Telegramming Мutiny: The Socially Mediated Rise and Fall of Evgeny Prigozhin

• In Event: Discursive Strategies for Mediating War, Propaganda, and Rebellion during Russia's Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine

Abstract

Few political actors in Putin's Russia illustrate the impact that digitally mediated communication has had on political rhetoric as dramatically as Evgeny Prigozhin. From his early days as "Putin's chef" and head of the Internet Research Agency (aka "Russian troll factory") to his ultimate failed rebellion against Russia's top military leaders, Prigozhin was a key player in the production of online mediated political discourse in the interest of the state, at least as he perceived it. After a brief overview of his pro-state mediated projects, I use in this paper a combination of critical discourse and keyword analysis to examine the role that Prigozhin's communicative style and the social networking platform Telegram itself played in his meteoric rise to global notoriety and equally spectacular collapse during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Author

• Michael S. Gorham, U of Florida