On Saturday morning, a friend calls me, all hungover, and asks me who we’re going with, Putin or the others. The question makes sense because, excluding pundits, correspondents, International columnists, scholars and, as I read in a brilliant tweet, those who speak with glasses in hand, no one has much of an idea of ??what is going on in Russia . I answer that with Wagner’s, certainly not.
It’s not pretentious, it’s just that a few months ago I saw a documentary on TVE about Wagner that was quite striking. French production, the title means everything: Wagner. Putin’s mercenaries. The most decadent is the reason for the name of the organization. Its founder, Dmitri Utkin, a veteran of the Russian special forces, was known by the nickname Wagner for his affinity with Hitler and the Nazis (Third Reich symbology tattooed all over his body). Financed by the Kremlin, at present the visible head is Yevgeny Prigozhin, absolute protagonist of cable collection (as it is now called) never seen in the history of the 21st century.
We are in an era where it is more important to explain where we come from than where we are going. For too many years we have taken the past for granted without society having much context to analyze the present. Social networks (especially Twitter) force you to position yourself without even having learned to count to ten, which is why the production of information and the administration of keys from the past to understand the present are so important. In two days we know more about Russia than in a year of war, and it helped that Saturday’s historic episode was a televised series with an exciting approach (possible coup in Russia), a suffocating knot (the mercenaries advance towards the Kremlin) and a disappointing outcome (triple pact). A war series told in Russia in the most Western way: two notes of Prigozhin’s voice and a party ending with the protagonist taking selfies in the street. The crises of war seem to be written by Danielle Steel now… If only Stanley Kubrick would raise his head!
A frustrating series finale with uncertain continuity. Maybe Prigozhin’s Truman Show. After the rise and fall, the world is waiting to see if he will end up killed, how and by whom. And, of course, if the cameras broadcast it rigorously live.
