The tangled plot of Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin’s relationship may look bizarre to those of us who live in Atlantic democracies. It is tempting to endow this opéra bouffe with extra layers of conspiracy. But their intimate and now venomous double act is in many ways a microcosm of the way Putin has ruled Russia for the last 23 years, through a court that is designed to keep the autocrat in control. By playing rival magnates and factions off against one another, and by precariously managing overlapping bureaucracies, he thought he had made himself unassailable and coup-proof. The Putin-Prigozhin drama is, in some ways, a modern story singular to our era of internet trolls, Telegram accounts, and thermobaric weapons, but it is also a tale as old as the Russian czars. One way to look at it is this: Set during a merciless war, late in the reign of an isolated, ailing, deluded autocrat, it is the story of the rise and fall of an imperial favorite.

Let’s start with the events of last weekend. On Friday, Prigozhin, the brutal, cantankerous commander of a ferocious mercenary legion fighting in Ukraine, mutinied against his former patron, Putin. He seized the strategic city of Rostov-on-Don, then headed north to threaten Moscow itself—and force out his rivals defense minister Shoigu and chief of staff Valery Gerasimov, whom he rightly blamed for the appalling conduct of Russia’s savage Ukraine war. In the excitement of events, naive Westerners romanticized Prigozhin as a brave rebel, when in fact the sledgehammer-wielding ex-con is as murderous a warmonger as the rest of his grisly Kremlin crew.

Prigozhin was certainly a maverick in military matters, but he was also a veteran insider of Putin’s gaudy and carnivorous court. His rise was made possible by his relationship with the autocrat. …