Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on April 2, 2025 in order to attend this event.

Please join the Harriman Institute for a Russian History Workshop with Michael Gorham.

Few political actors in Putin’s Russia illustrate the impact that digitally mediated communication has had on political rhetoric as dramatically as Evgeny Prigozhin. From his early days as “Putin’s chef” and head of the Internet Research Agency (aka “Russian troll factory”) to his ultimate failed rebellion against Russia’s top military leaders, Prigozhin was a key player in the production of online mediated political discourse in the interest of the state, at least as he perceived it. Serving as the epilogue to my forthcoming monograph (“Networking Putinism: The Rhetoric of Power in the Digital Age” [Cornell U.P. 2026]), “Wartime Runet” begins with more general reflections of the impact of Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine on Russian internet policy, then examines more closely the role that Prigozhin’s communicative style and the social networking platform Telegram played in his meteoric rise to global notoriety and equally spectacular collapse.