Did the CIA back Prighozhin or assassinate him?

The increasingly bizarre mental gymnastics of pro-Russian "anti-imperialists."

I haven’t had much to add to the news of death merchant Yevgeny Prigozhin’s assassination beyond laughing at the idea that the culprit was the CIA — or the Covid vaccine. (Prighozhin’s plane crashed, the joke goes, because his pilot had a heart attack after getting vaccinated — an obvious parody, but one so many people bit on that Forbes had to debunk it.) The notion that anyone else could possibly be to blame other than the famously vindictive Vladimir Putin, whose government he threatened to overthrow only a few months prior, is so absurd that it would be embarrassing to take any of this coping seriously.

But why is anyone even bothering to deflect blame in this first place? The reasons will vary, I suppose, but it occurs to me that among the sort of anti-imperialist who parses “the west” as this war’s only villain, Prighozhin poses an unusually thorny problem.

On one hand, pundits aligned with this perspective have spent the last two years praising Prighozhin’s supposedly anti-imperialist murder spree in Ukraine. Nevermind that he was an obscenely rich capitalist making money off of killing innocent Ukrainians and Russians, who he effectively conscripted into his army and who were being used, by his own admission, as cannon foder. Because Prighozhin was team anti-West, he was therefore an “objectively” progressive force, or so the argument goes.

But on the other hand, of course, the reason Putin had Prighozhin assassinated is that he had also “objectively” become an enemy of the Russian state. Logically, this would have to make him an enemy of anti-imperialism as well — which is why so many of them also, during Prighozhin’s march on Moscow, speculated that he had actually turned and become an agent of the CIA.

Now, the tidiest explanation is to suppose that the same CIA that might have been backing him before now decided to have him killed. This lets us rearticulate everything that has happened as an uncomplicated conflict between the West and the rest. If we accept that Putin murdered Prighozhin, then the simplistic analysis of multipolarism that masquerades as “objective” in its simplicity suddenly turns into a much more difficult problem, and it suddenly becomes possible that enemies of the West can also be enemies of workers.

Meanwhile, the problem of Prighozhin isn’t much of a problem at all for the Leninist conception of anti-imperialism. The man was a capitalist. He profited off of the exploitation and murder of workers even as he positioned himself as their ally. Whether he did so as an agent of the Russian state or as a secret agent of the West is irrelevant. And whether he was murdered by the CIA or the Kremlin, it’s a blessing to workers all over the world that the bastard is gone.

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On an unrelated-but-directly-related note, Branko Milanovic has written a post on BRICS and non-alignment today. Correctly, Branko reminds us that BRICS is best understood as the heir of the nations that attempted to remain unaligned during the Cold War between capitalism and communism:

they did not want to have to choose sides in the Cold War waged between the West and the East. They wanted to stay out of it. Many people failed to understand the logic of non-alignment, precisely because they failed to understand that you can create an organization composed of heterogeneous countries that may disagree on many issues, but find it useful, for geopolitical reasons, to get together in a loose association. Non-alignment was liked neither by the Soviet Union nor by the USA. The Soviets believed that it was superfluous because the USSR was “the natural ally” of the Third World and decolonization and rather than getting together in a new organization, the Third World countries should simply support the Soviet bloc.

Today, BRICS fan and “tankie” are almost synymous in the discourse: but is not the Soviet critique that Milanovic lays out here the paradigm tankie critique? It was Hungary’s attempt to disalign from the West and the Soviet Union, after all, that compelled Khrushev to send in the tanks. The Soviet position was that you could not be neutral in the global struggle between capitalism and communism.

Branko’s history on this is correct, but the rest of his analysis seems pointlessly confused. Why does he describe BRICS as unaligned even as he insists — “somewhat incongrously,” he admits — that it is also one of the rivals in a “new Cold War”? It’s because we all know that this isn’t actually a new Cold War in the sense of being a global struggle between capitalism and communism. No one can seriously argue that BRICS is attempting to build a global socialist state, or even to maintain some kind of socialist consensus among its members. BRICS partisans like the Cold War analogy because it seems to imply otherwise, suggesting that since the West is engaged in an international rivalry with member nations they must be “objectively” progressive, just like the Soviet Union was. But Branko knows that BRICS is no more the heir of the Soviet Union than Russia is, so once again, the multipolarists find themselves mired in contradiction.