98. Putin’s Secret Army: The Rise Of Prigozhin (Ep 1)

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Speaker 1 You have Genny Progozhin, restaurateur to Vladimir Putin, co-founder of the infamous Wagner Group, who a couple of years ago led a mutiny, which was the closest Vladimir Putin has ever come to being toppled from power.

Speaker 1 He's one of Russia's richest and most powerful oligarchs. He knows what people want.
Progozhin brings this entrepreneurial streak to violence. The man the Kremlin to do its dirty work.

Speaker 1 He is moving into a space that really only Putin should be in. The government depends on Wagner for its survival.
At the moment of the peak, he's going to fly too close to the sun.

Speaker 7 The world watched as the Wagner group turned on Russia's military. Yevgeny Progozhin was enraged by what he says were Russian strikes on his troops in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 This is the moment where you go,

Speaker 1 civil war. Putin's the ultimate apostle of payback, so I would be surprised if Progoshin escapes further retribution for this.
If you cross Putin,

Speaker 1 the likelihood is you're going to die.

Speaker 1 I've never been a chef. I used to be a restaurateur and quite successful.
I can't cook myself.

Speaker 1 They should have just called me Putin's butcher, and everything would have been fine. Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified.
I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera.

Speaker 1 And those are the words of Yevgeny Progozhin, restaurateur, not a cook.

Speaker 1 Restaurateur to Vladimir Putin. Co-founder, I think we'd say, of the infamous Wagner Group.
Yeah. Private mercenary army used by the Kremlin.
Soon to be friend of the pod.

Speaker 1 Not sure. After we

Speaker 1 complete our six-part investigation, our series that we're starting this deep dive into this murky world

Speaker 1 that blends the security services, the Russian security services, private armies, the Russian state, organized crime, and at its center, a man who used to run a hot dog stand in St. Petersburg.

Speaker 1 When you read that, I'll be quite, I was thinking some people might have thought they got the rest is food, and we're just going to spend

Speaker 1 a culinary element yeah there will be a culinary element how to run a restaurant you know how to develop a good menu we're going to be looking at some of those things aren't we yes as we also look at uh sledgehammers you know murder and mayhem and coups so it's going to be a kind of slightly crazy mix of

Speaker 1 a series but what i think is significant about evgedy pruggozhin who you know a couple of years ago led a mutiny, effectively, in Russia, which was the closest Vladimir Putin has ever come to being toppled from power.

Speaker 1 You know, Putin has been there for more than a quarter of a century. This was the one moment when people thought on one day it might be over.
He might be overthrown.

Speaker 1 And it was due to this one guy who has started off selling hot dogs in St. Petersburg 25, 30 years ago and knew Putin all the way from back then.

Speaker 1 So it kind of tells you quite a lot about Putin and power in Russia, I think. It shows the extent to which I think Russian power feels very medieval.

Speaker 1 It feels like a medieval court in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 I mean, here's this kind of spurned courtier, staffer to Putin, who wants to, or perhaps believes he's a bigger man in the system than he really is, and who is going to come face to face with sort of the realities of how Putin manages the people around him in this kind of hub and spoke model of sort of Russian autocracy, as we'll see.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I think it also feels a lot like a criminal enterprise. A gangland.
A gangland, you know,

Speaker 1 sort of a mafia, a spat between the big boss, right? The Don Putin and one of his kind of henchmen. We have a tendency, I think,

Speaker 1 in the States or in the West and in the UK to view other states through the lens of their bureaucracies.

Speaker 1 And we think, okay, you've got your security services and you've got your military and there's sort of an official

Speaker 1 system. And as we'll see, Pragozhin, he's very entrepreneurial,

Speaker 1 isn't he? I mean, he's a restaurateur. He's an entrepreneur of food.

Speaker 1 The seams of these power structures are where Pragozhin is going to really excel. And he's a violent man

Speaker 1 and very entrepreneurial about his violence in the creation of the Wagner Group. And this is also a globetrotting story.
Yeah, it is. Exactly.
We're going to go right around the world.

Speaker 1 We're going to go from kind of Leningrad, St.

Speaker 1 Petersburg in the kind of Cold War days across Africa, Middle East, Syria, place you know well, and then of course back to Moscow and with a bit of time in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 So it's going to kind of encompass a story which really actually has an impact on a huge number of countries.

Speaker 1 You know, it's not just a story about Russia, it's a story about Africa, it's a story about the Middle East, it's a story about Ukraine, it's a story about Europe as well, I think. That's right.

