Putin Will Follow Stalin's Path

Trotsky wrote articles. Zinoviev delivered speeches. Kamenev presided over meetings. Stalin, in the meantime, quietly compiled lists. Who was good for what. Who should be sent where. Who to bring close, who to push aside, who to quietly forget.

Three years later, by the time Lenin died, Stalin already knew more about every party figure of any consequence than the figure himself did. The party apparatus was no longer just an instrument. It had become a separate living organism, and Stalin was its bloodstream.

By 1927, Trotsky had been packed off to Alma-Ata. By 1929, expelled from the country. By 1936, the surviving rivals were sitting in the basements of the Lubyanka, signing testimonies their interrogators had written for them. By 1937, almost nobody from Lenin's Politburo remained alive — except Stalin himself and a handful of completely loyal figures.

In May 1935, in the Kremlin Palace, Stalin uttered his famous line: "Cadres decide everything." He said it with a certain irony, because by that point every question in the country was already being decided by a single cadre — one who had built around himself a dense buffer zone of personally dependent men.

Stalin was 57. Active, strong, and surrounded by party functionaries, civil bureaucrats, and Chekists who had rallied around him. The repressions would peak two years later and continue for nearly eighteen years, grinding through everyone in turn. Some preventively. Others just in case.

By 1953, Stalin was 74. He was dying slowly. He appeared in public less and less often, exhaustion visible in his eyes, visibly aged. The Kremlin tried to conceal it, because the strength of the leader is the symbol of power. It seemed there was no alternative to Stalin, and that a coup carried the risk of chaos. But that was no longer true. There were those who managed to come to an understanding among themselves — those few "close ones" who had somehow survived the endless purges.

Stalin died at his workplace, in a puddle of his own urine and vomit, while his guards stood for hours outside the room, refusing to enter. The same guards he had terrorized for years had been given the order not to intervene. None of them disobeyed. The weakened Stalin was hated by everyone.

Three years later, with calculated decorum, his former comrades denounced his cult. Five years after that, they removed his body from the Mausoleum and buried him at night by the Kremlin Wall like a thief, modestly screening the grave with construction barriers. Thus ended the path of the bloodiest dictator in Russian history.

The Stalin Template: A Simulacrum of Power

Stalin's system had one fundamental feature that Putin reproduced almost flawlessly. It was not power in the classical sense of the word. It was a stage on which one man played the role of the source of all decisions, while the actual decisions were made through complex bargaining among clans of security men, industrialists, and party officials. The leader was needed as an arbiter, as a symbol to believe in — but above all as a dictator, who could and had to be feared.

But precisely because the leader was theatrical rather than institutional, his aging became mortally dangerous to the system. The weakening Stalin of 1952–1953 could no longer keep the clans in line as effectively as before. He grew unpredictable, his paranoia intensified, and the "Doctors' Plot" became his last attempt to launch a new wave of repressions and thus restore fear as the principal instrument of governance. His inner circle understood this. Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Bulganin — they did not love each other, but they all hated Stalin equally, and equally feared ending up on the next list.

This is why, on March 1, 1953, Beria, Malenkov, and Khrushchev — the very comrades Stalin was already preparing to feed into a new cycle of repressions — let him die. Which does not exclude the possibility that they actively helped the process along.

Chain Reaction: How a Tyrant's Death Ignites the Periphery

A pattern needs to be brought into the open here, one that Soviet historiography carefully buried, and that post-Soviet historiography has never quite pulled into public discussion.

Stalin died on March 5, 1953. Three and a half months later, on June 17, 1953, East Berlin rose. Workers took to the streets against increased production quotas, and the protest instantly turned political. The crowd demanded the resignation of the GDR government, free elections, German reunification. Soviet tanks crushed the uprising in a single day, but the precedent was set: the imperial periphery tested the center for cracks the moment the chief instrument of fear was gone.

In February 1956, Khrushchev delivered his "secret speech" on the cult of personality at the XX Congress. By June of the same year — the Poznań uprising. Polish workers marched under the banner "Bread and Freedom," and Soviet forces suppressed the protest. Four months later, in October–November 1956, all of Hungary rose up. Budapest threw out the communist regime, declared its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and formed a government under Imre Nagy. The Soviet army rolled into Hungary, crushed the revolution with tanks, killed thousands. Nagy was hanged.

