Prigozhin and the virgins
The Russian elite's obsession with virginity is joined to a desire for conquest.
Back in 2021, journalists at RFE/RL published a shocking investigation into the secretive Sogaz health clinic in St. Petersburg, linked to the eldest of Putin’s daughters, Maria Vorontsova.
Sogaz is a place where, it was alleged, so-called “virginity tests” were performed on sex workers, some of them seemingly underage trafficking victims. Among the clinic’s actual patients? Wounded Wagner fighters (presumably, no virginity tests were performed on them).
More recently, a whistleblower referred to as “Masha” independently confirmed many of the details published in the 2021 report. She told journalists that she sold her virginity to none other than Wagner owner Yevgeny Prigozhin in the fall of 2019, and had been sent to the Sogaz clinic in advance of their encounter.
We could write all of this off on the eccentricities of a rich war criminal - or as Prigozhin’s enemies happily heaping dirt on him now that he has publicly rebelled against the Russian state- but it’s a set of occult beliefs that determine not just how the Russian elite see women, but how they see the rest of the world.
Prigozhin, Masha said, is obsessed with exchanging bodily fluids with virgins as he believes that it “prolongs his youth.” He also allegedly has metallic spheres embedded in his allegedly tiny penis (I’m sorry you had to read this sentence, and I’m sorry that I had to type it). As for the women he uses, he refers to them as “shampoo” — meaning they are as disposable as shampoo bottles.
Russian defloration porn is its own little cottage industry — eroticizing the naivete and nervousness of young women, and the pain often associated with having sex for the first time. One of the most popular adult actresses to come out of Russia in recent years began her career in it.
Virginity is a highly nebulous concept but in countries like Russia, it’s both a means of controlling female sexuality and a commodity for sale. That the Russian elite would seek to corner the market on it via clinics like Sogaz is not surprising. Neither is the weaponization of so-called “Russian virility” that allegedly stems from creepy encounters with virgins.
Russia views the conquest of Ukraine as explicitly sexualized. Russians don’t just use rape as a weapon of war, they also feminize Ukraine and describe this nation of 40 million people as a kind of wayward beauty who has lost her way and must be brought to submission. The fact that in response, Ukraine has risen up to viciously fight back continues to shock and appall the Russians.
In this light, Prigozhin’s obsession with mystical virility has an echo in practices alleged to have been performed by Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. For years, an eccentric Russian professor named Valery Solovey alleged that Putin surrounds himself with shamans who do things like sacrifice eagles to aid the Russian president and prolong his life.
Solovey ended up briefly detained by the FSB in 2022. While many reputable Russian journalists rightly doubt Solovey’s access to the circles of power, they concede that the Russian elite engages in occult practices, and, as the saying goes, drinks its own kool-aid.
The horrific fate of Yakut shaman Aleksandr Gabyshev, permanently confined to a psychiatric ward after trying to march on the Kremlin in order to drive out Putin, confirms this. Why make a famous martyr and political prisoner out of a mystic unless you, on some level, fear him? Or, at the very least, fear that others will genuinely follow him? As it is often the case, we seek to destroy what, on some intimate level, we believe in.
Nikolai Patrushev, one of the men who is closest to Putin today, formulates Russian foreign policy on psychic mind readings of U.S. officials and a siege mentality in which Russia is assailed by dark forces from the West. Memos reveal that the Russian government fears “psychic warfare” from Western powers. The call is coming from inside the house.
If all of this sounds a little familiar, it should. The Nazi Reich had famous ties to the occult - and shows how varied the attitudes toward it could be within the leadership itself. Himmler was a true believer, Hitler a hardened sceptic, even as the Führer embraced other forms of racist pseudoscience.
On a very simple, basic level, the kind of fascism engulfing Russia breeds superstitious paranoia. Brutality demands both justification and a source of energy. Some people wear runes to battle. Others, like Prigozhin, buy penile implants and sex with virgins. As George Orwell’s writings indicate most powerfully, totalitarianism is drawn to a kind of primordial demonism — whether it’s only in ritual, or in sincere belief.
Reality is always bigger and more complex than what your eyes can see, a very basic foray into physics readily confirms this. But a reality dominated by violence and fear becomes a kind of portal into hell — it doesn’t matter if it’s real to others, what matters is that powerful Russian men live in this hell, and want to spread their vision to others through war and conquest.
Vladislav Surkov, the ideological and stylistic architect of early Putinism, has referred to Putin as “a man sent to Russia by fate and God.” Other Putin courtiers have echoed these statements to the press -Oscar winner Nikina Mikhalkov, for example, once famously stood before Ukrainian journalists in a pre-war Kyiv and thanked God for Putin’s existence- cementing a sacred image of a once very average and charmless KGB agent turned rich despotic prick.
The absolute conviction of being unlike other mortals, unfettered by law or even basic decency, is unsurprisingly common among the elite. Only other, wealthier men can punish them, so the infrastructure of constraint is missing from their lives. Observe them long enough in Moscow, as I have, and you see the signs.
Once, as a seventeen-year-old in in the early 2000s, I went out on the town with a group of wealthy young Russian men, and watched them make a homeless drunk dance and humiliate himself for a thousand rubles - equivalent to about $30 at the time. When I protested, one of the men turned to me in surprise and said, “Why are you upset? He’s not human.” It’s a moment that keeps coming back to me as I look at what powerful people in Russia are up to today.
I was, coincidentally, a virgin at the time, and later learned that the parents of one of these young men essentially wanted to buy me for their son as a “respectable bride.” They’d observed me closely and received assurances that I was “unspoiled” through their daughter, who was close to me in age and asked me about my personal life, while I was completely clueless. It didn’t matter that I was still in high school, they’d buy me an education too. They spoke about it openly with my mother. My fluent English, good grades, Americanized background, and lack of a boyfriend made me a good candidate for their son, whom they were trying, in their own words, to “make into a real man.”
At the time, my Ukrainian heritage was not considered a problem — if anything, young Ukrainian women were prized as extra pretty and obedient broodmares. My family was horrified and I never saw any of those people again. I’m sure they found another virgin eventually.
Today, Russian fighters on the field boast that Ukrainian women simply dream of being raped by Russian men. Even in pre-war Russian propaganda, references to Ukrainian “whores” who need to be tamed by virile Russians show up so frequently that I have to wonder why anyone was surprised by mass rapes by Russians on occupied territories (I’m not linking to any of that crap, you can find it if you look for it).
This mixture of insanity and misogyny is important to our understanding of what festers in Moscow.
It’s a fascist cult of power, yes, but we must not forget that it’s a paranoid and delusional one.
This paranoia betrays concrete weaknesses that can and should be exploited, for the good of not just a besieged Ukraine, but the world itself. Buying virgins and sacrificing eagles can only take you this far in the modern world.
Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Thanks for enlightening me!
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