Speaker 1 And we will journey to some of the actually the worst places in the world. Yeah, and the darkest places.

Speaker 1 The wilds of Mali and St. Petersburg during sort of the Soviet collapse.
And I guess maybe it makes sense, Gordon, to start with some places that will maybe even worse,

Speaker 1 which is Evgeny Progozhin's early life. Yeah.
So Evgeny Progozhin, born in Leningrad in the Soviet Union, which is of course now called St.

Speaker 1 Petersburg, 1961, interestingly enough, a kind of middle-class Soviet intelligentsia family, not a kind of poor working class family. His mother, Violeta, works at a hospital.

Speaker 1 His father, Viktor, who dies early, is the nephew of a famous engineer. He's growing up in a slightly dull, stifling world then of the Soviet Union in the late 60s and the 70s under Brezhnev.

Speaker 1 He's known as Zenya. Young Progoshin goes to a good school.
He goes to a boarding school, which specializes in sports, which he's into, it trains Olympians. He's into cross-country skiing.

Speaker 1 It's the classic story, which is if he hadn't had an injury, he would have been an Olympic skier. Now, I don't know if that's true.
But, you know, he's not handsome, but he's got a swagger.

Speaker 1 Now, here's the thing, though. Pretty good start in life.
But he leaves school at 16 in 1977, age 16, and he gets mixed up with the wrong crowd. He drops out of school? He leaves school, yeah.

Speaker 1 And maybe it's because the sports thing isn't happening for him. He's clearly clever.

Speaker 1 He's clearly ambitious, but he's not really suited or into those kind of middle-class professional jobs there might have been.

Speaker 1 And for all the talk of, you know, equality in the Soviet Union, it's quite a stratified society in that point. He doesn't want to kind of move down the social class.

Speaker 1 He's a bit of a misfit, doesn't fit in. He can see people around him leading a fancier life.
He's ambitious. He's hot-headed.
He's a bit cruel.

Speaker 1 Does a brief stint as a PE, a physical education trainer. So you could have got your workout from Evgeny.
But he quickly gets into crime as a teenager. And this is the key moment.

Speaker 1 And it starts with petty crime. He's hanging around with low-level criminals who are on the make.

Speaker 1 Gets arrested for petty theft aged 18 in 1979 two and a half years suspended sentence he's sent to work in novgorod 100 miles from st petersburg in a chemicals factory but he doesn't learn his lesson should have learned his lesson you know life of crime in a chemicals factory chemicals factory but instead goes back to st petersburg after that and this is where he gets deeper into the world of crime do we know why he got into crime

Speaker 1 Obviously, crime doesn't pay. It doesn't pay.
Kids don't kids. Yeah, don't do it.
It's again, I think it's ambition, greed, not having a place, and a desire.

Speaker 1 I guess you could see it from the earliest days, a desire for things that he feels he should have, others have, and he doesn't have. He's going to want to take those things.

Speaker 1 He's going to be ambitious to take them.

Speaker 1 And I think you can see that when he starts hanging out in this, you know, as an 18-year-old, he hangs out with Alexei Lescha Bushman, who's a few years older and runs a small gang of a handful of thieves.

Speaker 1 I think of kind of a Tickensian world of, you know,

Speaker 1 street urchins. Street urchins here in St.
Petersburg. And he's going to, Progozian is going to help pick the targets for their activity, sometimes people he knows.

Speaker 1 February 1980, you break into an apartment, steal a vase, a candy bowl, a napkin holder, and some glasses with a value of 177 rubles. It's not kind of big crime.

Speaker 1 Next month, they steal a leather steering wheel cover. I mean, and a set of ballpoint pens, a tape recorder, a denim jacket, and a women's handbag.
I mean, it's kind of...

Speaker 1 At this point, this is all very juvenile. This is pretty juvenile.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But they swindle a man out of 250 rubles over some jeans.
They go out drinking champagne to celebrate and brandy at a restaurant.

Speaker 1 And at that restaurant, about midnight, they see a young woman with a fancy coat leaving the restaurant. And this coat speaks of money.
So Progozhin says, let's rob her.

Speaker 1 They follow her by taxi, then on foot. And in a dark street, one of them asks her for a cigarette.
Then Progozhin grabs her by the neck and he starts to choke her. Another man pulls a knife.

Speaker 1 She screams. Progoshin, to try and stop her, squeeze harder on her neck until she passes out.
They drag her down an alley. One person takes her boots.
Progoshin pulls off her earrings.