The logic of these events is simple and merciless. An empire built on the cult of a living dictator cannot dismantle that cult without the periphery reading it as a signal to act. As long as Stalin was alive, nobody on the occupied territories dared test the system. The moment the chief instrument of fear dies — and especially the moment Moscow itself says, "yes, he was a criminal" — fear in the periphery collapses instantly. The colonies grasp the implication: if the metropole itself has admitted that its founding father was a monster, then the occupiers themselves are not sacred. One can try.

This pattern is more than a historical parallel. It is the structural law of any empire held together by a personal cult. And it applies to Putin's system a hundred times more sharply than it did to Stalin's.

Putin's heir will have no buffer like the one Khrushchev had. Khrushchev denounced Stalin, but socialism as an idea remained legitimate. The Party remained legitimate. The USSR as a state remained legitimate. A man was declared a criminal, but the system was preserved. That is what allowed the suppression of Berlin, Poznań, and Budapest without dismantling the imperial frame itself.

Putin's heir will have no such umbrella. To denounce Putin is to denounce the entire "Russian world," the whole war in Ukraine, the entire paradigm of the "great power rising from its knees." To denounce Putin is to admit that half a million soldiers died for nothing, that the destruction of relations with the rest of the world was a mistake, that sanctions and isolation were the result of one man's stupidity to whom everyone deferred for some reason. And the moment that is said — quietly or loudly — bifurcation points will flare up simultaneously across the map. Chechnya and the Caucasus. Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. Yakutia, Tuva, Buryatia. Kaliningrad as a separate enclave. The Far East, long drifting into China's orbit. Each of these territories is a potential "Hungary 1956." And post-Putin Russia will not have the resources for a simultaneous crackdown in ten places at once.

The lag will be shorter, too. Khrushchev had three years of relative stability between Stalin's death (March 1953) and the XX Congress (February 1956). Putin's heir will not be granted such a lag. The information environment is different, the financial state of the system is different, the ongoing war and the contradictions inside the elite are different.

The Putin Remake: Same Set, Same Logic

To understand how Putin will end, one has to understand how he began. Kremlin propaganda has spent years painting him as a statesman, an idealist, a man of duty, a bearer of imperial mission. That is a mask. Beneath the mask is an entirely different man, whose first serious steps in power are documented and not subject to ideological reinterpretation.

In the early 1990s, St. Petersburg, like the rest of the country, was hungry. The city stood on the edge of a food catastrophe — apartments without proper food, shops with empty shelves. The West allocated humanitarian aid to the northern capital: food, medicine. The distribution was to be handled by the Committee for External Relations of the city administration, headed by a young former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin, deputy to Anatoly Sobchak.

Putin approached the matter with that same pragmatism later attributed to him in his presidential role. The humanitarian aid — the food meant to feed hungry citizens — he decided to barter for raw materials. Through shell companies, export licenses were issued for non-ferrous metals, petroleum products, timber, and cotton, totaling roughly 92 million dollars. Food was supposed to come back in return. The raw materials went abroad. The food never reached St. Petersburg. Some of the money ended up in the accounts of intermediary firms, the rest simply disappeared.

The City Assembly created a commission led by deputy Marina Salye. The commission established Putin's culpability and recommended his dismissal. The Salye report remains in the public domain to this day. Sobchak fired no one (among the participants). Putin stayed, continued his career, and a few years later moved to Moscow, into Yeltsin's administration, from where he was launched to the very top. Marina Salye herself, after Putin came to presidential power, moved to a remote village in the Pskov region and was afraid to speak about the investigation for the rest of her life.

This episode is not just an episode. It is an X-ray. It shows that the man who would, a few years later, be entrusted with a nuclear power, in the moment when his fellow citizens were starving and the decision to feed them was on his desk, chose to steal. He is not an idealist. He is not a statesman. He is not a bearer of mission. He is a pragmatist of exactly the type that Marxist tradition calls a comprador: an intermediary trading the resources of his territory for a personal cut, neither possessing nor desiring strategic vision.

He was precisely the kind of man Moscow's elite required for the maximally efficient looting of the colonies. A psychopath functioning as a machine for making money.

This is why Putin's entire subsequent career has been a scaling-up of the St. Petersburg scheme. First at the level of the country: hydrocarbons to the West in exchange for personal accounts of Russia's upper crust in Western banks. Then at the geopolitical level: an imitation of an imperial project while preserving the comprador function. The war in Ukraine initially fit the same logic. It was not a war for an idea. It was an attempt to raise the stakes in the bargaining with the West, to force the world to pay more for Russian resources and Russian compliance.

And here Putin made his main mistake. He overplayed his hand. He failed to feel the moment when he should have sold the shares of peace in Ukraine at maximum price.

