Sergei Ivanov Is Dead, and the Race of the Gun Carriages Has Begun

They say he stayed nearly half an hour, shook every hand, embraced Ivanov's son and murmured something to him at length, holding him by the elbow. The others stood in a ring around the wreaths - Medvedev, Lavrov, Matvienko, Chaika, Bastrykin, Nabiullina. To some of them Ivanov had been a friend, to others a boss and a patron, and a few had probably never met him at all. None of that matters. What matters is that he was one of theirs. They were burying a comrade, a fellow party man, a colleague, a contemporary. And within a handful of years, no more, many of the people now standing over those flowers will be buried in exactly the same way, in exactly the same kind of box. Someone will come, someone will say a few words, someone may even weep. There are many questions. But only one that counts: what will be left afterwards?

Sergei Ivanov was, in all likelihood, the first genuinely senior official of Putin's cohort to die simply of old age. Not in a cell, not under investigation, not with his assets seized, but quietly, in bed, a contemporary of his own president and a product of the very same school. Which is precisely why his death is not just one biography paused mid-sentence. It is a template. Read it carefully and you can decode the entire architecture of power these men have been building for a quarter of a century, and understand exactly what they leave behind.

Two identical fates that split apart, only to fuse again

Ivanov's life and Putin's ran in parallel at first, then twisted together so tightly they could never be untangled. Both were Leningraders, born months apart, Ivanov the younger. Both graduated from the same Leningrad State University at the same time. Both went into the KGB, into the same department, and sat in adjacent offices on Liteiny Prospekt. Identical starting data. And then the interesting part begins.

Ivanov, a specialist in political intelligence, was sent to Scandinavia: to a vital sector of the capitalist bloc, deep behind enemy lines. He refused all his life to lift the veil of secrecy, citing a seventy-five-year classification, but Finland kept surfacing in his interviews, and he spoke fluent Swedish, so there were dealings there too, and perhaps not only there. Putin, meanwhile, was posted to Dresden. Calling that intelligence work is a stretch: a friendly East Germany, a fellow socialist state, a dingy house of culture, papers to shuffle. Against that backdrop, Ivanov was plainly the more successful man.

And that brilliant career ended as dramatically as anything in a spy novel. There is, in fact, a novel about it: "The Spy and the Traitor," the loudest espionage story of the Cold War, the book about Oleg Gordievsky. A soviet defector, a KGB colonel, himself out of political intelligence, recruited by the British, Gordievsky became London's foremost source on everything happening inside the USSR before he was smuggled out of the country in the boot of an embassy car. Before that, he burned the soviet agents working under cover in the West. Sergei Ivanov among them. After a failure like that, Europe was closed to him, and he was sent to serve in East Africa.

Putin at that very moment was drinking beer with Chemezov and Tokarev in Dresden taverns, reconnoitring little more than the route by which a washing machine or a car stereo might be carried from the GDR back into the Union. After the soviet collapse the pattern held: Ivanov stayed in the security services, moved to the SVR, made general, rose to deputy head of an entire department. Putin's career, by contrast, lay in ruins. He quit the service and later admitted he had thought about driving a taxi, because there was simply no work. It was Chubais and Kudrin who hauled him to moscow and parked him in a modest post in the presidential property directorate. The rest you know.

Ground zero: how a chekist became a politician the same day as Putin

Ivanov's political career began at the exact moment Putin's did, in a single stroke. In that sense too they were contemporaries. By 1998 a barely coherent Yeltsin appoints Putin head of the FSB, and Putin instantly remembers his old KGB colleague. Ivanov arrives as his deputy. A single year passes: Yeltsin names Putin prime minister and heir apparent, and the chair of Security Council secretary, which Putin had been holding in parallel, passes to Ivanov. In 2001 Putin makes him defence minister. The Chechen war is raging, the Kursk scandal has not yet cooled, and handing the defence ministry to a man without a single day of military experience is no small thing. But Putin trusts Ivanov without reservation.

