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.

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........

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