Online, some jokingly dubbed it a "special funeral operation," playfully echoing the Kremlin's use of the term "special military operation," which it has consistently employed to describe the invasion of Ukraine from the war's onset. Prigozhin's funeral in St. Petersburg on Tuesday, August 29 took place under top secrecy, and under the most extraordinary conditions.
While dozens of journalists attempted to locate the ceremony all over the city, no information filtered out until the evening. In the end, the press service of Concorde, the parent company of the Wagner mercenary group, reported on its Telegram site that the funeral had taken place earlier in the day, at Porokhovskoye cemetery.
This picturesque site, located in the eastern suburbs of St. Petersburg, was already home to the remains of Prigozhin's father. Management said it organized the ceremony "in accordance with the wishes of the family."
No date or place was disclosed. Officials in St. Petersburg themselves acknowledged that they had been kept in the dark. In the morning, the Kremlin also denied being aware of any arrangements and stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had been close to the businessman since the 1990s, had not planned to attend.
According to several sources quoted by independent Russian media, only around forty of the people closest to Prigozhin, who was killed on August 23 in the unexplained crash of his plane, attended the funeral. The many mercenaries and ex-combatants of the Wagner Group who wished to do so were therefore unable to pay their respects to their leader, some of whom have shown unlimited devotion.
The images that began to appear in the evening showed the most basic of graves, topped by a wooden cross (Russian tradition does not allow for the erection of a tombstone until a year has passed). At his feet, an excerpt from Joseph Brodski's poem Still life.
The authorities went to great lengths to dupe journalists and curious residents. Arrangements were reported during the day in three other cemeteries in the city, to which access had been restricted. In one of them, the Serafimovsky cemetery, where Putin's parents are buried, one of Prigozhin's lieutenants, Valery Chekalov, was laid to rest on Tuesday. The dates and locations of the ceremonies planned for the eight other people who were on board the plane, including Dmitry Utkin, founder of the Wagner Group, are being kept just as secret.
Several apparently empty hearses also crisscrossed St. Petersburg, going from one cemetery to another as a ruse. A fake farewell ceremony was also organized in an official city building, cordoned off by the police. "Even after his death, Prigozhin managed to put on such a show, completely unprecedented in the Putin era," noted one of his close friends to the Telegram channel VTchK-OGPU, well connected to Wagner staff. These adventures are reminiscent of the man's passion for deception during his lifetime, in particular his use of fake passports, wigs and look-alikes.
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