He explained that trust himself, in his one and only official biography. Asked whom he trusted, whom he had shared his salt with, Putin answered that there is such a thing as the feeling of an elbow at your side. With Ivanov, that feeling arises. And with Nikolai Patrushev. And with Dima Medvedev. A quarter of a century ago these were absolute nobodies. Today we know only too well what became of the last two, and how sturdy that feeling of the elbow really was.

Ivanov spent six years as defence minister. For those who remember the period, he is fixed in memory above all by the case of Private Sychev. In 2006 the soldier Andrei Sychev told the country how a fellow serviceman had tormented and tortured him. The result: both legs and everything below the waist amputated, a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Everyone knew about the hazing then; it was eating the army alive. Mothers were afraid to let their sons serve, not because they might be sent to war, but because a conscript was more likely to be found hanged somewhere on the base. And how did the defence minister react? He announced there was nothing serious in the affair, because otherwise he would surely have known about it, and expressed surprise that moscow had only learned of it two days earlier. Naturally, it all went unpunished.

In 2007 Ivanov is promoted to first deputy prime minister and Operation Successor begins. Putin's second term was ending, he did not yet want to rewrite the constitution to suit himself, and the famous leapfrog unfolded: Ivanov or Medvedev? Volumes have been written about that intrigue. But by and large it means nothing. Genuine or stage-managed, the outcome is the same. Loyal to the marrow, snapping to attention and executing any order to the letter, Ivanov would have handed the chair back to Putin four years later exactly as Medvedev did. Nothing, absolutely nothing, points to the contrary.

The myth of the "liberal" Ivanov who loved leopards

Here is what genuinely takes your breath away: the flattering obituaries in the respectable, supposedly independent press. He worked for Putin, yes, they concede, but he was somehow different, a little calmer, a little more liberal, and besides, he so tenderly looked after leopards. Do not make me laugh.

Ivanov ran the presidential administration precisely in the years when Putin began tightening every screw to the maximum. The protests, Crimea, Syria, the gutting of what passed for domestic politics, the final destruction of the independent press: all of it fell on his watch. Under him Lenta.ru fell, TV Rain was blocked, Navalny's LiveJournal was shut. Throughout, Ivanov remained Putin's principal man, the head of his office. And the leopards? What of the leopards. A lovely cause. But between a leopard and freedom of speech, between a leopard and an honest election, any normal person chooses the latter.

A "modest" official and four billion

Which brings us to that incorruptibility others were so quick to celebrate. Ivanov lived strictly by the classic tenets of putinism. His declarations for years listed tidy little sums: eleven million, thirteen, thirteen again. Barely more than a million a month. For an official of his rank, modest to the point of tears.

Now consider Ivanov's house on Rublyovka, whose provenance his declarations are utterly incapable of explaining. Two thousand seven hundred square metres. A plot larger than a hectare. And not merely Rublyovka but Zhukovka, the Golden Land, its most super-elite stretch. Nor is it some dacha privatised in the nineties: it is new build, modern architecture, two wings joined by a glass gallery, with a price tag north of two billion roubles.

In 2013, for Ivanov's sixtieth birthday, his family gave interview after interview about the patriarch's modesty. His younger son Sergei assured everyone there was, in effect, nothing in the house: no car, no expensive clothes, no property abroad, none of it of the slightest interest to his father. Interests, however, have a way of shifting, and the amplitude of the shift is impressive. Ten years later, in February 2023, at the height of the war and of the universal "tightening of belts," the wife of that same Sergei Ivanov junior buys an apartment in Dubai, in the W Residences on Palm Jumeirah. And not just any apartment: nine hundred and twenty-six square metres, a cavernous living room, five bedrooms for the family and their guests, servants' quarters, vast terraces, private beaches, a spa, pools, a limousine service, security. The special delight is the "whatever whenever" button: press it in your apartment and a specially trained human being will gratify any whim round the clock. The price of the pleasure: four hundred and eighty million roubles.

