Eurasia Press & News
In the 1920s, the Bolshevik economic theorist and Communist Party darling Nikolai Bukharin was one of Stalin’s closest allies. But as Stalin became entrenched in power, Bukharin found that he was no less vulnerable to the dictator’s wrath than anyone else. Accused of conspiracy in 1937, Bukharin was executed the following year. Bukharin is credited with a grim joke: “We may have two parties—one in power, the other in prison.” He might have added, “or dead.” By the time of Bukharin’s arrest, Stalin was systematically replacing the people who had secured his ascent to power with a new generation of young and ambitious politicians and officials for whom total loyalty to the leader would be everything.
Among elites in Russia today, something like Bukharin’s story is happening once again. On July 7, Roman Starovoit, the minister of transport, killed himself with a firearm a few hours after being sacked by Russian President Vladimir Putin. A few days earlier, Andrei Badalov, the vice president of the oil transportation company Transneft, fell from the window of an apartment building. Badalov was only the latest of a series of top officials in the oil and gas sector who have been purged or died mysteriously since Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine began in 2022. According to Novaya Gazeta, the independent Russian newspaper, there have been 56 deaths of successful businesspeople and officials under strange circumstances since February 2022. Many of them have fallen out of windows. More and more, people who have loyally served Putin’s system are being persecuted, mainly on the grounds of corruption.
In 2024, the Ministry of Defense was hit with a sweeping corruption crackdown. In May of that year, Sergei Shoigu, the longtime defense minister known for his proximity to Putin, was sacked, and appointed to the primarily ceremonial position of chair of the Security Council. Shoigu’s deputy Timur Ivanov was less fortunate: he was arrested on large-scale corruption charges and, in July, sentenced to 13 years in prison—one of the longest sentences for any current or former high-ranking Russian official since the end of the Cold War. Since then, there have been many more arrests—especially of regional functionaries at various levels. As the Putin regime turns on its own people, it, too, has begun to replace them with a new breed of loyalists, people whose primary qualifications are their apparent fealty to the leader, and sometimes their participation in the war. Still, Putin prefers experienced and talented technocrats for the most responsible positions, such as governors and ministers.
After more than three and a half years of war and mounting economic challenges, Putin’s aim is not to fight corruption. His goal is to avoid internal threats. And to do that, he needs to turn the elites into a frightened and therefore controllable class. With the demise of Starovoit, a trusted Putin official, a feeling has emerged among Russian elites that no one is protected and that loyalty alone is not always enough to survive in the system. As in the Stalin era, it is not clear who might be next.
SKY FALL
Even for experienced members of Russia’s political class, the meaning of Starovoit’s suicide was difficult to interpret. On the one hand, he had not yet been charged with anything, but on the other, it was clear that he had chosen death over prison. Nonetheless, several important figures, including St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov, attended Starovoit’s funeral; earlier, a number of members of the government and deputy prime ministers appeared at a memorial ceremony for Starovoit in Moscow. State news agencies reported that Putin was supposed to send a wreath to one of these events. But later, they were forced to retract those reports.
All this may have caused a feeling of awkwardness and fear among those who attended: Had they done the right thing to pay last respects to a man who had lost the president’s trust? In fact, it appeared that Starovoit had become ensnared in a campaign against large-scale corruption in the Kursk region bordering Ukraine, where he had served as governor until the spring of 2024. Starting in December of that year, a number of Starovoit’s former colleagues and subordinates were implicated in embezzlement of military funds—including 19 billion rubles (around $250 million) that had been allocated for defenses along the Ukrainian border. These are the kinds of things that Putin does not forgive.
But Starovoit’s death was hardly an isolated case. In January, the deputy head of the Vladivostok administration fell from a hotel window in Thailand. The following month, the head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service in the Republic of Karelia fell from a window in his office. Later in the spring, a high-ranking police officer and a prison system employee died from apparently self-inflicted gunshot wounds. And shortly before Starovoit’s suicide, the vice governor of the Leningrad region was found dead with a gunshot wound in a country house. Meanwhile, according to Novaya Gazeta, some 140 officials and administrators of medium and high rank were arrested in June and July alone, mostly on corruption-related charges.
Until now, corruption has rarely attracted much attention in Putin’s system. There are no poor officials, and no one is ashamed of their wealth, no matter how it was obtained. But the siphoning of state funds connected to the war has become too sensitive for Putin. This has been confirmed not only by the purges of defense ministry officials and Starovoit’s death but also by the arrest of officials in Belgorod and Bryansk, two other regions bordering Ukraine. Ivanov, the fabulously wealthy former deputy defense minister who was responsible for military construction projects, among other things, received his harsh prison sentence for allegedly embezzling more than four billion rubles ($52 million) through foreign bank transfers. But the recent arrests are not only related to military graft; some appear to be part of a broader purge of regional officials with connections at the federal level.
