by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
What can an employee of the Rupert Murdoch media machine and an employee of a George Soros think tank reveal in a new book about the evils of President Vladimir Putin which they and a foreign legion of thousands haven’t already said before – except that there is still money to be made out of repeating the story.
Mark Galeotti, a writer for The Times of London, has been trying to live down his Italian Communist boyhood which is the only part of his story he doesn’t reveal or repeat. Co-author Anna Arutunyan calls herself Russian-American, leaving out the Armenian connexion at birth in Moscow, the circumstances of her growing up in the US, and some of the US institutions which trained and employed her, including New York University, the Wilson Centre of the Smithsonian Institution, USA Today, and George Soros’s International Crisis Group. Americans who come to Russia as rookie journalists with backgrounds as blank as Arutunyan’s reveal they have something to hide.
Together, Galeotti and Arutunyan have just published what they call a history of the rise and fall of Yevgeny Prigozhin. Not that they know anything directly about him. Everything they report has been published before, most of it in US newspapers and by US-paid Russian opposition propaganda organs. The sole source for their $10 billion estimate of the Prigozhin’s businesses in 2019 turns out to be two unknown fronts called Current Time TV and Municipal Scanner. The first acknowledges it is based in Prague and is funded by the US government propaganda agency, Radio Free Europe. The second, renamed The Scanner Project, says it was “created with the participation of Boris Nemtsov in 2014”. That source of regime-change money appears to have run out a year ago, when the site stopped publishing.
As for Prigozhin’s time in criminal gangs; his hot-dog kiosks and restaurants in St. Petersburg; his Defense Ministry contracts; and his role in the formation and operation of the Wagner private military company, Galeotti and Arutunyan rely on second and third-hand hearsay; and the lack of ever having eaten in any of the top Soviet restaurants of Moscow and Leningrad, or their successors since 1991. Instead, the duo express contempt for everything Russian they have read about and have no direct experience of, including the Zhiguli car (“tacky duplicate of a 1960s Fiat design”), Soviet cuisine (“think of such delights as canned cod liver and meat in gelatine”), and the display of new (“obscenely rich”) Russian money — except for that of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, because “he continued to bankroll opposition politicians and speak out against corruption”.
They have just one direct source for the Wagner mercenaries. Arutunyan claims to have interviewed Marat Gabidullin, who has been selling stories of himself to qualify for asylum in France, where he moved in 2018 after serving in the Russian Army until 2015, and then in a Wagner unit in Syria for three years.
Gabidullin told National Public Radio of Washington, DC, in June 2022 that he left Wagner “because he became morally exhausted in Syria, fighting for a corrupt government that was hated by its own citizens. He says he was asked to fight in Ukraine but refused.” A Ukrainian publication of 2023 claims Gabidullin “had a criminal record for murder.”
From Gabidullin, Galeotti’s and Arutunyan’s book depends for insights and evidence like these he told Arutunyan: “It was like in that movie Casino. They come in, go to the closet, open it, load the money into bags, everyone else looks away”; “from the beginning , he had a vision of [Wagner] being a global structure”; “Wagner is a typical serf-landowner type of business, with a diligent overlord who takes care of his peasants”.
Like that runaway, Galeotti and Arutunyan want everyone to understand that Vladimir Putin is the evil autocrat running “an almost medieval court in which constantly competing factions and individuals are struggling for the most important currency of all – Putin’s favour”. Thirty-three pages further on, by contrast (contradiction), that turns out to be “the whims and decisions of an ageing autocrat who had too much on his plate to be particularly interested in forging a coherent Africa strategy”.
To reach this conclusion, Galeotti and Arutunyan were unable to speak with (or read) a single source from South Africa, Angola, Botswana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Senegal, Guinea, Ghana, and Ivory Coast where most Russian money and political priorities have been invested for the past thirty years. The duo also appear to have ignored the Russian oligarchs with the largest investments in those states, including Oleg Deripaska, Alexei Mordashov, Vagit Alekperov, Roman Abramovich, Alexander Abramov, and Vladimir Yevtushenkov.
Galeotti and Arutunyan also compare their idea of a “medieval court” to the gangsters in which “Putin’s system relies on unspoken understandings – much like the criminal world in which Prigozhin was raised.” Discreetly left out of mention is that Prigozhin was Jewish and that his rise, like Putin’s own, started and depended on street gangs of Jews and other non-Russian ethnic minorities and the capital he hustled out of them for their joint ventures. (For the common sociology of this phenomenon, think of the US equivalent — Meyer Lansky’s role in the Lucky Luciano gang.)
The Jewish and Israeli links of this story – Prigozhin’s, Putin’s – are camouflaged by Galeotti, Arutunyan and their reviewers by their christianizing references to medieval and Renaissance courts. In the Financial Times review of the book, for example, it is claimed that the authors “skilfully intertwine Prigozhin’s biography with Putin’s own rise to power. In their telling, the president is cast as the tsar presiding over myriad squabbling subordinates playing ‘games of court’, amid which Prigozhin emerged as a sort of ultra-violent court jester. It is only through understanding the nature of this system that it is possible to grasp how a caterer ended up controlling a sprawling private army based across there continents. The fact that Russian war machine came to rely [sic] on a man like Prigozhin, the authors write, ‘is, at its core ‘an admission of a moral and ideological vacuum at the heart of Putinism’.”*
Since that is the fundamental charge of US and NATO state ideology against Russia, and since Galeotti and Aryutunyan have been paid to publish this charge in Prigozhin’s story, a non-Jewish ethnic Russian source serving in the army, the intelligence services, the Kremlin administration, and the media, might have been sought for fact-check or comment. Instead, there is nothing. That’s the vacuum in Galeotti’s and Arutunyan’s book.