Speaker 1 But her screams have already kind of summoned the police who are nearby. So these...
gang of thieves run. One of them doesn't make it.
Progoshin does.

Speaker 1 But the police will eventually track them all down and come knocking. So now he's in big trouble.
They're going to find the other stolen goods.

Speaker 1 There's robbery with violence and he's broken his probation. I think you could see that story.
This is a guy who's cruel and violent. You know, you get a sense of.
He selected the target.

Speaker 1 He uses physical violence on her already at a young age. At a young age, as a kind of 18-year-old.
So he's going to get sentenced to 13 years in a penal colony.

Speaker 1 Fortunately, I've never been to a Soviet gulag as

Speaker 1 the labor campaign. There's still time.
But they are, I hear, famously brutal places. You know, maybe not quite as dark as in Stalin's day.
It's where a goal hanger rehabilitates its hosts.

Speaker 1 So there we go. There's still time.
There's still time.

Speaker 1 But this is Vorovskoy Mir, the thieves' world inside these gulags, these prison camps.

Speaker 1 Of course, there's violence, prisoners in these huge barracks, and the barracks are run by the prisoners rather than by the guards and the officials, and especially hardened criminal gangs.

Speaker 1 And so Progoshin's going to learn from here. You have to make friends with the big guys to survive.

Speaker 1 It's the same lesson you learn in any prison, as you know, from your your time in Texas Penitentiary, David.

Speaker 1 You're either in... Sorry, you weren't there, but I...

Speaker 1 If you're watching now, all of my tattoos are covered up.

Speaker 1 So you were in or out of the gang. And at the bottom of the pile were the roosters, as they were known, who were preyed on sexually by the other prisoners.

Speaker 1 Now, there's no sign at the time that Progoshan was at the bottom, but we'll come back to that possibility later because at the end of his life, this will be raised as an issue.

Speaker 1 If that's not enough reason to go and join the declassified club so you get early access to all of these episodes,

Speaker 1 I can't help you. Go to therestisclassified.com and sign up.
Because that's going to come back, that bit of the story.

Speaker 1 But he learns to play by the system and he shows he's got what it takes to survive. He gets a tattoo on his back of a woman.

Speaker 1 And now this is made with a makeshift needle with the ink made from rubber, soot, and urine. Again, you know,

Speaker 1 not part of my experience. The back infection must have been tremendous.
What was the tattoo of a woman? Just a woman. Yeah.
Hopefully, not the one he robbed.

Speaker 1 But he asked for a transfer to a timber logging colony because, of course, these are all labor camps. You work.
And here, it's interesting.

Speaker 1 He starts his own kind of business in which he gets other inmates to carve wood, which then can be sold to people outside the camp.

Speaker 1 So I guess what you see there is the combination of entrepreneurial, ambitious nature coupled with violence, brutality, and an ability to survive.

Speaker 1 That is his personality there, you know, in those early, early days, it's set, I think.

Speaker 1 It reminds me of Pablo Escobar, the other friend of the pod, you know, who had a kind of middle-class upbringing, but very early on demonstrated absolutely no interest in following any of the normal paths that would lead from that, and who kind of tilts into crime early, gets involved in these gangs, has his own sort of personal capacity for violence.

Speaker 1 He's not just at arm's length. It's very similar.
It's very smart enough to run things rather than the Soviet Union's changing. While he's in prison, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 So he's in prison in this period in the 80s. 85, Gorbachev comes to power.
Younger generation of leaders wants to open up the Soviet Union.

Speaker 1 There's going to be political and economic reforms, new private enterprise, new freedoms, opportunities for the ambitious. Eventually, of course, as we know, that's going to spiral out of control.

Speaker 1 And Progoshin gets released in 1990. So that's that's effectively the last year of the Soviet Union before it's going to collapse.
And there's going to be a coup in 1991 to try and halt the changes.

Speaker 1 But effectively, you've got the end of the Soviet Empire, the end of Russia's control through the Soviet Union of places like Ukraine and the Baltic states.

Speaker 1 And Russia, as it hits the 90s, enters this wild decade, economic collapse, massive social change, a kind of Wild West mafia capitalism in which business deals are done with threats of violence to accompany them, everyone trying to get rich as fast as they can and get rich so they have enough power to stop them getting killed by a rival.

