Someone should make a long, lurid documentary about the misfortunes of Russia’s ruling class — a multi-season soap opera in the manner of those endless imported melodramas, with each episode a fresh ministerial collapse, a fresh body in a parked car, a fresh general blown up days after his promotion. The bosses, it turns out, cry too. And lately they have a great deal to cry about. Over the past few years, and increasingly over the past months and even days, an extraordinary mortality has settled over the people who run the Russian state and feed off it. It is varied, it is relentless, and it is — let me be honest about my own reaction — not entirely unwelcome. What I want to argue here is that these are not random accidents. They are the visible symptoms of a real fracture inside the regime, and they tell us something true about what this regime is for.
Three kinds of misfortune
Begin by sorting the dead and the disgraced into their categories, because they are not all suffering the same fate. There are three distinct streams.
The first is mass arrest for corruption. If you fold in the resignations and the quiet career executions alongside the formal prosecutions, the numbers run into the thousands inside the Defence Ministry alone. The purge began around the old minister’s circle — his advisers, his department heads, the men who handled the money — but it did not stop there. It has reached into the new leadership as well, into the team that replaced the old one, which tells you that this is not a tidy housecleaning of one disgraced faction. It is a struggle over the division of the spoils, and the spoils do not respect personnel changes.
The second stream is sudden death. Western commentators have given it a grim half-joking name — “Sudden Russian Death Syndrome” — and it has claimed dozens of officials, executives, and businessmen under circumstances that are always declared suicide and almost never look like it. The pattern is densest in the energy sector: one major oil company alone has lost several senior managers in a couple of years to “strange” deaths, and the gas monopoly has produced its own string of window-falls and self-inflicted wounds. The latest high-profile case, a transport minister found dead, is a perfect specimen of the genre precisely because the official story refuses to hold together. It is unclear when he died, how he died, even who exactly he was at the moment of death — a sitting minister, or a private citizen already fired by decree. Reports place the body in a car; photographs show it being removed from an empty lot. The investigative authorities say one thing, the newspapers show another. He was reportedly chairing meetings and issuing holiday greetings a full day after he was supposedly already dead. A man does not need to be a detective to smell something wrong here — especially when the dead man sat atop an embezzlement case worth more than a billion rubles, tied to the fortifications on the border that the enemy crossed with embarrassing ease. The chief witness against him was his own successor. It is entirely plausible that the chain of complicity simply needed to be cut, and that a “suicide” was the cleanest cut available.
The third stream is the most straightforward: elimination by Ukrainian services, on the grounds of war crimes. A naval commander praised in glowing terms by the Kremlin one week and dead the next; propagandists and turncoats and brigade commanders and the general who oversaw chemical-weapons units. This is a partial list, and it is the least mysterious of the three, because no one is pretending these were accidents.
No innocents among them
It is worth pausing on a moral point before going further, because it shapes everything else. Across all three categories — the arrested, the imprisoned, the “suicided,” the eliminated — there are no innocents. This is not a wave sweeping up dissidents and bystanders. These are the men who built and staffed and enriched themselves from a regime that is, at this moment, killing its neighbours. I feel no obligation to mourn them and I will not pretend otherwise. Their arrests are good news; their deaths are good news; each one is, in the plainest sense, one fewer accomplice. I do not expect them to finish the job and destroy one another entirely — it will not go that far — but the movement in that direction is a kind of grim satisfaction, and I see no reason to disguise it as anything loftier.
That said, the moral judgement should not be allowed to swallow the analytical one. The question that matters is not whether these people deserve their fate but why the fate is arriving now, in this volume, in these forms.
Why the war made theft easier — and deadlier
The answer begins with a paradox. Corruption has always been the backbone of the Russian economy; that is not new. What the war changed is the mechanics of it. War brought closed military budgets and a vast new zone of official secrecy, and secrecy is the ideal medium for theft. When no one is permitted to know how much was spent on the fortifications, or where the procurement money went, or which contractor delivered what, stealing becomes radically easier. The war, in this sense, has been a profit machine.
But — and this is the crucial turn — the pie is shrinking even as it becomes easier to grab from. Oil sales to the principal customer are down; the price Russia actually receives runs well below what the budget assumed; contract payments are being quietly trimmed. There is, in short, steadily less money sloshing through the system. So you have the worst possible combination for a kleptocratic elite: lower stakes and looser restraints at the same time. More people can reach into the pot, and there is less in the pot to reach for. The predictable result is intensified competition, and competition among these particular people is not conducted through litigation. It is conducted through arrests engineered against rivals, through “redistribution of market control,” through the occasional persuasive defenestration.