The Point He Missed

Any comprador knows: the value of an asset is determined not by what you have, but by how much someone is willing to pay you to give it up.

The failure of the 2022 blitzkrieg became exactly that kind of asset. Russia did not take Kyiv. It did not cut Ukraine in two. A stalemate had emerged, in which both sides were taking heavy losses while the world watched the possibility of nuclear escalation with dread.

At that moment Putin could have sold his de facto defeat at a very high price. Retain control over the occupied territories, secure a sanctions moratorium, extract guarantees against Ukrainian NATO membership, lock in the status of a "great power" that must be reckoned with. It would not have been a triumph, but it would have been a successful conversion of military failure into a political deal. Compradors all over the world do this. Putin himself had done it in Syria, in Georgia, in Belarus.

But he missed the moment. He got carried away. He decided the maximum price had not yet been reached, that more could be squeezed out. So he dragged out the bargaining.

By 2025 it had become clear that Russia had lost the war in its initial form. There was nothing more to be gained. The reserves of the National Wealth Fund are melting at a rate that promises full depletion within the next year and a half to two years. The industrial potential of the Soviet-era military economy, on which the supply to the front has rested all this time, is being depleted irreversibly. Young and educated citizens have already left or are leaving. The population is aging rapidly. Allies — North Korea and Belarus — are more of a burden than an asset.

Yet through all this Putin does not sign peace. Not because he doesn't want to — he would have done so long ago. It is because the price he had counted on is gone. The West is no longer willing to pay for the war to end. The West is willing to wait until Russia exhausts itself. Ukraine has already proved it will hold out for as long as needed. The Global South has lost confidence in Moscow's ability to be an alternative pole. China is waiting for the Russian asset to depreciate to the point where it can be picked up for free.

Putin has devalued his own asset. This is the comprador's principal crime — failing to sell in time. When you have nothing left to offer except the prolongation of agony, you yourself become a burden to everyone. Including those who put you in place.

The Main Obstacle to Peace Is Putin Himself

By 2026 the situation has stabilized in the worst possible configuration for the Russian regime. Everyone understands that the war must end. Everyone understands that it can only end on terms Putin himself cannot personally sign — because any fixed outcome makes him responsible for the catastrophe. Any admission of defeat undermines the myth on which his power rests. Any concession will raise questions inside the elite: what did we burn the reserves for, what did we kill half a million people for, what did we wreck relations with the entire world for, if in the end we are conceding?

This means: as long as Putin is alive, there will be no peace. Not because he doesn't want it — he would agree to any conditions that guarantee his personal safety. But because he cannot. Any peace agreement makes him vulnerable to his own circle.

From this follows a cold conclusion that every member of his inner circle should now be grasping. The main obstacle to normalization is not the territories, not the sanctions, not NATO. The main obstacle is Putin himself. His physical existence as the sitting president blocks any scenario in which Russia could return to even some form of economic and political stability.

And that changes everything. Up to this point the inner circle protected Putin because Putin protected them. Now Putin has become a source of risk to them. Every day of his rule brings closer the moment when the system collapses uncontrollably, dragging them personally down with it. Every month of dragging out the war increases the likelihood of default, hyperinflation, regional revolts, the loss of the monopoly on violence.

Under these conditions, the elite's logic of self-preservation shifts from defending the leader to eliminating him.

The Logic of Removal: The FSB as the Only Path

Here is the key paradox of the Putin regime. The leader has surrounded himself with the FSO — his personal guard, men he trusts personally. But the real threat does not come from outside. It comes from the very structure that is the source of his power: the FSB.

For years Putin built a system in which the FSB controls everything. But the same service controls him. Every step he takes, every conversation he has, every medical reading passes through the hands of people who know more about him than he knows about himself. When he placed an FSB killer next to each of his "close friends" in the inner circle, he set a precedent. He demonstrated that physical removal is a legitimate instrument of politics. That nobody is untouchable. That there is no line that cannot be crossed.

This logic cuts both ways. If removal is the norm, then the leader himself is not protected from that norm. The FSO will not stop it. The FSO answers to the same people who made the decision. The moment the collective interest of the elite demands his removal — and sooner or later it will, because Putin has gone from being an asset to being a liability — the mechanism will fire from within.