MALICE TOWARD MANY
Fear does not play a determining role in the lives of ordinary Russians. Most members of the public have adapted to current circumstances and continue to either support Putin’s regime, or, to avoid problems, pretend that they do. (According to August polling by the independent Levada Center, a large majority—69 percent—of respondents agree that “the country is moving in the right direction”; this is despite the fact that for several months now, similar majorities—some two-thirds of respondents—have said that it is necessary to move toward peace talks rather than continue military action, the highest such figures since the start of the war.)
Many Russians are convinced that the silencing of Putin’s opponents, and now the widening arrests of officials, are bells tolling for someone else; they do not concern them. People know they need to behave cautiously, but their conformist behavior is shaped more by learned indifference and anticipatory obedience to everything they cannot influence. Any unpleasant government decision—such as the August order blocking voice calls on WhatsApp and Telegram, on the pretext of preventing scams and terrorist activity—tends to be perceived mostly with passive discontent and immediate adaptation with the search for alternative practical solutions.
For the political bosses, oligarchs, bureaucrats, and business executives who constitute Russia’s elites, however, it is an altogether different story. For them, fear has become a highly effective means of control. The problem for them is that they own their wealth only as long as the state allows them to do so. After more than three and a half years of war, the Kremlin is in dire need of additional funds—informal income streams from big business and “patriotic” investments in industries that are important for the state. Lately, the government seems determined to nationalize any privately owned asset or company it can easily get its hands on. The most significant case so far was the seizure, in June 2025, of Moscow’s huge Domodedovo airport on the grounds that its owners held foreign passports or dual citizenship. Such blatant grabs by the state send a clear signal to those who are tempted to think that the perquisites of Russian elite status—money and businesses—belong exclusively to them.
In Putin’s system, it turns out that joining or maintaining a place in the establishment—whether close or more distant to the regime—is dangerous. Until the war, there were various patronage networks, and mini-patrons could regulate relations and protect their own vassals from the biggest patron: the president. Much of this system is still in place, but it no longer works properly. For example, it was widely understood that Starovoit was under the protection of the Rotenberg brothers, Boris and Arkady, billionaires who have been close to Putin since their youth. But in the end, it didn’t help him. Mini-patrons, it appears, are no longer able or willing to protect their vassals.
No one is going to stand up for anyone else.Take Vadim Moshkovich, the billionaire founder of Russia’s largest agro-industrial business and former member of the upper house of parliament, who was arrested in March 2025 and charged with embezzling 30 billion rubles ($357 million). Moshkovich has denied the charges and no one seems to know who among his detractors was behind his detention. Yet no one from the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs—the so-called trade union of oligarchs that represents major businesses—publicly stood up for him.
Sometimes the attacks have been more overtly political. On August 20, a court in Yekaterinburg fined the deputy director of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center, Lyudmila Telen, for reposting an old Facebook post that “discredited the Russian Armed Forces”—signaling a new front against the remaining liberal elements of Russian society. In previous years, Russian authorities largely avoided attacking Yeltsin, who died in 2007 and who as the country’s first president after the Cold War was the man who picked Putin to succeed him. In 2015, the Yeltsin Foundation opened the Yeltsin Center, a prominent independent museum and research institution in Yeltsin’s hometown of Yekaterinburg, and the foundation has also run a smaller branch of the Yeltsin Center in Moscow.
But influential conservative forces close to the Kremlin have long sought to tarnish his liberal legacy, and “patriotic” influencers and quasi-public organizations have been allowed to discredit and interfere with the work of the Yeltsin Center. Now, the legal case against Telen, a former liberal journalist, signals that this campaign is transitioning to a more formal legal and administrative level. What Telen reposted on Facebook was an antiwar message written more than three years ago by Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana Yumasheva. The state knows that it cannot prosecute the daughter of the first Russian president, so it has set out instead to stymie the Yeltsin Center and the allegedly pro-Western liberals who run it.
Along with the ruling against Telen, the center’s activities have largely been ground to a halt. It doesn’t seem to matter that the head of the center’s board of trustees is also the head of the presidential administration of the Russian Federation, Anton Vaino. As in the case of Starovoit, no one in the system today is going to stand up for anyone. Everyone is afraid.
SALAMI TACTICS
For Russian elites, there is another important lesson in Starovoit’s demise. In pursuing first the transport minister’s former subordinates and then the man himself, Putin was deploying a strategy that has also been seen elsewhere, including at the defense ministry. In this approach, ever higher levels of the military, federal, and regional elites are gradually implicated, layer by layer, like slices of salami.
There is no question that the government is now slicing off layers with much greater speed—suggesting how suspicious the top leadership and, possibly, the top leader himself, has become since the start of the “special military operation”: people who dare to steal while others are fighting for him, or people who are not sincere in support for the government and the war, but simply biding their time, must be punished. Or perhaps it is a self-developing process: the system has begun to devour itself as it did in the Stalin era. And many officials now know they could well end up as the next slice.
