Rumors and Misdirection Keep Crowds Away From Prigozhin Burial

The cryptic traces from Mr. Brodsky’s poem “Still Life,” a dialog between Jesus, dying on the cross, and his mom Mary echoed the uncertainty swirling round Mr. Prigozhin. “As I step on a threshold, / I know not nor decide: / Are you my son — or God? / Are you dead — or alive?”

The closing stanza, during which Jesus responds to his mom, may very well be taken as a mirrored image of Mr. Prigozhin’s larger-than-life standing and his professed devotion to his motherland: “Dead, or alive / There is no difference, woman / Son or God, I am yours.”

Many of Mr. Prigozhin’s adherents have refused to consider that he’s useless.

“I just don’t believe in it,” stated a person who laid carnations in entrance of a spontaneous memorial on the Wagner Center, a sprawling, fashionable complicated in St. Petersburg. The man, who walked with a limp, stated he had served with Wagner till three weeks in the past and that Mr. Prigozhin had been his direct commander, however refused to present his identify to Western media.

The controversy over Mr. Prigozhin’s dying might loom over Russian historical past for many years, stated Aleksei A. Venediktov, who headed the liberal Echo of Moscow radio station earlier than the Kremlin shut it down final yr.

“Who killed Kennedy?” he requested rhetorically in his workplace in an interview final week. “Look, this comparison is really important, because there are many versions out there in the public domain besides the official version.”

Valeriya Safronova contributed reporting from Vienna, Austria, Jesus Jiménez from New York, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Milana Mazaeva from Washington, and Oleg Matsnev from Berlin.