Putin’s Terrifying “Chef”

read a book that totally changed my mind. It's called How to Feed the Dictator, and this Polish journalist went around the world meeting former dictator chefs. Pol Pot, the Cambodian genocidist, was so sweet that Cook's called him Brother Mattress because he was soft spoken and calmed everyone down. Idiomine, who murdered half a million people, would thank Cook's five times and then give them envelopes full of extra cash when they made a good meal. Sodom Hussein bought his

chefs a new car every year. Now, almost all these chefs were summoned to their jobs and obviously had to take it whether they wanted it or not. They were petrified of what their new lives would be like. In the palace, None of them sought this job out, but someone actually sought out providing food for Vladimir Putin. This guy's known as Putin's chef, and honestly he's way more

insane and dangerous than you would assume. He is writing his hard who's got that kind of time when you're already busy trying to be John Stein until it turns on a mic made the twiddles enob because the journalist Rand's got in that Jule Jomeo sing will start me. Just listen to smart people speak conversation. There's probably no one in Russia who's worn as many hats as if Guinny Progosian. He's been called Putin chef because he runs

a catering company that the Russian government contracts with. But he's a chef in the sense that Tony Soprano is a waste management consultant. It's far more accurate to say that Progosian is the head of a private mercenary company that's had soldiers all over the world, especially now in Ukraine. And this company is supported directly by Vladimir Putin himself. Julia Yaffi reported this story for her publication Puck Juliette,

thank you for coming on. As you may know from my annoying emails over the years and tweets, I'm an enormous fan and read everything you write. So I'm really really excited. Thank you so much. And they are not at all in They're very flattering and funny. Don't encourage me. That's how you wind up having to be on the podcast. Don't do that. Yeah, you grew up for your first seven years in the Soviet Union? What drew you to

this particular story? For me, it's just a really good story in the sense that it is just fucking nuts. This guy is fucking nuts. He's a movie villain. He gives children dysentery, he sledgehammers people in the head, and he's recruiting prisoners to take over another country. I mean, it's it's just a good story at its root. Now, how do you pronounce Progosian's name, because I'm afraid I'll get it wrong and he'll kill me just like that.

He'll kill you anyway. Yeah, Progosian, he really will. You look at his face and it's like if you were casting a show and you were casting a hit man and he showed up, you'd be like this is too on the nose. Yeah, and you'd be like, hey, writer's room, can you just kind of turn it down a few ches to really overwriting this character. He looks like Mike from Breaking Bad. He's got those droopy eyes, and he's bald,

and he curses constantly. Yeah, but I think to a lot of Russians he looks weirdly familiar, you know, this kind of post Soviet everyman. He's a real mujik. What does that mean? A mujik is an alpha male kind of man. He's very physically strong, but he has a big heart. He's very loyal, he sticks up for his own he doesn't back away from a good and just fight.

So a mujik is a very important thing in Russian culture and also in Russian politics, and in many ways he's out alpha mailing Putin, but he's made a lot of money off the Russian state, and in that way he is not at all like a Russian everyman. And how rich is burgos In? He's very rich. Russian independent journalists have shown his children on yachts and in big apartments. He's very very rich. And you said he grew up kind of tough and on the streets. But didn't you

go to boarding school? And he was going to be a cross country skier. Okay, So boarding school in the Soviet Union is not boarding school in the US or the UK. Boarding school is where you go in the Soviet Union if as if you were very poor and if your parents cannot take care of you. It is something that is like a step above an orphanage. Oh, it's more missus Hannigan than Hogwarts. Correct. So after his stay with miss Hannigan, he falls in with a bunch

of guys who commit a ton of crimes. So he falls in with a crowd that they're stealing things there. It's incredibly Soviet petty crime. Like they're breaking into people's apartments and stealing their crystal, you know, and their carpets. That's hard to think about people's carpets, you know, hanging on the wall, do you know what I mean? Yeah?

