the English manager, comes along. French chef. Where does the capital come from for this? Is it the hot dog money? I think - Is he just kind of slowly working his way up? He's got some business partners as well who are basically gangsters. Okay. And at that point, they're in it together. And he'll eventually kind of ease them out. And it's interesting. Boghossian can be charming, but also violent. he supposedly assaulted a chef after a complaint from a customer about the quality of the food the chef was taken to the cellar and pummeled to the point of being hospitalized for two months it's like not quite gordon ramsay shouting at you but it's like it's a lot worse it's not merely verbal abuse yes it's a lot worse so he's got mix of charm and violence place will serve foreign food that's the key because you know the elite want the foreign food french foie gras oysters from Brittany starting to be the place where the new elite are kind of moving.

20:45David:World of mobsters and bodyguards, city officials, spooks. To me, I don't know, Chicago? You know, it feels like Vegas.

20:54Gordon:Chicago in the 20s and 30s.

20:55David:Yeah, Vegas in the 50s.

20:56Gordon:I don't know, something like that. It's got a feel of that, hasn't it? It does. It's sort of borderline lawless and yet real collaboration in some cases between the authorities and the criminals. I think that to me is one of the hardest things to understand about, I mean, Russia in that period and Russia today is this very strange kind of marriage between the security services, then the KGB, FSB, and these guys like Pregosian who have lived for so much of their life sort of outside of the law. But they're all - They're all on the make. On the make.

21:34David:And they all kind of need each other. I guess that's the point. So, you know, this is his first restaurant. According to Candice Rondeau's book, Putin's Sledgehammer, among the guests at this place are Susie Quattro and the Pet Shop Boys. I don't know if those are references which mean a lot to you.

21:48Gordon:I know the Pet Shop Boys because my dad is a big Pet Shop Boys fan. Okay, very good. And I listened to that extensively as a child. Okay, there you go. Susie Quattro.

21:57David:But if the Pet Shop Boys listened, then let us know if you ever visited one of Brigoshan's restaurants. But about that time, it's thought Putin is kind of moving in these circles. So in some ways, Putin and Progression, I think, are kind of similar because they are two people who've grown up on the wrong side of the street. You know, Putin has come from quite a poor background in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. And he grew up in a kind of crowded apartment blocks. And Yulia Joffe, the journalist, you know, talks a bit about this, about the world of the courtyard, the war, which is where, you know, the courtyard of these apartment blocks.

22:31David:As a boy, Putin would have to show he could survive against the bullies and the thugs. And he's a small guy, Putin.

22:39Gordon:Yeah.

22:39David:And so his way of surviving was to show he was capable of more violence than anyone else.

22:45Gordon:It's essentially, I mean, it's not quite this, but it's not dissimilar to the dynamics of the prison camp. Exactly.

22:51David:I think it's the same kind of dynamics, which is you've got to show strength. You never show weakness. You're loyal to your friends. Anyone who bullies you, you hit them back harder. That's the kind of teenage world Putin grew up in, in Leningrad, St. Petersburg. So you can already see he's projecting the tough guy thing. You know, it's why he learns martial arts, because he knows, because he's small, he's got to survive. That's what he's come from as well. And that's also why Putin is going to be quite good at prospering in this new world of rough, tough, violent, kind of thuggish capitalism security services of Russia in the 90s.

23:26David:You know, he's got the right skills, just like Pogosian, I think.

23:29Gordon:It's fascinating when you look at the demographics. in the Soviet Union in the 50s, how many of the men were dead? Yeah. And how the Soviet state around the time that, you know, guys like Putin and Progozhin are being brought up has essentially tried to engineer a baby boom to resurrect the population without any dads around. Yeah. So you do, you have this, I mean, not to get all touchy-feely on it, Gordon, but it's like, it's a period in time where they actually, there aren't a lot of dads around. And so you have, you know, whether it's these prison camps or whether it's these, you know, of the Vore, these courtyards.

24:02Gordon:I mean, it's a pretty unsupervised time for young Russian men. And I guess maybe they're Gordon, having set up the young entrepreneurial criminal, sort of brutal. Yevgeny Pregosian. Let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll see how he gets enmeshed into the world of Vladimir Putin. See you after the break.