Speaker 1 It's kind of brutal, violent world.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's less the case now, but when I was in school and I was learning about this era in Russia, there was a tendency to view it through the lens of this kind of attempted and ultimately failed experiment with liberal democracy.

Speaker 1 To some degree, that's true, but I think it's better or more accurate to see this as a bunch of people who were living essentially in a failed state, a government and a society, an empire in many ways that had collapsed.

Speaker 1 And the violence, you know, it's interesting, talking to former agency officers who served in Leningrad and then St.

Speaker 1 Petersburg in the 90s, you know, they would talk about regularly hearing gunshots, explosions. It's a sense of a place that had kind of come apart at the seams and that was very lawless.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I think that kind of, for a criminal entrepreneur like,

Speaker 1 there's a lot of opportunity. Exactly.
So everybody's trying to get rich. Everyone needs protection from someone more powerful to avoid being at the bottom of the pile.

Speaker 1 In some ways, I think, you know, all of this, as you said, is suited to Progozhin, who understands violence and business.

Speaker 1 In some ways, the outside world is now becoming like the world of the Russian or the Soviet prisons.

Speaker 1 You know, it's kind of mirroring some of that power structures in which having protection is actually, you know, translating into the business world of Russia. So he got this feel for it.

Speaker 1 So he's going to drop out of college. He's going to marry Lubov in 1991.
He works at a car dealership, but his side hustle, and I love this, is running kiosks in Leningrad selling hot dogs. Now,

Speaker 1 this is where it kind of, you know, some of his reputation as a hot dog salesman comes from. Sausages have been around for a while in Russia, Soviet Union, but the key was no bun.
No bun. No mustard.

Speaker 1 No mustard. No ketchup.
So you do that and suddenly you take the old sausage, add those things and you have something kind of cool and western and new, which in the 1990s we didn't do very well.

Speaker 1 It's the genes of the culinary world. It is.
The hot dog. It's just our first food reference.
He says he mixes the mustard in his kitchen and his mother, Violetta, helps count cash. She kind of plays.

Speaker 1 His wife isn't helping. No, but

Speaker 1 his mother kind of is there actually all through his career. It's interesting in the kind of background.
She's kind of an interesting figure. But he's making money pretty quickly.

Speaker 1 And he says he's having to pay $100 per kiosk per month protection money to the gangs. So you get a sense already that he's getting to know the gangs and understanding how to navigate that world.

Speaker 1 This is maybe perhaps my only piece of knowledge that I'll drop on Russian criminality. I believe the Russian word, which I will horribly mispronounce for protection.

Speaker 1 Krisha. Yeah.
a roof. Roof.
Yeah. An overhang, something over top.
Over your head. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. So he's paying for Krisha.

Speaker 1 And here in St. Petersburg, it's interesting.
We were talking to an ex-R-Russian the other day who was saying, you know, Moscow, you have a central authority, you have the Kremlin, you have power.

Speaker 1 But St. Petersburg, you know, what had been learning grades is a little bit wilder.

Speaker 1 You know, actually, the thugs, the spooks, the businessmen have slightly freer reign, and they're all kind of mixing together in this world as well, all using each other for kind of money protection muscle everyone's on the take so progoshion is starting to move with more senior gangsters they can see he's got good skills you know they can see his his ambition so he moves on from hot dogs he manages some grocery stores and then casinos classic kind of gangster thing which of course the casinos are closely tied to the banks and to the gangs then comes the kind of the beginnings of the move into the the world of restaurateuring.

Speaker 1 1995, he's running a place called the Wine Club, a bar he's got an english manager called tony which i guess makes him look classy although it does occasionally feature strippers as well so it's not that classy it could be classy it could be classy and then comes the big break because he opens a restaurant called the old customs house it's a fancy old 19th century building on the riverfront near the winter palace tony the english manager comes along french chef where does the capital come from for this is it the hot dog money or what i think is he just kind of slowly is working his way up he's got some business partners as well who are basically gangsters.

Speaker 1 Okay. And at that point, they're in it together.
And he'll eventually kind of ease them out. And it's interesting because Bogoshin can be charming, but also violent.

Speaker 1 He supposedly assaulted a chef after a complaint from a customer about the quality of the food. The chef was taken to the cellar and pummeled to the point of being hospitalized for two months.

Speaker 1 It's like, not quite Gordon Ramsey shouting at you, but it's like it's a lot worse. It's not merely verbal abuse.
Yes, indeed. It's a lot worse.
So he's got a mix of charm and violence.