There is a historical rhyme here that is hard to ignore. When the Soviet Union collapsed, enormous sums — the legendary “party gold,” the funds that had bankrolled friendly regimes and movements abroad — suddenly became unowned and grabbable. A wave of “window accidents” followed, falling mostly on the Central Committee apparatus, while the security men who out-trained them in such matters came through rather better. It was a power struggle over a melting fortune, resolved partly by gravity. What is happening now has the same logic: a redistribution of shrinking opportunities, settled by force. And it follows that as long as the war drags on and the money keeps tightening, the infighting will not subside. It will grow.
The implausible suicides of honour
Let me return to the “suicides,” because the official framing of them is where the propaganda is thinnest and most insulting to the intelligence. We are asked to believe that a remarkable number of corrupt officials and oligarchs, on the verge of arrest, were seized by a sudden access of conscience and took their own lives.
Consider what an actual suicide of honour looks like. History does offer them. When the Soviet Union came apart, certain hardliners who had genuinely believed in the cause — who had given their lives to an idea and could not survive watching that idea die — killed themselves. Whatever one thinks of them, they were believers, and their deaths had the terrible consistency of belief. That is the form the thing takes. Now ask yourself how that maps onto a man who clawed his way to a deputy-minister’s office for the express purpose of profit, who spent his career converting public funds into private wealth. The notion that such a person, cornered, would suddenly perform an act of honour does not compute. Corruption and the suicide of honour are made of incompatible materials. A man does not spend twenty years acquiring for greed and then exit on principle. When the corrupt “shoot themselves” in conveniently large numbers at conveniently useful moments, the overwhelming likelihood is not honour. It is murder, dressed for the official record.
Richer than ever, and no longer Russian
While the middle ranks are being arrested and the unlucky are falling out of windows, it would be a mistake to imagine the very top is suffering. For the oligarchs, war has been a mother. A fresh crop of new billionaires has appeared, minted over a single year of fighting — people who got rich precisely because there is a war on. And here is the elegant part: a striking number of those who were counted as Russian billionaires last year are now listed, in the same rankings, as citizens of somewhere else. British, Monégasque, French, Latvian, Uzbek, Swiss, Israeli — the homeland is shed like a coat the moment it becomes inconvenient, while the fortunes, swollen by the war, travel comfortably onward. The men who profit most from Russia’s war take care to stop being Russian on paper. That tells you exactly how much they believe in the cause they are enriching themselves from.
And for everyone below that protected tier, the lesson of the war years is darker still. Loyalty buys nothing. Consider the seizure of a successful, popular game company — a business that did everything required of it, demonstrated the expected loyalty to the authorities, kept its head down, kept operating. None of it mattered. The state took it anyway, not as punishment for disloyalty but simply because it was good, popular, and profitable. The message could not be clearer: in today’s Russia, being a successful company is itself the danger. God forbid you build something that works and that people like. Compliance is no shield, because the predation is not about politics. It is about appetite.
A prosperity they have chosen to refuse
All of this raises the obvious question that any sane observer eventually asks: Russia is a country immensely rich in resources, with talented people and real industrial capacity. Why not simply make it prosperous? Why not let the population live well, take pride in their country, and reward the rulers with the easy loyalty that prosperity tends to buy?
The answer is not incapacity. It is choice. A genuinely prosperous society implies certain unwelcome things. It implies the rule of law, the separation of powers, a real — not rhetorical — fight against corruption, and, most intolerable of all, the rotation of those in power. Prosperity and accountability travel together; you cannot have the durable version of the first without conceding the second. And accountability is precisely what this elite cannot survive. A regime whose entire way of life is built on corruption has no interest in building the machinery that would end corruption, because that machinery would end them. They have looked at the trade — comfort and legitimacy and national strength on one side, the surrender of impunity on the other — and they have chosen impunity, every time. The poverty of Russian public life is not a failure of the system. It is the system functioning as intended.
So when we watch the arrests pile up, the bodies appear in empty lots, the generals die days after their promotions, we should resist two easy errors. The first is to mistake this for a real anti-corruption campaign; it is a redistribution among thieves, nothing more. The second is to mistake it for the regime’s imminent collapse; these people are not going to finish each other off, and we should not build our hopes on a fantasy. What it actually is, and all it needs to be to matter, is evidence — concrete, accumulating, hard to fake — of a serious crisis at the top. The war turbocharged the theft, the theft set the clans at one another’s throats, and the official lies meant to cover it all are wearing visibly thin. A regime that devours its own servants this freely, and lies this badly about it, is not a regime in confident health. It is one whose own people have started to come apart in its hands. That is not a reason for sentiment. But it is, unmistakably, a weakening — and a weakening of this particular regime is good news.