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On August 29, former Wagner mercenary group head Yevgeny Prigozhin was buried in St. Petersburg, Russia, to minimal local fanfare. Despite the appearance nationwide of makeshift shrines to the slain oligarch, and despite the deceased's status as a "Hero of the Russian Federation," a title that ordinarily would have entitled him to a state-sponsored sendoff featuring a brass band and a cannonade salute, the funeral itself did not attract much of a crowd.
This was likely due to the fact that Russian authorities arranged for conspicuous corteges of hearses, often accompanied by phalanxes of uniformed Ministry of Defense and Interior Ministry personnel, to be present on Tuesday morning at seemingly every St. Petersburg cemetery except for the one—Porokhovsky—where the small, secretive ceremony was ultimately held. Commentators began referring to the event as a "special funeral operation," a reference to the Kremlin's euphemistic characterization of its ongoing war against Ukraine as a "special military operation."
This particular Kremlin operation, unlike its haphazard, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, appears to have been executed competently. According to reports from the independent Russian outlet Agentstvo, which spoke with employees from the Porokhovsky Cemetery, Prigozhin's funeral was attended by "20 to 30 people, only close friends and relatives."
It is not the first time that the authorities in the Kremlin have used misdirection in order to defuse a potential powder keg of protest. On the evening of January 17, 2021, supporters of Alexey Navalny began gathering at Moscow's Vnukovo Airport in anticipation of the anti-corruption activist's return to Russia following an FSB Novichok poisoning attack that had nearly killed him the previous August.
However, after authorities at Vnukovo purported to discover that a stuck snow-plow was blocking the flight's intended runway, the low-cost commercial airliner carrying Navalny and his wife was diverted at the last minute to Sheremetyevo Airport. Navalny was arrested there before clearing passport control, and several of his supporters who had turned up at Vnukovo were taken away to spend the night in a holding cell.
Of course, the use of smoke and mirrors is not a viable long-term strategy for maintaining control over an increasingly isolated nuclear-armed superpower spanning from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka. However, the reigning powers-that-be in Moscow demonstrated on Tuesday that they are still committed to using whatever limited levers remain available to them in order to maintain their position in the Kremlin for as long as possible. At least for now, it still appears to be working.