History knows many such cases. Julius Caesar was killed not by enemies but by closest comrades. Paul I was strangled by the officers of his own guard. Stalin's death, however shrouded, looks very much like the result of a conspiracy. Beria was executed by his Politburo comrades a few months after Stalin's death. Ceaușescu was shot under the verdict of a hastily assembled tribunal. Gaddafi was killed by a crowd in which the majority were his own former soldiers. The pattern is obvious: dictators rarely die a natural death. They are killed by their own.

The Transition Scenario: A Repetition of the Familiar

What will happen afterward? Here an almost perfect analogy with the Stalin scenario applies, only at accelerated speed.

First: the inner circle will wait. Not because they loved the leader, but because the transition of power is always a period of maximum risk. Each survivor will be watching every other one, gauging who is making a play for the lead role. At this stage, no sudden movements. Stalin's death in 1953 was exactly such a pause — for nearly three weeks the country lived in a state of total uncertainty while Khrushchev, Malenkov, and Beria bargained over the new distribution of power.

Second: there will be a brief period of collective leadership. They will call it "stability" or "continuity," but in essence it will be a triumvirate or quartet of security men and technocrats, each distrusting the others. This period will be highly unstable and last no more than a year to a year and a half.

Third: one of them will eliminate the others. Most likely not physically — the times have changed. They will be sent into retirement, into honorable exile, into ambassadorial chairs somewhere in Uruguay. But politically they will be destroyed. This will be the analogue of Khrushchev's removal first of Beria, then of the "anti-party group" of Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich.

Fourth: the new leader will gradually begin the dismantling of the Putin cult. Quietly at first, through reshuffles and personnel changes. Then more loudly — through the "exposure of excesses." It will not happen at once, but it will happen without fail. Just as Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the XX Congress in 1956, and just as the XXII Congress in 1961 ordered the removal of his body from the Mausoleum.

And it is precisely at this moment — the dismantling of the cult — that the chain reaction described above will fire. Berlin 1953 and Budapest 1956 will repeat themselves, only this time not on the East European periphery but on Russia's own territory. Grozny, Kazan, Ufa, Yakutsk, Kyzyl — each of these cities holds its own historical grievance against Moscow, its own suppressed elites, its own memory of colonial status. The denunciation of Putin will give them what they have lacked for decades: the moral right to try.

Putin will not be buried with state honors forever. A few years after his death his name will start being struck out of textbooks, his monuments will start coming down, his portraits will start being removed from office walls. This will happen faster than it did with Stalin, because Putin lacks even the imagined "achievements" of his predecessor. No industrialization. No Victory. No space program. Only a Ukrainian war he did not win, and a country he ruined.

And Then — Collapse

The most interesting thing will begin afterward. The Stalin system outlived its creator by 38 years, slowly degrading through the Brezhnev stagnation to Gorbachev's perestroika and finally to the collapse of 1991. The Putin system has none of that durability. It is built on the personal charisma of one man, on oil revenues that are shrinking, and on a war that brings no victory.

When Putin is gone, the system will have neither ideology nor resources nor a leader capable of holding it together. The regions, which formally answer to Moscow only because Moscow holds the monopoly on violence, will start bargaining for autonomy. The Caucasus, which the Kremlin holds only through the Kadyrov regime, will be the first bifurcation point — after Putin's death Moscow will have neither the money nor the political capital to keep paying tribute to Grozny. The Far East, already economically inside China's orbit, will formalize its status. Siberia will become a zone of interest for Beijing on one side and Eurasian players on the other.

This will not be an exact repetition of 1991. Smaller scale, different speed, different geography. But the same logic: an empire built on one man does not outlive that man by more than a single generation.

Cadres Decide Everything — But Not Forever

Stalin was right in 1935. Cadres do indeed decide everything. But there was one thing he failed to account for: when the leader becomes a burden, the very same cadres he placed for his own security turn into his executioners.

Putin replicated this scheme almost flawlessly. He built a system in which everyone depends on him personally. He made the FSB all-powerful. He surrounded himself with men he trusts. He placed killers around everyone who could become a threat.

But it is precisely those decisions that have predetermined his end. When the system arrives at the conclusion that he himself is the chief burden, it will apply that very norm to him.

Putin will die the way Stalin did. Only this time it will not be a dacha in Kuntsevo, but a bunker somewhere in Valdai or on the Black Sea coast.

Those who guarded him all his life will give him what Stalin's comrades gave him, and step back to watch the convulsions.

History repeats itself, as Marx liked to say, twice: first as tragedy, then as farce. Stalin's death was a tragedy for the millions of Kremlin's slaves who still believed in the leader. Putin's death will be a farce, because nobody seriously tries to believe in this leader anymore.