Yevgeny Prigozhin might believe there’s nothing he can’t do.
He has run a chain of restaurants and a catering company, which caught the eye of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He engineered a plan to interfere in US elections. And he runs a Russian mercenary group accused of atrocities in Ukraine and across multiple continents.
He’s also, The Moscow Times reports, a children’s book author.
These days, Prigozhin is perhaps most famous for leading the charge in Ukraine. The Wagner Group, which he leads, once filled its ranks with Russian prisoners and threw them to the front lines in eastern Ukraine.
Prigozhin is also well known for his exploits in Africa, where his mercenaries work to destabilize the region in Russia’s favor — mostly in the form of gold mining. Wagner has also operated across the Middle East, including Syria and Libya, and dozens of other countries around the world.
Long before all that, in the 1980s, Prigozhin spent nearly a decade in a Russian prison for fraud and other crimes. After his release, he opened a hot dog stand to get back on his feet. He parlayed that into the restaurant and catering business. He became known as “Putin’s Chef.”
It was in 2004 that he undertook the writing of a children’s book with his two young kids. There were only a couple thousand copies published and it likely never went on sale. But The Moscow Times managed to get its hands on it. And it’s a doozy.
The book, which runs almost 90 pages long, follows the story of a small man, named Indraguzik, who lives in a world of other small people, who all live among normal-sized humans. It includes intricate drawings that may or may not have been Prigozhin’s work.
The story begins when Indraguzik falls from a theater chandelier where he lives with his family. Essentially an adventure tale, it follows Indraguzik’s journey back home.
Along the way, he meets various characters, full-sized humans, and even the king of this world, who Indraguzik promises to help. Some magic then happens. We won’t spoil the ending. But you can get the gist here.
The seemingly wholesome tale stands in stark contrast to the news from Prigozhin’s own life.
“He’s a diverse person, striving for self-realization within what is possible,” Konstantin Kalachev, a Russian political expert, told The Moscow Times. “As long as being good was in fashion, he was good. But then the time came for evil, and he became evil.”
Prigozhin’s life, he said, was “a mirror of the times.”
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