The Art of Political Survival and Authoritarian Diffusion: The Rise and Fall of Yevgeny Prigozhin as a Media Oligarch

This paper examines the rise and collapse of Yevgeny Prigozhin as a case study in authoritarian diffusion through entrepreneurial intermediaries, focusing on how media entrepreneurship functioned as a mechanism of political power within, and eventually against, the Russian state. Rather than treating Prigozhin as a mere by-product of personalized patronage, the paper conceptualizes him as a nodal actor in a broader ecosystem of authoritarian experimentation, through which practices, roles, and repertoires of influence were developed in Russia and projected beyond it. Drawing on the notion of adekvatnost’ as a relational and situational competence, the analysis traces how Prigozhin’s media operations emerged from the western practices of astroturfing and evolved into deniable instruments of information warfare into semi-autonomous infrastructures that blurred the boundaries between propaganda, warfare, and political performance. These infrastructures did not remain confined to the domestic arena. Instead, they functioned as vehicles of transnational authoritarian diffusion, circulating modes of coercion, legitimation, and narrative control across conflicts, platforms, and audiences, including in contexts such as Africa. Diffusion here is understood not as simple policy transfer, but as the spread of role models, organizational templates, and performative scripts that can be adapted to different political environments. The paper argues that this model of entrepreneurial authoritarianism thrived under conditions of institutional ambiguity, where informal actors could innovate faster than bureaucratic hierarchies and export those innovations through flexible media and security assemblages. However, as the Russian state shifted toward more centralized and technocratic modes of governance after 2020, the very flexibility that enabled Prigozhin’s success became a liability. His confrontation with the state is interpreted not as an aberration, but as a structural limit of decentralized authoritarian innovation once diffusion-generated actors begin to rival the center. By situating Prigozhin’s trajectory within a broader ecology of networked power, the paper contributes to debates on how authoritarian practices emerge from international and intercultural learning, how these practices diffuse from focal points of innovation to other contexts through hybrid constellations of state and non-state actors. It highlights the mechanisms through which crises accelerate experimentation, how media infrastructures operate as vectors of political authority, and how the boundaries of acceptable authoritarian innovation are continually renegotiated as models travel, mutate, and encounter resistance within evolving authoritarian orders.