And that is far from all. The family portfolio also holds apartments in moscow and an enormous parcel of seafront land near Kaliningrad. In sum: four point two billion roubles of real estate. There, in a nutshell, is the entire yield of twenty-six years of service to the people.

The sons, of course, are a separate ballad. The elder, Alexander, was placed in VEB. In 2005, behind the wheel, he struck and killed a sixty-eight-year-old woman on a pedestrian crossing in moscow. What followed is straight from the textbook: a crowd of Ivanov's bodyguards descended on the scene at once, not even relatives were allowed near the body, witnesses began dissolving along with their statements, and the minister's son was, in the end, acquitted. Eight years later, in 2014, Alexander drowned in Dubai. The younger, Sergei, was ushered into Gazprom, SOGAZ and Alrosa the moment he left his institute. At twenty-five he was a vice-president of Gazprombank; by twenty-nine, deputy chairman of its board. Ivanov himself, after the presidential administration, drifted into the role of special envoy for nature and ecology, his loyalty intact to the last: I wish us success, I help our army as best I can, within my modest means.

The other Ivanov: a martinet in constant pain

Here it is worth pausing to admit that the picture is not as flat as it may seem. A source who knew Ivanov personally describes him in wholly different terms, and that description does not cancel out the family billions so much as explain their nature.

After the death of his son in the autumn of 2014, this source says, Ivanov's health collapsed. He could barely walk; aides brought him to the office, which is where the rumours of heavy drinking began, though the man himself was never seen drunk. It looked more like someone racked by terrible pain, for whom every movement had become a labour. It was not cancer. And that, the source says, is precisely why Putin let him leave the head of administration's chair without consequences. He was patched up afterwards, felt better, but the illness was never fully beaten.

The characterisation is the crux. Ivanov never came across as a particularly clever man, this account holds, more a martinet at Putin's side. Yet he was not cunning, not sly, easy to deal with. And, unlike almost every one of his colleagues, he was no money-grubber: no appetite for luxury or riches, utterly plain in his everyday life. That is the key to the whole construction. The billions settled not on Ivanov himself but on sons, daughters-in-law and offshores. The man was the perfect instrument: loyal, obedient, asking no unnecessary questions. And the gold clung to the family on its own, because that is how the system is built.

How the system works: the signal to Sechin

One episode illustrates the mechanics of the Kremlin better than any org chart. By late 2013 Igor Sechin had developed an extraordinary appetite for prominence: he was climbing into every major dossier, Rosneft filled the entire media space, and there was talk of a "Sechin special forces." He turned out to be the only russian on Time's list of the hundred most influential people in the world, in the "Titans" category. Even when Khodorkovsky was released from the colony, the press recalled Sechin more often than Putin. This irritated Putin, but he would never voice such displeasure to his inner circle: as if trifles like that could trouble the great man.

The job of delivering the signal fell to Ivanov, as head of the administration. He chose a sinuous route. A call went to Interfax from the administration requesting a closed meeting between Ivanov and the country's editors in chief. Before it began the moderator asked where to start, and Ivanov asked only that one question be sure to come up: was Sechin aware of the preparations for Khodorkovsky's release? The whole event was staged for that single question. The question was put, and Ivanov replied: Igor Sechin is the head of an oil company, and decisions of this kind the president takes alone, without informing representatives of business. The signal landed. Sechin, who knew Putin well, understood everything. That is what the head of the presidential administration actually does.

The race of the gun carriages

Ivanov's death, as well-placed sources in moscow put it, is in effect the start of the race of the gun carriages. In the late soviet years the string of Kremlin state funerals, the bodies borne through Red Square on artillery caissons, earned that grim nickname. They all have illnesses of varying severity. They have money, the best doctors and equipment, but eternal life is not for sale. It has all happened before. Kosygin died at seventy-six in 1980, Suslov at seventy-nine in 1982, Brezhnev at seventy-five the same year, Andropov at sixty-nine in 1984, Chernenko at seventy-three in 1985. Ivanov was seventy-three.