And you know, they're stealing jeans because denim is like incredibly rare in the Soviet Union, So they're stealing people's denim from their apartments and then selling it on the black market. Oh, they're also stealing electronics, like personal use electronics, from people's apartments, because that's also impossible to find in the Soviet Union, that in and of itself just like paints this picture of late Soviet life and the hardship

that everybody was living through. But one night, they have a particularly good haul of crystal and rugs and home stereos, and they're at a restaurant, which is also like most Soviets did not go to restaurants. You had to have some kind of hook up to go there, and either you were some kind of communist party official, or you

were a black market here and you had cash. And they spotted a woman who was wearing a nice coat, and when she walked out of the restaurant, go and walked up to her and asked her for a smoke, And as she reached into her purse to get him a cigarette, he started choking her, and as she started screaming, he started choking her even more forcefully, so forcefully that she passed out. And then she testified that when she came to her boots and her earrings were gone, he

stole her boots. Wow. Yeah, And that is the one that where he got caught. So he spent basically his entire twenties in a Soviet prison. That crime. Like, he didn't need to choke her. It feels very clockwork orange. Yeah, and it kind of explains who Progosion is throughout right. It's just has that extra dash of brutality. Yeah, you're like, holy shit, this guy's nuts. Yes, just super violent, like even in the world of Russian mafia seems particularly scary. Yeah, Okay.

So he gets out of prison and the world's changed. The Soviet Union's gone, it's collapsing, it's collapsing. He gets out at the very end. It's like eighty nine at the time. By the way, nobody thinks it's going to collapse. Everybody thinks it's just changing, right, And he doesn't know

what to do. And he gets in touch with a friend for the schoolmate of his, and he's like he brings them into the restaurant industry, which again is taking off because there weren't really any restaurants, like I think Moscow had like three restaurants. And he also gets into the hot dog business. He has a hot dog stand and he mixes mustard in his kitchen, which you know, he's still living with his mom at the time in her apartment. So he's like getting into the restaurant world.

But the restaurant world is dominated by the mafia already by organized crime. Why is that? I mean, it seems like I guess that makes sense more than the garbage industry, Like why did they go into the restaurant industry? Cash? Cash flow, and also like they kind of knew how to do it, Like not a lot of people in the late Soviet era understood the concept of a free market and in general, how a non command economy worked. Of course, if you're selling stereo equipment, you're also going

to know how to steal hot dogs. Yeah, And eventually he opens his own restaurant, and then another restaurant, and another restaurant. He opens this restaurant I'm kind of fascinated by because it had strippers in it, which it's very nineties. It's very nineties rush. Yeah. But then he opens one that's on a boat. Yeah, and it becomes popular with the elite of newly democratic Saint Petersburg, including the mayor

and his then deputy, Vladimir Putin. He has George W. Bush and Laura Bush and Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell for dinner. You know, and if you go through old photos you just see kind of Progosion everywhere in the background at every banquet with his like fucking freaky bald head in the background with a platter right like I'm seeing the pictures. He's always kind of like serving something to the whoever the most powerful person is, right, yeah,

and he looks like who's that Adams Family character? Oh, uncle Fester? Yeah, yeah, he's like Uncle Fester in the background, just like raw. Then in two thousand, Putin becomes president, which is great news for Progosion because Progosion has taken his restaurant industry expertise and started a catering business, which then gets contracts through Putin to cater state schools and most importantly, the entire military. Right, how were the Progosian

school lunches? In one unbelievable case, Concord, Progosian's company had gotten a monopoly to cater to Moscow's schools, and literally hundreds of Moscow's elements entry school children came down with dysentery. But the reason for this, and the reason the food is so bad, is that around the time that Concord starts up, this little thing called Wagner starts up, so he's named it after a German composer he calls his fighter as musicians. He starts this Wagner Group, which doesn't

seem connected to like restaurants are catering at all. So confusing because Wagner, beloved by Hitler, just seems like it doesn't. It's also confusing to me, very confusing because Putin is not at all an ethno fascist who is using and rehashing and recycling a lot of Hitler's tactics and excuses for invading neighboring countries. So it is very strange. And what is this Wagner Group. Wagner Group, so Wagner is it's technically a private military company, which are illegal in

Russia to this day and for a long time. Both Progosion denies its existence and his own connection to it, and the Russian government denies any connection to it. But what it really is is a way for the Kremlin to have boots on the ground and deny that they were in any way connected to the Kremlin. They popped up in places like the Central African Republic, where the Kremlin denied having anything to do with anything. I guess Wagner just grabs things for themselves and takes the profit

from them. On one hand, Wagner's funded out the back door of Concord, which is why the food and Concord is so bad. Concord gets these insanely big contracts from the Russian government, but most of it goes right out the back door to fund Wagner, to create that veneer of plausible deniability, but also to keep progosion happy. Anywhere