But this doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities for others. During the purges of the late 1930s, a new generation of young and ambitious politicians and officials quickly arrived to take the places of Stalin’s purged comrades. Officials were dismissed in waves even from the very source of repression—the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—as new commissars arrived to replace them. The scale of what is happening today is of course incomparable to the mass purges of those times. But the point is the principle: Putin has now indicated that he trusts, at least for the moment, those who “protect” Russia, and that means new career prospects for these people—including special retraining programs, incentives to adapt to civilian life, and preferential access to education and employment. For instance, the state pays for the education of “participants in the special military operation” and their children, and universities are required to allocate at least ten percent of their places for them. As of mid-August, 28,000 people were enrolled in Russian universities in 2025 under the preferential quota for special military operation participants and members of their families—a nearly 75 percent increase over the previous year.
In fascist Italy, this kind of patronage of the warrior class was known as trincerocrazia, the “trenchocracy,” based on Mussolini’s idea that veterans from the trenches had a natural right to rule the country. In Russia’s case, Putin cannot help all of Russia’s veterans, given how many there are. But he will be able to promote a few, positioning them for leadership roles in the distant future. (Putin has no intention of going anywhere any time soon.) The rise of these trenchocrats has created another layer of anxiety for Russia’s existing elites. The system has already signaled to members of its upper echelons to watch their financial transactions carefully; now, they will need to be more Putinist than Putin himself.
THE LAST TECHNOCRATS
Over time, the replacement of Russia’s elite with a new generation of military heroes can degrade the quality of the regional and federal bureaucracy. In certain crucial areas, it could more directly threaten the functioning of the state. Consider the country’s financial managers. An enduring mystery to many Western observers is how Russia has been able to remain relatively solvent despite the extraordinary pressures of three and half years of war. One answer is the Kremlin’s highly skilled financial and economic officials, and the leaders of Russia’s central bank. These institutions are still led by former liberals such as Anton Siluanov, the finance minister, and Elvira Nabiullina, the governor of the central bank. Putin’s system would have collapsed long ago if it weren’t for the remnants of the market economy, including adaptive small and medium-sized businesses, as well as competent monetary and budget policy.
Since the “special operation” began, Nabiullina has managed to keep the financial system relatively stable despite extraordinary levels of military spending, in part by keeping interest rates very high: in July, they were lowered to 18 percent, after reaching a peak of 21 percent last year. In doing so, she has put a break on inflation (which is nevertheless nearly approaching a double-digit figure on an annual basis). She has also signaled in a somewhat veiled way that only by reducing the extravagant levels of spending now required for the “special military operation” will the government set the conditions for her to bring rates down.
So far, Russia’s financial technocrats have not been fired because Putin seems to recognize that he needs them. But if the system continues to deteriorate, perhaps they will become scapegoats, as well, and he will replace them with voodoo economists. If that happens, the country will almost certainly face an economic crisis, including a runaway budget deficit, unabated inflation, and recession. (Economists are already now arguing whether the Russian economy has entered a period of technical recession, implying a decline in GDP for two consecutive quarters.)
The Putin system has begun to devour itself.This scenario may seem far-fetched, but the effects of degrading expertise have already been shown in other domains, even as the problems that Russia must deal with are far more complex than before: shortages of doctors, teachers, and public-transport drivers; collapsing city and regional budgets; slowdowns in factory production; and demographic decline. For now, members of the new military elite are being assigned insignificant positions such as deputy mayor for youth affairs and patriotic education. But the picture could look different if they begin to fill more important administrative posts.
Thus far, the most notable example of a trenchocrat attaining a high federal position is Artem Zhoga, who built his career in the ranks of anti-Ukrainian military units in the Donbas region. In 2022, his son was killed fighting in the Sparta Battalion, an anti-Ukrainian militia in the Donetsk Republic, and shortly afterward, Putin met with Zhoga to award his son a posthumous Hero of the Russian Federation medal. Then, in December 2023, Zhoga played a major part in an orchestrated public event with Putin in which Zhoga asked the president to run for reelection as head of state. Putin accepted Zhoga’s staged proposal, and following the meeting, Zhoga—who had no experience in government or administration—became the president’s plenipotentiary representative in the Ural district. Under Zhoga’s leadership, the region’s somewhat liberal governor, Yevgeny Kuyvashev, was forced to resign. Putin then appointed Zhoga to serve as a nonpermanent member of Russia’s National Security Council. Although the position is largely ceremonial, this meteoric rise has set a precedent—showing that it is possible to make a career in Putin’s system by performing one’s fealty.
But those hoping to follow in Zhoga’s footsteps will need to remember that it is a game without rules. In any case, the existing elites can no longer rest easy. Having reconciled themselves to the regime’s radicalism, they may have now sealed their own doom. Many members of Putin’s aristocracy continue to hold out hope that after the end of hostilities, everything will become, if not different, then at least milder. They are counting on the repeal of the laws on “foreign agents” and “undesirable organizations” and an end to the encroaching nationalization of the private sector, among other things. But the larger lesson of the recent purges is quite different: Putin lacks a reverse gear.
