To sum it up a bit
Originally Posted by Roman Popkov, ex-leader of the Moscow branch of the National Bolshevik Party of Eduard Limonov
As for Prigozhin and Putin, here's another thing. For years, everyone tirelessly compares Russia with its mystical, sworn sister, paradoxical antipode twin - Germany.
In this sense, the "Wagnerites" are sometimes compared with the SS, but this is of course not true.
The SS has always relied on "elitism" on a certain "order", "knightly" style. "PMC Wagner" is essentially an anti-elitist phenomenon.
If we are to look for German analogies, then the Wagner PMC and personally Prigozhin are much closer to the SA and Ernst Rohm. They are similar typologically - simple-boorish statements, proximity to crime, immersion in crime. Similar rhetoric: not only chauvinism, but also inciting hatred towards the elites (generals, governors, oligarchs and other "fat cats"). Red-brown degree.
Röhm wanted to make a parallel army out of the SA, but got burned out in opposing himself to the Fuhrer. Prigogine charmed Putin in the fog of war and calmly does what Ryom failed to do - a parallel army.
Evgeny Viktorovich looks through the fog of the current war beyond the horizon, into post-Putin Russia and into new wars for power - only the lazy have not written about this. But for Putin, all this Prigogine long-term planning does not exist. Putin does not see post-Putin horizons, for him it is incomprehensible, as for us it is the infinity of the Universe.
Until then, this is the situation. Imagine Hitler, who in 1934 turned his back on army generals, industrial magnates and whisperers from the SS, and made a bet on Röhm, gave him guns and planes. By the way, it was the SA that created the wildest, most cruel concentration camps immediately after the NSDAP came to power.
Of course, now a bunch of high-ranking people from the FSB, the Ministry of Defense and other structures are dreaming of a new "night of long knives." But now it is not easy for them to whisper to Putin. Putin filled his ears with wax, Putin likes everything in Prigozhin. And despite his career in the KGB, Putin is typologically closer to Prigozhin than to the generals, even those from Lubyanka (FSB).
Post Scriptum
P.M.C Wagner itself is a very illustrative example of the absurdity of Russian claims that it is Ukraine that needs to be so-called denazified.
Why was it named Wagner and not Chaikovsky, or Glinka, for example? What a "coincidence" that they named it after Hitler's favorite composer...
Manipulating on the topic of Nazism and using your status as the so-called heir to the USSR to justify your crimes in Ukraine is not new for Russia. Russia puts a sign of identity between itself and the USSR, respectively, in their internal propaganda, the victory of the USSR over the Third Reich is presented as a victory of Russia itself alone. Of course, they prefer not to mention the American Lend-Lease, without which Zhukov would have fought with carts, with Maxim machine guns mounted on them, and with an armored train. Following the logic of Moscow propaganda and their twisted rewritten history, since Russia (USSR) defeated the Nazis in World War II, therefore, a priori it cannot be a Nazi state, and those against whom it wages war, of course, the other way around. As one of the arguments, they like to cite the fact that Stepan Bandera was recognized as a hero in Ukraine, and Bandera himself is perceived by them as the personification of Nazism and collaborationism of Ukraine (at that time the Ukrainian People's Republic), despite the fact that Stepan Bandera spent the entire war in the Nazi concentration camp, like his brother, who was killed there. Well, the fact that, in percentage terms, the largest number of collaborators was just the same among the communists, and not nationalists, they are silent about this.
You can learn about the attitude of Hitler's Germany towards Ukraine, and the key role of Ukraine (Black Soil) in his plans from a lecture by Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University
Last edited by Hug; Nov 13, 2022 at 05:16 PM.