[PREVIEW] Episode 554: The Caterer Armed

**John Lechner** (0:00)
But that's what I always try to do in the book, too, is, I think it's important no matter what you cover, especially if you want to cover or engage in analyzing or looking at other societies that are foreign to your own, is that it's a much better, you'll learn a lot more by looking at how a political economy or a system works and saying, what is the equivalent for us?

**TrueAnon** (0:36)
Yeah.

**John Lechner** (0:37)
Then once you start thinking about, well, what's the equivalent for us? You start realizing that incentives are incentives everywhere.
Russia is different than America. Russia is a young country, 30 years or so, 30 years old or so.
It's not surprising, I think, that to switch from a command economy, essentially, to a market economy, even if you could have, there hasn't been really a lot of time for things to become institutionalized.
Corruption feels a lot more like personalized still in Russia, where you're speaking still about individuals as embodying a specific institution or a specific patronage network in a way that doesn't make as much sense in the US because we have such long-standing institutions, and a lot of the things that we would look at in Russia as corruption, is now a euphemism here in terms of the revolving door and all these. And the revolving door makes sense, and why the revolving door exists. The thing that was always so strange about, especially at the height of when in 2023, right? Everyone's like, what is Wagner? And they're asking me like, what is Wagner? Is it just the arm of the Kremlin, or is it a private entity? And I'm like, it's both. I'm sitting here in Washington, DC right now, right? This is the capital of public-private partnerships, right? Lockheed Martin is a private company that absolutely defined is dedicated to increasing shareholder value. But they would never say that, right? They always are framing what they do as furthering America's greater national security interests, right? And why wouldn't you, if you're Lockheed Martin, hire someone from DOD, DOW, whatever you want to call it, because those are the people who are going to be best positioned to sell to the government. And Russia is no different. Wagner, we can talk into how it was created, but of course, Wagner had straddled the public and private space, just like any company here in the US that has kind of any touches in any way upon weapons or violence will have to have some sort of level of integration with the US government too.

**TrueAnon** (3:55)
Yeah, it's interesting because I was always, I never was like an expert on Russia or Wagner. And I was always a little confused as to what Wagner was, because I feel like every time I read about it, there was a different thing that it was being attributed to it. Because I think what most people think of Wagner, you think of, okay, the PMC, right? Like the private military company. But there was a lot sort of more to this kind of consortium of companies of which the Wagner Group was the armed wing of, if that makes sense. It was just like kind of another contract. You see, you mentioned Concord, but you also mentioned like a number of think tanks, a number of internet companies.
Prigozhin was quite fond of making action films.

**John Lechner** (4:46)
Oh yeah, for sure. Good ones too.

**TrueAnon** (4:50)
Have you actually seen, I tried to watch one the other night.

**John Lechner** (4:52)
It's really funny.

**TrueAnon** (4:54)
It was a little tough. I can't believe it. They never got Steven Seagal for one, did they?

**John Lechner** (4:59)
He was, he didn't make the way in, unfortunately.

**TrueAnon** (5:03)
Yeah, they don't want to film all this scene sitting down.

**John Lechner** (5:07)
Exactly.