Wagner goes, they find some local renewable revenue streams. So we're in Africa, it might be a diamond mine or a cobalt mine, right, So it's just like stealing stereo equipment, right, Yeah, except stereo. The stereo you can sell once. If it's a refinery, you can keep using it. If it's a diamond mine, you can keep using it. If it's the rights to if it's mineral rights to a piece of land somewhere in the Central African Republic, that will feed

Wagner for a long time. And again the Kremlin can say, like, we're not funding this, Like show us where in the budget we're funding Wagner. In the meantime, Wagner is training on bases in Russia. In the meantime, they're getting all their weapons from the Defense Ministry of Russia. There's this one crazy scene in Syria that made me understand how Putin works. Wagner is trying to get hold of this oil field, but they do not have Putin's permission for this,

right exactly. Progosion didn't have Queen's permission. He hadn't checked in with the Defense Ministry, who would have told him that this refinery is controlled by the Kurds, who are allies of the Americans, and that to get there they would have to cross through territory that is way too close to the American Special Forces, a base that the

American Special Forces had there. And they went too close, right, They got two clothes and the Americans radio through the deconfliction channel to their Russian counterparts that the Russian Defense Ministry and said, hey, your guys are coming at us. They're getting too close. Get them away from us or we'll shoot. It's a lot of guys. It's like three hundred guys. Yeah, and they're heavily armed. They're not on foot, you know, they're not just on foot. They're like in

APC's and they're heavily armed. They're not. They don't have just like pistols. And so the Russians did they call them back. No, the Russians said, what guys, those aren't our guys. But the Americans know that. Russians. Yeah, and and they're like, as one person who was there in the room when they were talking to the Russian said, no, those are your fucking guys. Pull them back because we will shoot. And the Russian said, I don't know what

you're talking about. And the Americans were like, okay, doak, that's what they do. They opened fire, and according to another person who witnessed this, it was like an advertisement for the American Defense catalog. They shot everything they had at them, drones, a jet, machine guns, artillery fire, and apparently the Americans would periodically stop, like pause and be like, Okay, you're gonna pull back. No, Okay, we're gonna keep going.

And they did that a couple of times, and they didn't pull back, and within a couple of minutes it was just, oh, they just completely wiped them out. And they had heard the Wagner guys screaming over the radios that they're letting us just die. Out here. When we come back, we'll find out how Progosion was involved in the Russian interference in the twenty sixteen presidential election, and how now he's playing a key role in the invasion

of Ukraine. But first, our advertisers are going to sell you some stereo equipment that's totally in its original packaging and absolutely works. So, Julia, this guy, if getting Progosian has started a private militia that's funded by the Kremlin through a backdoor, which is his catering company. But if that's not enough, Progosian's also involved in the interference in the twenty sixteen US presidential election. I mean, he is the Russian meddler. Yeah, and he admitted to it, for

he was charged. He was charged in twenty eighteen by Robert Muller. He denied it forever, the Russian government denied it forever, And in twenty twenty two he said, yeah, it was me, and I'd do it again, and I'm gonna do it again in twenty twenty four because I don't like the way you guys do your politics, and I'm gonna, you know, I'll engineer some shit in your political system to make sure it goes the right way. You're welcome. Has he ever actually met Trump or he's

just a fan from a distance. I don't know of him meeting Trump, but progosion unless he was in the background during the Miss Universe content, you know, like I'm sure somebody will find a photo of him just in the background. Like wa. How does he handle journalists that

uncovers some of this stuff about him? He hires a chemist, and the chemist will like load up these syringes full of poison and they'll rove the streets and they'll just jab you know, journalists or critics of Pretagosha, and they'll just jump them with these syringes full of poison. They won't they didn't kill most of their people. They just you know, it was just to kind of scare them a bit. But you know, these people would end up in the hospital for a week. They're just like Yeah.

Then the invasion of Ukraine happens, which is supposed to take a week, it starts to take a lot longer. Yep. Putin clearly politically a draft would be a disaster, so he starts to rely on Wagner, and Wagner has to come up with a way to get a lot of soldiers very quickly, and Progosion comes up with what seems like an insane plant. So Wagner participates in the invasion of Ukraine almost immediately because they have the most some

of the most experienced soldiers. They remember, they've been fighting in eastern Ukraine, they've been fighting in Syria, they've been fighting in Libya, in other parts of Africa. They are seasoned, experienced soldiers as opposed to some of these eighteen year old conscripts that are just getting picked off by javelins in Ukrain Rain, and they're able to actually deliver some results early on in the war. And so Putin gives Progosion permission to recruit from his old stopping grounds from

the jails. So Pogojan starts helicoptering into these prisons. Literally,

he literally takes his helicopter like a bond villain. He would chop her into whatever penal, colony, number, whatever, and the prison guards would gather all the prisoners in the prison yard and make them listen to Progosian, who would deliver a speech in this language that you know he sounds like one of them, because he is one of them, and it's a it's a language that's very heavily inflected with prison slang and that kind of prison yard swagger.