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26:34Gordon:And we're live on match day as Doug reaches for a buffalo wing. He's got it. Oh, and he's gone for a can of Pepsi, too. What a finish. There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better. Match days deserve Pepsi.

26:55Gordon:Well, welcome back. Evgeny Pregosian is rising through the ranks of illicit, but also increasingly official St. Petersburg society. And he is going to become Putin's chef. Yeah, that's what he gets known as.

27:11David:But it's interesting. Trying to work out exactly when they met is a little bit murky. Both of them, I think, hid it a bit. But Putin is going to turn up perhaps at his first, Pogosian's first big restaurant, the old customs house. They might have also had some contact because Putin at one point sits on the gambling board. So Putin, we should say, has been a KGB officer. But then around the time of the end of the Soviet Union, he moves into city government as an advisor to the mayor of St. Petersburg. And so it's at that point that him and Prigozhin are going to meet in this kind of murky milieu of, you know, kind of spies, crooks, officials.

27:45David:You know, maybe, as I said, because of the casinos that Prigozhin is running and Putin's on the gambling board, the extent to which Putin himself is involved in criminality is long been questioned about that period in the 1990s. There's a lot of interesting, slightly murky connections and deals, but it's fair to say that those who knew about it are largely dead or are close to Putin. And people who've looked into it - Largely dead. What are you implying? Implying they've met strange ends. But they're going to get to know each other, Prigozhin and Putin. I think one thing to say is though, it's very much, Prigozhin is more like staff.

28:25David:The phrase Putin's chef, which we'll come to, is kind of true. He's someone who's useful, who's staff, who works, if you like, downstairs working for the boss. He's not on the same level in some ways as this. Of course, it's not quite true because he's not going to cook for Putin, but he's going to run the restaurant and run the catering, which I think suggests the power balance of the relationship. So Prigozhin's restaurant business grows, and this is important for the story because he's inspired by a trip to Paris and he sets up his new company, Concord Catering. And Concord will be the name, which is the kind of overarching business structure, which is going to run a lot of these things.

29:03David:They're going to buy a rusty old boat, remodel it and turn it into a fancy floating restaurant called New Island. Now this does really well, has its own truffle menu, David, which I always like.

29:16Gordon:He's gone from hot dogs to a truffle

29:19David:themed menu with white glove waiters he's moving up and it is all about ostentatious wealth he's good about understanding what the rich what the elite what they want he's got just that instinctive feel of what they want and he knows how to offer it to them interestingly enough the kind of waiters also are good at overhearing conversations and reporting back to him but he's very discreet and putin meanwhile is on the rise so they've encountered each other but putin is actually going to move from St. Petersburg to Moscow. And he's going to go into official positions in Moscow in the presidential administration.

29:56David:He's going to get picked to run the FSB, the security service. He's become prime minister in 1999. By 2000, the end of the 90s, Putin is president of Russia. And he's going to bring a lot of his Leningrad, St. Petersburg friends with him to Moscow and keep them close throughout his life. And Putin's message, of course, is there's been this decade of Wild West, of humiliation, of economic collapse, of the West exploiting us, of just, you know, disaster and violence and crime. And Putin's message is, I will bring order, I will bring stability, I have the right skills. And, you know, you can see people responded to that after this period of chaos.

30:38David:Prigotian, though, is still in Leningrad or St. Petersburg. He's not one of the inner circle of friends.

30:42Gordon:I guess if you move, you don't necessarily bring your caterer with you. To the other city, right?

30:50David:You bring your mates. You bring your close friends. But Putin hasn't forgotten him. And so two months after he becomes president, Putin brings the Japanese prime minister to the New Island floating restaurant to show off. So he is a chef, but it's a kind of interesting position because one thing as we get to the kind of way in which being a chef to a leader is important is that you have to also be trusted to be a chef because you've got to be trusted you're not poisoning the food. You know, which in medieval times, the chef was a kind of trusted position. And actually, Putin's own grandfather, weirdly, had been a chef to Lenin and Stalin.

31:28David:It's also wonder if Putin's got kind of admiration for chefs or a kind of respect for them. So he's kind of decided Pogosian is his trusted chef. You know, not chef as in cook, but, you know, caterer, person to do it. Supplier. Supplier. Yeah, exactly. Of food and food experiences. And Putin wants to show off to all these kind of foreign leaders who he's bringing to Russia. Actually, Russia isn't what you thought it was, this kind of collapsing country. You know, we're capable of having fancy restaurants. So next year, Prigozhin is serving wine to President Chirac of France, whom Putin has brought as a guest.