Speaker 1 Place will serve foreign food. That's the key because, you know, the elite want the foreign food.

Speaker 1 French foie gras, oysters from Brittany, starting to be the same, you know, place where the new elite are kind of moving. World of mobsters and bodyguards, city officials, spooks.

Speaker 1 To me, I don't know. Chicago, you know, it feels like Vegas.
Chicago in the 20s and 30s, Vegas in the 50s. I don't know, something like that.
It's got a feel of that, hasn't it? It does.

Speaker 1 It's sort of borderline lawless and yet real collaboration in some cases between the authorities and the criminals. I think that to me is one of the hardest things to understand

Speaker 1 about, I mean, Russia in that period and Russia today is this very strange kind of marriage

Speaker 1 between the security services, then the KGB, FSB,

Speaker 1 and these guys like Pragozhin, who have lived for so much of their life sort of outside of the law. You know, but they're all

Speaker 1 on the make. On the make.

Speaker 1 And they all kind kind of need each other i guess that's the point so you know this is his first restaurant according to candace rondeau's book putin' sledgehammer among the guests at this place are susie quattro and the pet shop boys i don't know if those are references which mean a lot to you uh but i know the pet shop boys because my dad is a big pet shop boys fan okay very good and i listened to that extensively as a child okay as a result there you go well

Speaker 1 if the pet shop boys listen let us know if you ever visited one of progoshin's restaurant but about that time it's thought putin is kind of moving in these circles.

Speaker 1 So in some ways, Putin and Progoshin, I think, are kind of similar because they are two people who've grown up on the wrong side of the street, you know, and Putin has come from quite a poor background in Leningrad, now St.

Speaker 1 Petersburg. And he grew up in a kind of crowded apartment blocks.
And Yulio Yoffey, the journalist, you know, talks a bit about this, about the world of the courtyard, the Vor,

Speaker 1 which is where, you know, the courtyard of these apartment blocks, as a boy, Putin would have to show he could survive against the bullies and the thugs and he's a small guy Putin yeah and so his his way of surviving was to show he was capable of more violence than anyone else it's essentially I mean I it's not quite this but it's not dissimilar to the dynamics of the prison camp exactly I think it's the same kind of dynamics which is you've got to show strength you never show weakness you're loyal to your friends anyone who bullies you hit them back harder that's the kind of teenage world putin grew up in yeah in Leningrad, St.

Speaker 1 Petersburg. So you can already see he's projecting the tough guy thing.
You know, it's why he learns martial arts because he knows because he's small, he's got to survive.

Speaker 1 That's what he's come from as well.

Speaker 1 And that's also why Putin is going to be quite good at prospering in this new world of rough, tough, violent, kind of thuggish capitalism security services of Russia in the 90s.

Speaker 1 You know, he's got the right skills, just like Progozhin, I think. It's fascinating when you look at the demographics in the Soviet Union in the 50s, how many of the men were were dead? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And how the Soviet state around the time that guys like Putin and Progozhin are being brought up has essentially tried to engineer a baby boom to resurrect the population without any dads around. So

Speaker 1 you have this, I mean, not to get all touchy-feely on you, Gordon, but it's like, it's a period in time where they're actually, there aren't a lot of dads around.

Speaker 1 And so you have, you know, whether it's these prison camps or whether it's these court, you know, the Vor, these courtyards, I mean, it's a pretty unsupervised time for young Russian men.

Speaker 1 And I guess maybe there, Gordon,

Speaker 1 having set up the young entrepreneurial, criminal, sort of brutal Yevgeny Progozhin, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll see how he gets enmeshed into the world of Vladimir Putin.

Speaker 1 See you after the break.

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Speaker 1 Well, welcome back.

Speaker 1 Evgeny Progozhin is rising through the ranks of illicit but also increasingly official

Speaker 1 St. Petersburg Society, and he is going to become Putin's chef.
Yeah, that's what he gets known as. But it's interesting trying to work out exactly when they met.
It's a little bit murky.

Speaker 1 Both of them, I think, hid it a bit.

Speaker 1 But Putin is going to turn turn up perhaps at his first progoshian's first big restaurant the old customs house they might have also had some contact because putin at one point sits on the gambling board so putin we should say has been a kgb officer but then around the time of the end of the soviet union he moves into city government as an advisor to the mayor of st petersburg and so it's at that point that him and Progoshin are going to are going to meet in this kind of murky milieu of, you know, kind of spies, crooks, officials.