Anna Arutunyan and Mark Galeotti and their book, published in mid-June.
Their account of alleged gold and diamond smuggling by Prigozhin out of Africa is footnoted, not to the well-known Russian and international gold and diamond miners in Africa, but to an academic paper published at the University of Exeter in August 2023. What that original reference reveals is that it was funded by the UK Foreign Office; the lead author, David Lewis, was an Exeter academic on secondment to the Foreign Office for several years. Lewis did no direct research of his own; at the university he also prevented experts on Russian gold and diamond mining in Africa from lecturing to his students. Instead, Lewis’s claims about Prigozhin in Africa are based on references to BBC and US State Department publications, as well as to the Polish government-funded Polish Institute of International Affairs and “the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime”, which is paid for by the Norwegian government.
Another of the book’s frequently cited sources, especially for Prigozhin’s military operations in the Ukraine, is The Dossier Centre. This is an outlet paid for by Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his regime-changing organization in London.
Source blindness and keenness to repeat US and British Government propaganda lead Galeotti and Arutunyan to report the reason for Putin’s engagement of Prigozhin to interfere in the US presidential election campaign of 2016 was Putin’s hostility towards Hillary Clinton because she “had criticised the [Russian] parliamentary elections for voting irregularities”. Galeotti and Arutunyan reveal their ignorance of the large Russian bribe Clinton took through a family foundation in 2009 in exchange for her promise to support the sale of General Motors’ Opel division to a combination of the Russian state bank, Oleg Deripaska’s car company, and the German government. Clinton pocketed the cash and then reneged on her promise. For Putin’s reaction and the full story, read the book, chapter 6.
ALTERNATIVE HISTORY FROM PRIGOZHIN’S MUTINY TO HIS DEATH
June 23, 2024: https://johnhelmer.net/
June 28, 2023: https://johnhelmer.net/
July 5, 2023: https://johnhelmer.net/
Left: July 10, 2023 -- https://johnhelmer.net/
Right: September 5, 2023 -- https://johnhelmer.net/
Without a direct source in St Petersburg, Africa, Syria, or the Ukraine on the front, how do Galeotti and Arutunyan explain Prigozhin’s death, which is the climax and selling-point of their story?
They say their principal source is the Wall Street Journal, the Murdoch platform in New York, whose version was supplied by “western intelligence officials and a former Russian intelligence officer”. Arutunyan and Galeotti conclude by saying “all of this is, of course, entirely speculative”. Of course — off course.
The English, French and US sources on which the book’s narrative depends: David Lewis, Anglo- Jewish; Gabidullin, a Muslim Bashkir; and Alan Cullison, a Christian New Yorker and Wall Street Journal reporter living in Washington. In the August 28 list of new Russian Foreign Ministry sanctions against US citizens, 13 members of the Wall Street Journal staff were banned; that’s a far larger number than for the New York Times and Washington Post. Cullison wasn’t on the list.
For their narrative of Prigozhin’s “taking the city of Voronezh”; throwing Moscow into “half in panic, half in business as usual”, and the “rapid exodus of oligarchs and senior officials” – an innuendo that Putin was fleeing the city — Galeotti and Arutunyan cite only one source – Meduza, the regime-changing internet publication, based in Riga, Latvia, funded from the US. Notwithstanding, “we know very little about the negotiations ending Prigozhin’s move to Moscow,” the intrepid biographers concede, “we know very little about quite how these arm’s length talks went…” Analysing Prigozhin’s death falling out of the sky on August 23, 2023, Galeotti and Arutunyan again crib from the Wall Street Journal, but at the same time acknowledge: “many explanations have been given for the delay between the mutiny [June 23-24, 2023] and the response [aircrash August 23] …It is at present impossible to know.”
In this world of impossibility-to-know never has the conviction-of-course been so persuasive, at least for the purpose of selling books to the already persuaded. “Prigozhin may be dead,” Galeotti and Arutunyan conclude, “but his rise, rebellion, and fall demonstrated, for all to see, a fundamental weakness of the Putin regime.” Here’s the political science — “central to [Putin’s] political system is the constant competition between rival factions, institutions, and individuals”.
Of course, this cannot be faulted, the evidence for it cannot be wrong, not in Moscow nor anywhere in the political world. That’s because it is a cliché.
And here’s the final one: “someday, democracy will be coming to Russia, and although he is hardly a suitable banner-bearer for reform, Prigozhin’s disruptive mutiny will have played its part in that process”. “Democracy”, “reform”, “part”, “process” in the final lines of the book you have paid £18 to reach can’t be faulted for lack of evidence or for an excess of propaganda.
[*] The reviewer Miles Johnson is the FT’s house expert on Prigozhin. He claimed in a report of February 2023 that “Prigozhin generated revenues of more than a quarter of a billion dollars from his global natural resources empire in the four years before Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, according to corporate records.” In Johnson’s arithmetic, his sources added up to just $210 million in revenues, with just one Syrian company reportedly generating two-thirds of that total in a single year, before collapsing to $400,000 a year later.
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