Dmytro Yagunov: The Wagner Phenomenon: Russian Neo-Imperialism and the Importation of Prison Subculture

The issue of Russian criminal and prison subculture and its spread is by no means historical or criminological in nature. In fact, assessing Russian criminal and prison subculture solely within the framework of historical science or criminology deprives researchers of the opportunity to analyse the essence of this phenomenon. Having shed the prefix ‘sub’, Russian criminal and prison culture has become one of the pillars of Russian statehood and the spread of Russian neocolonial narratives.

As it was many centuries ago, the Russian state is a mixture of colonialism, imperialism, and vast yet uninhabited territories conquered in past centuries as a result of brutal wars against the local population, followed by its destruction or assimilation. For the modern Russian Empire to survive, it needs two things: an external enemy with a corresponding war against that enemy, and the creation of total fear within the country, combined with the isolation of the population from alternative sources of information, similar to the isolation of prisoners.

Accordingly, the Russian prison system has proven to be much more necessary and instrumental than it was during Stalin’s rule. On the one hand, the prison system is extremely necessary for intimidating its own population. On the other hand, the prison system is a constant source of soldiers who, in terms of their status, are little different from slaves. To create slave soldiers, an extremely repressive state apparatus of criminal justice is needed, which punishes citizens with imprisonment even for isolated pickets and peaceful protests, reposts on social networks or singing songs, for which the prison system is an instrumentally useful appendage.

And this is where the criminal and prison subculture, which in modern Russia plays the role of cement, becomes particularly important. With its characteristic and established language, preserved for centuries, it unites citizens in society, students and teachers, parents and children, soldiers and commanders on the fronts of Russia’s neo-colonial wars, prisoners and prison staff. With its pre-revolutionary penal and prison origins, it is no longer perceived in the context of its historical background, but is instead used as a modern product.

We can call all this the ‘Wagner phenomenon’, which is based on the name of the private military company ‘Wagner’ — a Russian non-state illegal armed group created by entrepreneur Yevgeny Prigozhin, which has the status of a terrorist organisation in a number of countries.

Since July 2022, numerous media outlets have reported on visits to Russian prisons by a man with the Hero of Russia star, resembling Yevgeny Prigozhin. According to these reports, he began a recruitment tour of colonies for former law enforcement officers and then moved on to Russian maximum security prisons. The entrepreneur offered prisoners the opportunity to take part in combat operations in Ukraine as part of the Wagner private military company in exchange for a pardon, expungement of their criminal records, Russian passports and cash payments. In September 2022, a video appeared confirming Prigozhin’s personal recruitment of prisoners, filmed in maximum security colony No. 6 in Mari El.

In June 2023, there was a mutiny by fighters of the Wagner private military company. On 23 June 2023, Prigozhin announced that the Russian military had launched a missile strike on the rear camps of the Wagner private military company. In the evening of the same day, Yevgeny Prigozhin announced that he was going to carry out a ‘march of justice’, denying a military coup. During the mutiny, mercenaries from the Wagner private military company, meeting no resistance, took control of Rostov-on-Don, entering the city in tanks, among other vehicles, then passed through the Voronezh and Lipetsk regions with minimal resistance during the day, heading for Moscow, shooting down one Russian army aircraft and six helicopters. A counter-terrorism operation was declared in several regions, including Moscow. However, on 23 August 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a plane crash in the Tver region.

In the context of the issues we are investigating, it is necessary to highlight several important aspects that, at first glance, may seem unrelated.

These aspects are: 1) the very fact of the creation and successful existence of this de facto military order, which directly influences Russia’s foreign and domestic policy; 2) the involvement of this military order in the mass recruitment of prisoners from Russian prisons to participate in the war against Ukraine; 3) the import of prison subculture into this military order.

All these facts need to be analysed together with the factor of mass support for the 2023 uprising by the local population, as well as the nationwide trend of filling the Russian army with prisoners or forcibly mobilised individuals, even without the participation of the Wagner private military company or similar structures, since the state itself has openly taken on this initiative.

As far as conclusions can be drawn from various sources, the modern Russian army, which is carrying out aggression against Ukraine, is built entirely on prison laws. It has the same prison language, the same hierarchy with ‘blatny’ and ‘opushchenny’, the same ‘concepts’. Modern Russia is the most radical example of a prison state, not because it has many prisons and many prisoners, especially since the number of prisoners in Russia has significantly decreased due to mass mobilisation to Russia. Modern Russia is the most radical example of a prison state because the army and society function according to the informal laws of prisons formed over the last five centuries.

In this context of Russian criminal and prison culture, the mutiny of the private military company Wagner is a modern-day uprising of Stepan Razin or Yemelyan Pugachev – an uprising against the authorities, not against the tsar, but with faith in the tsar. However, unlike the large-scale Russian rebellions of past centuries, which were uprisings of relatively free people, this rebellion by Wagner mercenaries demonstrated that it was a revolt by people who consciously live by the informal laws of Russian prisons, which seem completely natural and comfortable to them.

Taking the above into account, we can confidently conclude that the modern Russian prison state is not about the number of prisons, the number of prisoners, or the number of prison staff. It is about the Russian population’s acceptance and internal perception of the idea that the state should be governed by informal prison norms, where a minority plays the role of prison guards, a second, sufficiently large group of citizens should be imprisoned, but the rest of the citizens are only ‘temporarily and conditionally released’.

That is why the criminal and prison subculture is one of the most important instruments of Russian neocolonial policy, both domestic and foreign. The official formal authorities of Russia cannot help but use these channels of penetration into Ukrainian ‘territory’ — in the broadest sense of the word — to further support their post-colonial policy, which is becoming increasingly unsuccessful in view of European these channels of penetration into Ukrainian ‘territory’ – in the broadest sense of the word – to further support its post-colonial policy, which is becoming increasingly unsuccessful given the European and Euro-Atlantic vector of development of Ukrainian society, finally formed after another armed attack by Russia on Ukraine.