32:04David:And Prigozhin will claim in a resume, which of course might be boasted, that he caters to 70 leaders of countries, including Prince Charles, now the king here. Tony Blair, Berlusconi of Italy, the then king of Saudi Arabia.

32:17Gordon:Why is he writing a resume? It gets hacked at some point. It's a little bit murky. This is how you know he's not actually one of Putin's friends. If you're having to draft a resume in the Russian system, you are not in the inner circle.

32:32David:One person we do know for sure that he does really serve is President George W. Bush, because there's a couple of pictures of him being served by Purgosian at the table. One on May 25th, 2002. The menu. I think this is important because now we get to our rest is food bit. That's right. The menu was... This is our audition. Yeah, exactly. is looking to be sponsored by some fancy restaurant. The menu was duck liver pate and gingerbread. I don't know what I think about that. Served with prunes and aged pork caramel. Don't know. Don't know. It's not a good one. Black caviar on ice, fried fillet of beef with black truffles, accompanied by fresh morels and baby carrots, boiled in a row and broth, and raspberry milfoy for dessert.

33:18David:Excuse me. I can't even read these words. No, no, no. Your French pronunciations are notoriously uneven. I wouldn't make a good kind of, you know, maitre d' at the Rest is Classified restaurants. You were not selling our Rest is Food pitch very well, Jordan. But what I love is you can see in the picture, Prigozian is there kind of behind Putin and Bush. He's kind of, you know, he's there making sure everything goes well. He is the kind of maitre d' of the thing. Putin then celebrates his birthday at the New Island restaurant 2003. And we should say follow us on Instagram to see that photo. Because we will certainly be posting that to the feed.

33:56David:On the social media feed. And Bush gets served again in 2006 when all the leaders are there at G8 Summit. It's not at the restaurant, but Prokosian is doing the catering. This time Prokosian wears a silver tie. And the menu this time, should we go through it? We should. Astrakhan? Astrakhan?

34:13Gordon:Astrakhan tomatoes? Yeah. Do you know what those are? No.

34:15David:No. Tomatoes from Astrakhan, I guess. Write in and tell us if you know. In balsamic vinegar. Crayfish with gooseberry marmalade. I don't know what I feel about that.

34:26Gordon:You know what this reminds me of? Have you listened to the Rest is History episode on medieval cooking? Yeah. Where people are eating like, you know, it's like eels. Yeah. And you're like, why would you do that? It's not luxury. Eels like stuffed with cow liver, you know, and like, you know, duck hearts or something like that. This is like combining some exotic and strange animals with weird, weird flavors and sauces. Fried smelt with turnips and baby zucchini.

34:53David:What smelt? I don't even know what smelt is. But I like this one fact. Bush, President Bush ordered a steak. Ordered a steak.

35:01Gordon:He didn't want it. He saw the crayfish floating in the gooseberry marmalade and he decided against. But Purgosian's doing well, right? I mean, he's now, I mean, I guess there's all of these ridiculous menus. suggest when Putin is entertaining really important world leaders, he goes to Prigozhin to provide the service of the catering and the food. Yeah, exactly.

35:24David:Prigozhin isn't one of the big oligarchs. He's not like a billionaire who's got lots of power in the 90s. He's a new breed of people who are becoming rich under Putin, and thanks to Putin, and owe their loyalty to him. But he's not quite in the category of either the big billionaires or millionaires or Putin's close pals like Sergei Shoigu, who is one of Putin's old judo partners. So he's a pal, but Shoigu will become Prigozian's arch nemesis eventually. There's also other things. He tries something called Blini and McDonald's. So Blini is a kind of little pancakes. And it's Blin-Donald's, which is a kind of like version of McDonald's, I guess.

36:09David:Do we have any of the menu? Do we know what the menu was?

36:13Gordon:No, I mean, I'm fine enough. The menu's been wiped from the internet.