And he's addressing his fellow mujiks and he's like, listen, you can die in prison, or you can die free. You can serve out your sentence for another ten years, or you can go fight and in six months, if you make it out alive, you're free, your record is expunged, and you'll get some money. And if you don't, we'll bear you like a hero. And people sign up. This

is like the Hunger Games. Yeah, and also, just to be clear, for this to happen, you need to sign off at the very very very top of the Russian system. You could not chopper into a Russian penal colony and deliver the speech without Putin's explicit permission. And the reason is like, yeah, we can't do a draft right now. We're committed to a semblance of normalcy, especially in the big Russian cities, because this is not a war. This is a special military operation. We don't want people to

think it's going to be a long war. So listen, nobody cares about prisoners. We need cannon fodder. Great and what's interesting is that Stalin did this in World War Two. They were called straffbat which means was short for which is a penal battalion. These were people from the Gulags who were sent in literally as cannon fodder, often without weapons. And these guys are too right, Oh yeah, the casual

rates are how bad? Something like, oh my god? And what's crazy is that as this recruitment drive starts in the in the summer and we see these videos of Pen's pitch coming out Russian ngeo's notice that the Russian prison population just plummets by tens of thousands of prisoners. Does this scare the Russian people that they know these scary criminals might be coming back to their country alive

and free. Well, nobody's asking them, but some people find this kind of distasteful, in part because of the Stalinists associations and because they're really poorly armed. They're really just being sent as cannon fodder. And pigoshan response to them on his social media channels and he says, look, assholes,

and he calls the assholes. He's like, you want to drive around in your nice car with your napple leather and you want to carry around your snell bag while we fight in Ukraine and you don't want to send your sons to war, fine, then let me send these comics. Like you don't give a shit about them, They don't give a shit about themselves. I'm literally quoting him here.

He says, So if you don't have another solution, sit down, shut the fuck up, and let me do my thing, because if you're not willing to send your son, then let me do this. Okay. If these soldiers try and quit in the war, as some have, how does Progosian handle that. The most famous case was a guy by the last name of Musion, and he ran over to the Ukraine because some people signed up with the express purpose of escaping immediately. Sure, yeah, because you don't want

to be in jail. But a lot of these people were like, this is stupid war. Why are we fighting Ukraine? And as soon as they got to the front, they were like, well, this is fucking dumb and I don't want to die, like they're not. They're giving me a gun with three bullets and I'm supposed to charge a

Himar's installation. Fuck that. So people deserted and what's crazy is that the Ukrainians would turn them over in these prisoner exchanges, which is terrible because Ukrainians from the beginning of the war have been encouraging Russian soldiers to desert on mass and saying we will treat you well. Come over to our side, lay down your arms, don't do this. And then what happened to Nusion is he was turned

over by the Ukrainians in a prisoner exchange. He originally said that he was walking down the street in Kiev, felt a bump on his head and woke up in a Wagner basement in the dawn bass There's a videotaped confession.

Then his head is taped to a cinder block with packing tape and he says, yeah, I'm guilty, I'm a deserter, and somebody smashes his head and with a sledgehammer, and then Wagner puts this video under the title of the Sledgehammer of Justice on their various telegram channels because they want it to be clear that this is what we do to deserters. And we have since heard from other people who have escaped, including Wagner officers, that this is

a very common execution method for Wagner, this isis. It's like isisis and then Progosion puts it on his telegram channel like he's isis and he says, this is what this dog deserves. Well, he was worse. He wrote it seems to me that this film should be called A Dog Dies, a Dog's dea. It was an excellent directional piece of work watched in one breath. I hope no animals were harmed during filming like that, he's a shit beyond. It's the choking. Oh, it's the choking. Right, It's like

you didn't have to do that extra thing, but you did. Yeah. And what's even fucking crazier is that then Russian politicians and members of parliament have been posing on social media with sledge hammers that Progosian has given to them autographed. What is wrong with your old country? So many things, a hundred years of violent negative selection. What is Progosian's ambitions at this point? He's got his own army. He's not afraid to like sledge hammer people. It's not even

