Authors

Fabian Burkhardt¹; Maiia Guseva²;  ¹ Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Germany;  ² University of Munster, Germany

Discussion

The manipulation of information through propaganda is one of the main mechanisms used by modern dictators to ensure regime stability. Some authoritarian rulers manage to stay in power not so much by preventing the masses from rebelling, but by eliminating the desire to do so, by shaping the flow of information to appear popular to the majority of the population. The Prigozhin mutiny is a striking example of how state propaganda failed to prevent an organized group like the Wagner mercenaries from staging a mutiny in a highly personalized authoritarian regime. Prigozhin resorted to mutiny—a strategic form of communication of last resort—because other forms of public communication failed to resolve the escalating conflict between Prigozhin and Russia's military leadership. In this paper, we argue that it was precisely the growing discrepancy between state propaganda and the relatively uncensored Telegram that fueled the desire to rebel. We use text-as-data computational social science methods including dictionary-based text analysis and sentiment analysis as well as topic modeling to analyze two original data sets: Transcripts from three state propaganda channels Rossiia-1, Pervyi Kanal, and NTV, and all messages posted by Prigozhin's press service on Telegram between February 24, until the end of August 2023. By focusing on elite dynamics, we show that until the mutiny, state TV adopted a propaganda strategy of "distraction" (i.e., largely ignoring Prigozhin and his complaints), while Prigozhin's rhetoric on Telegram gradually escalated, culminating in the mutiny as a major communication failure. Only after the mutiny was crushed did state propaganda shift to an "attraction" model, while Prigozhin fell silent. But Prigozhin's escalating rhetoric also likely contributed to the mutiny's swift end: We empirically show that throughout 2022 and 2023, Prigozhin consistently used anti-elite frames and outright threats, which in turn reduced the risks of elite defections from the Putin regime during the mutiny. The paper makes several contributions to the propaganda and comparative authoritarianism literature by focusing on the risks rather than the stabilizing function of propaganda, by analyzing signaling directed at elites rather than the population at large, and by zooming in on a militaristic and equally authoritarian actor rather than a pro-democracy opposition.