The death of Roman Starovoit tells you everything you need to know about the suffocating atmosphere now pervading Putin’s inner circle. The former transport minister—who had also served as governor of the embattled Kursk region—was found dead just hours after being dismissed by Putin, in what authorities are calling an apparent suicide.
It’s a grim arithmetic that speaks to the current state of Russian elite politics: better to take your own life than face whatever comes next. As Johns Hopkins professor Sergey Radchenko put it with stark clarity, Russian officials “would rather just kill themselves before they actually confront the source of all their problems—and that is Putin.”
Starovoit’s death appears linked to a growing corruption scandal involving the embezzlement of funds meant to fortify Russia’s border defenses against Ukrainian incursions. His successor as Kursk governor was already under investigation for similar charges, and speculation swirled that Starovoit himself was about to be dragged into the mess. The timing—his dismissal followed almost immediately by his death—suggests he saw the writing on the wall.
What makes this particularly unsettling is how unusual it is. Radchenko, who has studied Russian politics for decades, notes that high-ranking officials who fall out of favor typically end up in prison, not dead by their own hand. The closest parallel was the suspicious death of former media minister Mikhail Lesin in a Washington hotel room years ago—but that was widely suspected to be murder, not suicide.
The broader implications are chilling. “Nobody can be sure of tomorrow” in Putin’s Russia, Radchenko observes, and this uncertainty has created a culture of preemptive self-destruction among the elite. When your options are prison, exile, or worse, some apparently choose a fourth path.
Meanwhile, in a move that would be darkly comic if it weren’t so ominous, Russia’s Communist Party has declared Nikita Khrushchev’s famous 1956 denunciation of Stalin to be “erroneous and politically biased.” It’s a symbolic gesture more than anything else—the Communist Party has been thoroughly neutered by Putin and holds no real power. But it reflects the creeping rehabilitation of Stalin’s legacy that has been underway for years.
This isn’t entirely surprising. The party’s longtime leader, Gennady Zyuganov, has been an open Stalin apologist for decades, regularly laying flowers at the dictator’s grave near the Kremlin wall. Still, the timing feels significant. As Putin’s regime grows more authoritarian and paranoid, the appeal of Stalin’s model—total control through total terror—becomes harder to resist.
The tragedy is that this rehabilitation flies in the face of documented history. Stalin’s purges killed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. The gulags, the mass torture, the Great Purge of 1937—these aren’t matters of interpretation but recorded fact. Yet among ordinary Russians, particularly those with nationalist leanings, Stalin’s reputation has been steadily rehabilitated over the past two decades.
Radchenko notes that while Putin’s Russia hasn’t reached the levels of brutality seen in 1937, it still has “a lot to go before it becomes an outright Stalinist tyranny.” The operative phrase there is “before it becomes”—not “if it becomes.” The trajectory seems clear enough.
What’s particularly troubling is how this atmosphere of fear and historical revisionism reinforces itself. Officials like Starovoit choose death over disgrace, removing potential sources of opposition or even just independent thought. Meanwhile, the gradual rehabilitation of Stalin’s legacy normalizes ever-higher levels of state violence and control.
The Russian intelligentsia—those who might push back against this drift—have been marginalized to the point of irrelevance. They “don’t really count for anything at this point,” as Radchenko puts it with characteristic bluntness.
This leaves Putin’s Russia in a peculiar bind. The system demands absolute loyalty, but absolute loyalty breeds absolute fear. And fear, as Starovoit’s death demonstrates, can push people to make choices that ultimately weaken the system they’re trying to serve. It’s a self-consuming cycle that has characterized authoritarian regimes throughout history.
The question isn’t whether this dynamic will continue—it’s whether it will accelerate. When high-ranking officials start choosing death over demotion, you’re looking at a system that has moved beyond mere authoritarianism into something approaching terror. And in Putin’s Russia, that tomorrow seems closer than ever.