36:16David:Because I think that business collapses. He also weirdly writes a kid's book in 2004. He's a renaissance man. Exactly. He's going legit. Supposedly with his son, because he's now got a son Pavel and a daughter Polina. And it's the tale of a little boy and a sister who live with their family inside a chandelier. The boy falls from the ceiling into the world of normal human-sized beings and tries to get home. And a boy in this world of big people helps them out. Anyway, it's self-published.

36:49Gordon:So 2 ,000 copies given away. He was able to get contracts from the Russian state for food services, but he was not able to get a book published.

37:00David:But the business empire is growing. He gets rid of some of his kind of dodgier gangland partners. He opens restaurants in Moscow, again, where he can kind of ingratiate himself with the new elite. Now, the point is he's going to use his friendships to get big government contracts. So he's now moving from restaurants to catering supply and including also, you know, things like construction and real estate. But the crucial thing is he gets a contract for food for schools. Putin himself will open one of the factories doing the supply. I don't think the kid's got the truffles and the caviar. I think this was a slightly lower level of catering.

37:35David:And actually, there's lots of reports in later years about the kids, you know, end up with vomiting bugs and dysentery from a daycare and school facility.

37:43Gordon:The quality control was lax relative to the state dinners he was serving.

37:47David:So he's getting, particularly gets to know a guy called Dmitry Bulgakov, who's in charge of logistics for the Ministry of Defense. You can see how he's moving in these circles. And that gets him a crucial contract for the military, worth about 500 million pounds, 750 million dollars, to supply food for the Russian army. Now that is a big deal. Yeah, that's a big deal. That's huge. Yeah. So he's moving into making big money now, which again is just this entrepreneurial guy. May 2008, his company Concord Catering wins the contract to feed guests at Dmitry Medvedev's presidential inauguration. So important part of the story, Putin's been in power as president, but 2008, he decides he's going to step back to being prime minister and his kind of protégé at that time, Medvedev, is going to kind of hand over.

38:33David:But the problem is Medvedev doesn't do what Putin wants. You know, Putin's going to feel dissatisfied and Putin is going to decide he needs to come back as president. You know, he's tried stepping back, doesn't like it. Shocking. Shocking. But that doesn't go well with those who thought Russia was on the path to a more liberal, you know, Western democratic system. And so when Putin says he's coming back, there's actually street protests, particularly in the big cities, particularly claims of rigged elections. This is all kind of December 2011. And Putin hates these protests. he comes to see them as being organized by those sneaky folks at the cia you know all part of a plot by western intelligence to bring about regime change in russia uh strangely people linked to precaution are doing some of the catering for the protesters and this is a kind of weird detail but it is interesting now that's odd unless you realize he might be using it to kind of spy on them and understand what's happening which is the nexus of catering and espionage that we've been searching for in this series.

39:37David:We've just found it. We just found it. So Putin hates these protests. He fears the West is trying to spread, you know, these color revolutions which have happened in neighboring countries to kind of bring down pro-Moscow governments. So he's getting more and more aggrieved. He wants to crack down on dissent at home, go after his critics as he returns to the presidency. He's famously called, you know, the internet a CIA project. So he views the internet and the West as driving and using social media in these things designed to kind of spread Western ideas, undermine the country. And so at this point, he's going to think, I've got to do something about that.

40:15David:You know, I need to fight back. And interestingly enough, he's going to end up turning to Prigozian to do this.

40:21Gordon:Who does not at first blush seem like a natural sort of resource in this fight.

40:28David:No. Does he? No. And that, I think, is one of the curiosities of this story, is that you're going to take someone who's been a criminal, a thug, a kind of restaurateur, a supply caterer, and who is yet going to be part of Putin's core political project, both within Russia and then extending even into the United States.

40:55Gordon:That sounds like a cliffhanger to me, Gorda. It is, David. And I think there with the former hot dog vendor now on the cusp of finding himself at the center of Russian official disinformation campaigns. Let's stop. And when we come back, we will see exactly how Yevgeny Prigozhin, I guess, ends up in the middle of a disputed American election. See you next time. We'll see you next time. But don't forget. Oh. Don't forget.

41:27David:We almost forgot. We almost forgot. We almost forgot, but you should not forget. Join the Declassified Club because you do not have to wait because if you want to hear all six episodes, all six, if you want to know how it ends and it ends spectacularly, you can binge by joining the Rest is Classified Club, the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. Sign up there, but otherwise we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.

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