Russian oligarch's death just another chapter in tragi-comedy that is Putin's reign

It’s never funny when someone dies. Unless that someone is the murdering, torturing, raping, pillaging Yevgeny Prigozhin. Then it's at least kind of funny.

I mean yes, yes, yes, it might have been preferable to sort out his crimes in a “court of law” with “due process” and all that yak, but where were you going to find a jury of his peers, the cast of “Reservoir Dogs”?

If nothing else, “Putin’s Chef” is guilty of being a dope. His death was as assured as a happy ending for the Hardy Boys.

Or, as the news sites qualify it, the presumed death, apparent death, alleged death, seeming death, likely death and so on. Never has death been so equivocal. But then, this is Russia, where black is white, friend is foe, and up is down — literally, seeing as so many Russians demonstrate a remarkable lack of balance on fifth-floor verandas.

The implication is that no one is going to be surprised if down the road the P-dog all of a sudden appears on Jeopardy or something. “I’ll take faked deaths for $500 please.”

Prigozhin was known to employ body doubles, even though it’s hard to believe there are two guys on this earth who look like that. It would be like trying to find a stand-in for Jar Jar Binks.

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The fact that he wasn’t using a double suggests his brutishness was not matched by intelligence. I mean, if not now, when? There are two rules in life: 1. Don’t put ketchup on a hot dog. 2. Don’t go running around Prostornaya Street as yourself after trying to overthrow the government.

Even Putin seemed to hold his breath until the DNA swab came back from the lab, commenting, “He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved necessary results.” In syntax, meter and doublespeak, this so resembled our own former leader’s “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” that you wonder if they don’t have the same speechwriter.

The “necessary results,” safe to say, is livestreaming the bashing in of a person’s skull with a sledge hammer. But then he went too far by organizing a bloodless march on Moscow. In Russia, it’s all funny until someone doesn’t get hurt.

Not that the Kremlin had anything to do with the crash, of course. It was probably just a clogged fuel filter or something.

Although if you want plausible deniability you really should wait until the plane hits the ground before identifying Prigozhin as among the dead. “It is with deep sadness that we … what?” (whisper whisper whisper). “Oh, wait a sec.” KABOOM! “OK, as I was saying, it is with great sadness …”

Most of us watched Putin v. Prigozhin play out with the bland indifference with which a Ravens fan watches Steelers v. Patriots. Somebody’s got to lose, so we’re good.

U.S. intelligence, which seems to know more about Russia than Russia does, grudgingly implied that the borderline psychotic Putin (I can say that, not having any air travel planned at the moment) was the more normal of the two. Or at least the more nominally civilized — the difference in Russia apparently being whether you do the murdering yourself or outsource it to someone else.

And for Russia, that would seem to be a problem. Putin wants nothing more than to be seen as an equal on the grand, modern global stage, which is going to be difficult when you’re in the business of assassinating political rivals like some deerskin-wearing medieval warlord.

Putin sees himself as the second coming of Peter the Great. OK, but while Peter was certainly better than his predecessors, no one was coming to Peter’s Russia to build semiconductor factories. Corporate CEOs aren’t big on countries where they’re liable to get broken on the wheel or shot out of the air.

They’re funny that way.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Yevgeny Prigozhin's demise a little too obviously organized by Kremlin