The death, incidentally, was a strange one. Ivanov was the only man at that altitude whom Putin allowed to retire of his own accord, with no arrests in his circle and no other consequences. And he left this life, according to insiders, immediately after a late-night sitting with Dmitry Shmidt, an adviser-inspector attached to the FSB director and a friend of many years. By the same accounts, Shmidt himself was hospitalised after that gathering.

You need only survey the mourners to grasp the point: every second one of them is already turning to dust. Putin is seventy-three. Bastrykin is the same. Matvienko is seventy-seven. Lavrov, the man topping United russia's list at the coming elections, the country's finest United russia man, is seventy-six. The bottom line of all these lives will be identical: nothing will be left. Nothing, that is, except the stolen billions in the accounts. But even billions run out eventually, and stolen ones fastest of all: power will change, the archives will open, criminal cases will begin, and nothing whatsoever will remain. What was the grovelling for? What was the lying for? What was the war for? The choice between a historic chance to do something that mattered and the plain stuffing of one's own pockets was made, and it can no longer be unmade.

Who is now orphaned: Giner without a roof

Ivanov's death has its inverse beneficiaries too, the people whose troubles now begin. First on that list, according to well-placed sources, is the oligarch Yevgeny Giner. The two became friends back when Ivanov was defence minister: Ivanov was a passionate CSKA supporter, and Giner owned the club. The friendship held ever since. Giner has patrons enough without Ivanov, but certain senior siloviki preferred not to cross him, knowing all too well whom he would turn to if pressed. And from there it is a short step to Putin. That protection is now gone.

Meanwhile the Giner family lives to be seen. Only recently, in the fifth year of the war, Yevgeny's son Vadim acquired an exceedingly rare Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss, a run of seventy-five cars priced from three and a half million dollars, and now tears about the capital in it, trailed by an SUV full of guards. Muscovites queuing for petrol and digesting the calls to tighten their belts for the "special military operation" watch this curiosity flash past with particular joy. Vadim's garage holds other rare machines besides, and he can speed without fear: the young man is a co-owner of Forpost Group, the very supplier of the traffic-violation camera systems. It is onto his son that Giner registers much of what he owns.

The Ukrainian tail of the moscow tower

And here the story stops being purely an internal russian affair and becomes ours. Ivanov, together with Chemezov and his Rostec, were among Putin's closest comrades going back to the KGB, and this tower has its own candidate for the succession: First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov, the man over the defence complex. It is at war with the clans of Patrushev, who is pushing his son Dmitry up the agricultural line, and of Kovalchuk, who is advancing his son Boris into the Accounts Chamber, while it cooperates with the technocrats Gref and Nabiullina. The alignment is a moscow one, but it runs straight into Ukraine.

In Ukraine the Ivanov-Chemezov tower is represented by the VS Energy-CSKA-Luzhniki group: Babakov, Giner, Voyevodin. That same State Duma deputy speaker Babakov who publicly demanded death sentences for the defenders of Azovstal. And these people still own assets in our country: the Premier Palace hotels, oblenergo regional power companies, Dniprospetsstal, KZRK jointly with Akhmetov, the Nikopol Ferroalloy Plant alongside Benya and Pinchuk, and the list runs on. The Babakov people calmly re-registered the Hotel Rus to Tigipko, and did so under NABU surveillance recordings, though that property sits on Malopidvalna Street three hundred metres from the counterintelligence department.

Somehow no one is surprised that russians still control our oblenergo. These "russian" power-supply companies took in eighty billion in revenue in 2025. And our law enforcement has no questions for them.

There, in the end, is the whole arithmetic. In moscow they bury one of Putin's comrades and start the race of the gun carriages around the rest. And in Ukraine the men from the very same tower go on quietly skimming eighty billion a year, while moscow tallies up who will be the next to be laid on the carriage.