Speaker 1 You know, maybe, as I said, because of the casinos that Progoshin is running and Putin's on the gambling board. The extent to which Putin himself is involved in criminality has long

Speaker 1 been questioned about that period in the 1990s.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of interesting, slightly murky connections and deals, but it's fair to say that those who knew about it are largely dead or are close to Putin and people who

Speaker 1 are dead. What are you implying? Implying.
I'm not, they've met strange ends.

Speaker 1 so but they're gonna get to know each other progoshin and putin i think one thing to say is though it's very much progoshian is more like staff the phrase putin's chef you know which we'll come to is kind of true he's someone who's useful who whose staff who works if you like downstairs working for the boss he's not you know on the same level in some ways as this of course it's not quite true because he's he's not going to cook for putin but he's going to run the restaurant and run the catering which i think you know suggests the power balance of the relationship.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 Progojin's restaurant business grows, and this is important for the story because he's inspired by a trip to Paris and he sets up his new company, Concorde Catering.

Speaker 1 Concorde will be the name, which is the kind of overarching business structure, which is going to run a lot of these things.

Speaker 1 They're going to buy a rusty old boat, remodel it, and turn it into a fancy floating restaurant called New Island. Now, this does really well, has its own truffle menu, David.

Speaker 1 Which I always like he's gone from hot dogs to a truffle-themed menu with white glove waiters. He's moving up, and it is all about ostentatious wealth.

Speaker 1 He's good about understanding what the rich, what the elite, what they want. He's got just that instinctive feel of what they want, and he knows how to offer it to them.

Speaker 1 Interestingly enough, the kind of waiters also are good at overhearing conversations and reporting back to him, but he's very discreet. And Putin, meanwhile, is on the rise.

Speaker 1 So they've encountered each other, but Putin is actually going to move from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

Speaker 1 And he's going to go into, you know, official positions in Moscow in the presidential administration. He's going to get picked to run the FSB, the security service.

Speaker 1 He's going to become prime minister in 1999. By 2000, you know, the end of the 90s, Putin is president of Russia.
And he's going to bring a lot of his Leningrad St.

Speaker 1 Petersburg friends with him to Moscow and keep them close throughout his life.

Speaker 1 And Putin's message, of course, is there's been this decade of wild west, of humiliation, of economic collapse, of the West exploiting us, of just, you know, disaster and violence and crime.

Speaker 1 And Putin's message is, I will bring order, I will bring stability, I have the right skills. And, you know, you can see people responded to that after this period of chaos.

Speaker 1 Progoshin, though, is still in Leningrad or St. Petersburg.
He's not one of the inner circle of friends. I guess if you move, you don't necessarily bring your caterer with you

Speaker 1 to another city, right? Yeah. I bring your mates.
You bring your close friends.

Speaker 1 But Putin hasn't forgotten him. And so two months after he becomes president, Putin brings the Japanese prime minister to the New Island floating restaurant to show off.

Speaker 1 So he is a chef, but it's a kind of interesting position because one thing, as we get to the kind of way in which being a chef to a leader is important is that you have to also be trusted to be a chef because you've got got to be trusted you're not poisoning the food

Speaker 1 you know which in medieval times the chef was a kind of trusted position and actually putin's own grandfather weirdly had been a chef to lenin and stalin so i also wonder if putin's kind of admiration for chefs or a kind of respect for them so he's kind of decided progozhin is his trusted chef you know not chef as in cook but you know caterer person to do it supplier supplier yeah exactly of food and food experiences And Putin wants to show off to all these kind of foreign leaders who he's bringing to Russia.

Speaker 1 Actually, Russia isn't what you thought it was, this kind of collapsing country. You know, we're capable of having fancy restaurants.

Speaker 1 So next year, Progozian is serving wine to President Chirac of France, whom Putin has brought as a guest.

Speaker 1 And Progozian will claim in a resume, which of course might be boasted, that he caters to 70 leaders of countries, including Prince Charles, now the king here,

Speaker 1 Tony Blair, Berlusconi of Italy, the then king of Saudi Arabia. Why is he writing a resume? It gets hacked at some point.
It's a little bit murky.

Speaker 1 This is how you know he's not actually one of Putin's friends. If you're having to draft a resume in the Russian system,

Speaker 1 you are not even in the inner circle.

Speaker 1 One person we do know for sure that he does really serve is President George W. Bush because there's a couple of pictures of him being served by Progoshin

Speaker 1 at the table. One on May 25th, 2002.
The menu. I think this is important because now we get to our rest his food bit.
That's right. The menu was.
This is our audition. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 It's looking to be sponsored

Speaker 1 by some fancy restaurant.