that he's not afraid to sledge hammer people. It said, he's not afraid to fight the Defense minister publicly. He's not afraid to fight the mayor of Saint Petersburg publicly, he's publicly like saying bad things about Putin's buddies. Yeah, but he's never gone after Putin personally, so he'll go. For example, right after the war started, Russia pass these military censorship laws saying that you go to jail forever if you discredit the armed forces of Russia. But Procosians

out there saying this military campaign is fucking awful. It's being run by idiots. Defense Minister Shoigu is a fucking idiot. This general gets him is a fucking idiot. Oh. Also, our guys are fighting the hardest, We're the ones doing the real fighting, and you guys aren't giving us enough shells. Give us more artillery. I'm going to fucking light you on fire if you don't give me more shells. That doesn't go over well in Russia. No, it does not.

It does not know. It's also a display of weakness because it looks like the Defense ministry has cut him off and is not giving him the weapons he needs because he's gotten a little too big for his breeches. So is Putin worried about progosion like his progosion about to fall out of a building somewhere he might. I think it is interesting. I mean, there was a period, especially in the fall, when people were like, is this a new power center? Is he going to contest Putin's power?

You know, the Moscow rumor mill was talking about how he wanted a formal position in the Russian government and that he wouldn't settle for anything short of Defense minister, and I think people in the Kremlin were like, yeah, okay, buddy. But at the same time, he unlike them, He has an army of tens of thousands of guys who are extremely loyal to him. Unlike Putin, he is constantly down

on the front lines with them. The first rule of being a dictator is you don't let another guy have his own army, correct, right, But yeah, this guy has his own army, and these guys are really loyal to him, and they're also crazy and they know how to shoot guns. And you know, there were people who talk to Wagner fighters at the front and we're saying that these guys feel abandoned by Moscow, feel abandoned by the central leadership, and we're like, fuck it, We're going to march on Moscow. Oh,

but I mean good luck getting to Moscow. Like Putin is surrounded in Moscow by like I would probably like fifty thousand well armed police, special police, National Guard, the equivalent of the Secret Service FSB, and they all hate progosion. So a Wagner too is unlikely for now, for now, but he is clearly making a political play. He is clearly building his own base of support, and he's out alpha mailing Putin. I say he's dead in six months,

I hope. So are you afraid of writing stuff like this? No? Like for your own safety? No? No, I mean I can't go to Russia now for the foreseeable future. What's he going to do come to America? I don't think so. You're so much tougher than me. Look, what I'm afraid of an America is not. What I'm afraid of an America is the right wing nuts who for years have sent me death threats, who can find my address online and who can buy an AAR fifteen and show up

at my doorstep. But the chances of him getting somebody here to the US to offer me are very low. Compared to our podcast listeners, yea, the Steiny's They're so strong anti semi Yeah, Juliet Yaffi, you wrote this amazing story putin Chef for a puck. It scared me. It made me realize how crazy the world is and that I will never ever be able to go to Russia. It made you laugh, it made you cry well, I cried. Thank you so much for doing this, Thank you for

having me, Thanks for sharing the story. If you think putin Chef is dangerous, you do not want to know about Donald Trump's chef. This guy's a colonel from Kentucky, gotten a shootout with his local fried Chicken competitor over a sign, was friends with Jerry Folwell, wore the same white suit and black string tie every day and guarded his secret combination of eleven herbs and spices with his life. At the end of the show, what's next for joel Stein?

Maybe he'll take a nap voke around online. Our Show Today was produced by Molaboard and Nisha Bencutt. It was edited by Lydia Gencott. Our engineer is Amanda kay Wang and our executive producer is Katherine Giradl and our theme song was written and performed by Jonathan Colton, and a special thanks to my voice coach Vicky Merrick and my consulting producer laurenz Elasnick. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen

to your podcasts. I'm Joel Stein and this is the story of the week. Next week, I learned why the journalist aj Jacobs is walking around Manhattan with a metal ladle. Here's a hint. It's not for soup. Oh my god. When I write a story, if I get like some bad comments, I'm like, you know, that's days of being a mess for me. I can't imagine if I knew that someone might like shoot me with a syringe in the middle of the street with poison. Yeah, just like

right in the neck. Although honestly, that's what some of the comments feel like. Snowflake,