Prigozhin folded--for now--because he knew he'd get a second chance based on his indispensability to Russian influence export and as a conduit of blood diamond and gold mining profits to Putin's cronies. He's a consummate political gamesman, if sometimes blinded by his own ego.

Russia's ruling clans are a team of rivals. They combine consensus and back-stabbing rivalry.

Just as Russia is a hybrid Slavo-Turkic-Mongol empire it's an institutional hybrid in which autocratic power subsists on ad hoc informal power distribution arrangements that Putin referees. It's an arbitrary rule by law mafia with a flag regime that's also highly procedural, as Stalin's purges were.

The rival siloviki and oligarch clans work within an unstable equilibrium that depend on the autocrat to avoid devolving into warlordism. The system Putin built is a paradox: structural de-institutionalization.

Thanks for reading and commenting.