Speaker 1 The menu was duck liver pate and gingerbread. I don't know what I think about that.
I don't know. Served with prunes and aged pork caramel.
Dunno. Don't know.
It's not coming, I think.

Speaker 1 Black caviar on ice, fried fillet of beef with black truffles. accompanied by fresh morels and baby carrots, boiled in a rowan broth, and raspberry mille foie foy for dessert excuse me

Speaker 1 i can't even read these words because you're certainly not used to it french pronunciations are notoriously um notoriously

Speaker 1 i wouldn't make a good i wouldn't make a good kind of you know maitre de at the rest is classified restaurants you were not selling our rest is food pitch very well jordan so just but what i love is you can see in the picture progosion is there kind of behind putin and bush he's kind of you know he's there making sure everything goes well he is the kind of maitre de of the thing yeah putin then celebrates his birthday at the New Island restaurant 2003.

Speaker 1 And we should say follow us on Instagram to see that photo because we will certainly

Speaker 1 post that to the feed. On the social media feed.

Speaker 1 Bush gets served again in 2006 when all the leaders are there at a G8 summits. Not at the restaurant, but Progoshian is doing the catering.
This time Progosian wears a silver tie.

Speaker 1 And the menu this time? Should we go through it? We should.

Speaker 1 Astrakhan? Astrakhan? Astrakhan tomatoes? Yeah. Do you know what those are? No.
No. Tomatoes from Astracon, I guess.

Speaker 1 Right in the Tell Us if you know. In Balsamic Vinegar.
Crayfish with Gooseberry Marmalade. I don't know what I feel about that.
You know what this reminds me of? Yeah. I have.

Speaker 1 Have you listened to the Rest is History episode on medieval cooking? Yeah. Where people are eating like, you know, it's like eels.
Yeah. You know, and you're like, why would you do that?

Speaker 1 It's not like

Speaker 1 eels like stuffed with cow liver, you know, and like, you know, duck hearts or something like that. And this is like combining some exotic

Speaker 1 and strange animals with weird flavors and sauces. Fried smelt with turnips and baby zucchini.
What's smell? I don't even know what smelt is, but I like this one fact.

Speaker 1 Bush, President Bush, ordered a steak. Order a steak.

Speaker 1 He didn't want the. He saw the crayfish floating in the gooseberry marmalade.
He decided against.

Speaker 1 But Progoshin's doing well, right? I mean,

Speaker 1 he's now, I mean, I guess as all of these ridiculous menus suggest, when Putin is entertaining really important world leaders, he goes to Progoshian to provide the service of the catering and the food.

Speaker 1 Exactly. So he's not, Progoshian isn't one of the kind of big oligarchs.
He's not like a kind of billionaire who's, you know, got lots of power in the 90s.

Speaker 1 He's kind of a new breed of people who are becoming rich under Putin and thanks to Putin and owe their loyalty to him.

Speaker 1 But he's not quite in the kind of category of the kind of either the big billionaires or millionaires or Putin's close pals like Sergei Shoigu, you know, who is one of his, you know, Putin's old judo partners.

Speaker 1 So, you know, he's a pal, but Shoigu will become Pogosian's arch nemesis eventually.

Speaker 1 There's also other things. He tries something called Bleenie and McDonald's.
So Bleeny is a, you know, kind of little pancakes. Little pancakes.
Little pancakes. And it's

Speaker 1 Blin Donald's, Blinny Donald's, which is a kind of like version of McDonald's, I guess. Do we have any

Speaker 1 of the menu? Like, do we know what the menu was? No, I don't know.

Speaker 1 The menu's been wiped from the internet.

Speaker 1 Because I think that business collapses um he also weirdly writes a kids book in 2004 because he's now a renaissance man he's exactly he's he's going legit uh supposedly with his son because he's now got a son pavel and a daughter polina and it's the tale of a little boy and a sister who live with their family inside a chandelier the boy falls from the ceiling into the world of normal human-sized beings and tries to get home and a boy in this world of big people helps them out.

Speaker 1 Anyway, it's self-published. So self-published.
2,000 copies given away.

Speaker 1 He was able to get contracts from the Russian state for food services, but he was not able to get a book published.

Speaker 1 But the business empire is growing. He gets rid of some of his kind of dodgier gangland partners.
He opens restaurants in Moscow again, where he can kind of ingratiate himself with the new elite.

