By Brian Whitmore
ALEKSEI NAVALNY AND YEVGENY PRIGOZHIN had little in common. Except for the fact that they both got whacked on the orders of the same crime boss.
The extrajudicial execution of Navalny in an Arctic prison colony on February 16 had all the hallmarks of a mob hit carried out to send a message. An anti-corruption crusader whose groundbreaking work helped expose the kleptocratic nature of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin regime was eliminated—it’s as if Al Capone had somehow managed to knock off Eliot Ness.
Similarly, the events leading to Prigozhin’s assassination on August 23 looked like an internal mob dispute, what Russians call a vnutrennyaya razborka (criminal slang for ‘settling of scores’). When the longtime Putin crony, oligarch, and mercenary leader staged a mutiny with his aborted march on Moscow in June, he clearly had to go. As the unforgettable character Omar Little put it in the acclaimed television series The Wire, “you come at the king, you best not miss.” Prigozhin missed. And his fate thus resembled that of countless underbosses who got too ambitious.