Speaker 1 Now, the point is, he's going to use his friendships to get big government contracts. So he's now moving from restaurants to to catering supply,

Speaker 1 including also, you know, things like construction and real estate. But the crucial thing is he gets a contract for food for schools.
Putin himself will open one of the factories doing the supply.

Speaker 1 I don't think the kids got the truffles and the caviar. I think this was a slightly lower level of catering.

Speaker 1 And actually, there's lots of reports in later years about the kids, you know, end up with vomiting bugs and dysentery from daycare. The quality control was lax relative to the state dinners he was

Speaker 1 serving.

Speaker 1 So he's getting, particularly gets to know a guy called Dmitry Bulgarkov, who's in charge of logistics for the Ministry of Defense. You can see how he's moving in these circles.

Speaker 1 And that gets him a crucial contract for the military worth about £500 million, $750 million, to supply food for the Russian army. Now, that is a big deal.
That's a big deal. Yeah, that's a big deal.

Speaker 1 That's huge.

Speaker 1 So he's moving into making big money now, which again is just this entrepreneurial guy.

Speaker 1 May 2008, his company, Concord Catering, wins the contract to feed guests at Dmitry Medvedev's presidential inauguration.

Speaker 1 So important part of the story, Putin's been in power as president, but 2008, he decides he's going to step back to being prime minister.

Speaker 1 And his kind of protege at that time, Medvedev, is going to kind of hand over. But the problem is Medvedev doesn't do what Putin wants.
You know, Putin's going to feel dissatisfied.

Speaker 1 And Putin is going to decide he needs to come back as president. You know, he's tried stepping back.
He doesn't like it.

Speaker 1 But that's

Speaker 1 shocking. But that doesn't go well with those who thought Russia was on a path to a more liberal, you know, Western democratic system.

Speaker 1 And so when Putin says he's coming back, there's actually street protests, particularly in the big cities, particularly claims of rigged elections. This is all kind of December 2011.

Speaker 1 And Putin hates these protests. He comes to see them as being organized by those sneaky folks at the CIA, you know, all part of a plot by Western intelligence to bring about regime change in Russia.

Speaker 1 Strangely, people linked to Progression are doing some of the catering for the protesters. And this is a kind of weird detail, but it is interesting.

Speaker 1 Now, that's odd, unless you realize he might be using it to kind of spy on them and understand what's happening, which is a nexus of catering and espionage that we've been searching for in this series.

Speaker 1 We've just found it. We've just found it.

Speaker 1 So, Putin hates these protests. He fears the West is trying to spread, you know, these color revolutions which have happened in neighboring countries to kind of bring down pro-Moscow governments.

Speaker 1 So he's getting more and more aggrieved. He wants to crack down on dissent at home, go after his critics as he returns to the presidency.
He's famously called the internet a CIA project.

Speaker 1 So he views the internet and the West as driving and using social media and these things designed to kind of spread Western ideas, undermine the country.

Speaker 1 And so at this point, he's going to think, I've got to do, you know, I've got to do something about that. You know, I need to fight back.

Speaker 1 And interestingly enough, he's going to end up turning to Progozhin to do this.

Speaker 1 Who does not, at first blush, seem like a natural

Speaker 1 sort of resource in this fight. No.
Does he? No. And that, I think, is one of the curiosities of this story: is that you're going to take someone who's been a criminal, a thug, a kind of restaurateur,

Speaker 1 a supply caterer, and who is yet going to be part of Putin's core political project, both within Russia and then extending even into the United States?

Speaker 1 That sounds like a cliffhanger to me, Gorda. It is, David.
And I think there

Speaker 1 with the former hot dog vendor now on the cusp of finding himself at the center of Russian official disinformation campaigns.

Speaker 1 Let's stop. And when we come back, we will see exactly how Yevgeny Progozhin, I guess, ends up in the middle of a disputed American election.

Speaker 1 See you next time. We'll see you next time.
But don't forget. Oh, don't forget.
We almost almost forgot. We almost forgot.
We almost forgot. But you can't.

Speaker 1 Join the Declassified Club because you do not have to wait.

Speaker 1 Because if you want to hear all six episodes, all six, if you want to know how it ends, and it ends spectacularly,

Speaker 1 you can binge by joining the Restis Classified Club, the Declassified Club at the Restisclassified.com. Sign up there, but otherwise we'll see you next time.
We'll see you next time.

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