Is Putin Actually Yagoda Who Made It to the Top?

Everyone compares Putin to Stalin, but I wonder whether a more revealing comparison is Genrikh Yagoda, the Soviet security chief who helped build Stalin’s machinery of repression before eventually being consumed by it. You wonder why anyone would ever want to emulate someone as horrible as Yagoda, but then again, it could be said that Putin is an equally horrible human being, responsible for more than 1 million deaths already in his unjustified, fascist war against Ukraine.

Yagoda rose through the secret police, became head of the NKVD, and helped create the very system that later turned against him. Stalin eventually removed him, had him arrested and executed, and simply replaced him with someone else. Yagoda discovered the fundamental weakness of being the man who operates the machinery of power: there is always someone above you who can decide that you are expendable.

Putin followed a remarkably different path through a related institutional tradition. He came out of the KGB, headed the FSB, and ultimately became the person at the top of the political system rather than merely the person operating its security apparatus. In that sense, perhaps Putin is not Stalin reimagined at all. Perhaps he is something more interesting: Yagoda who made it all the way to Stalin’s chair. He eliminated the fundamental vulnerability Yagoda faced because there was nobody above him with the authority to remove him.

But that raises an uncomfortable question about what happens when Putin is no longer there. The system he built is deeply associated with him personally, yet the institutions beneath him have their own interests and reasons for surviving. If a successor eventually needs to explain Russia’s failures, political repression, military disasters, or economic problems, it may be easier to blame Putin personally while preserving much of the underlying system. Authoritarian regimes have done this before: the machinery survives while responsibility is concentrated on the dead or defeated leader.

That would make Putin’s eventual fate potentially much more interesting than the simple question of whether he resembles Stalin. Yagoda was destroyed because Stalin could sacrifice him without sacrificing the system. Putin has spent decades making himself synonymous with the system, which could make his departure either extraordinarily difficult or extraordinarily dangerous. If he eventually loses control rather than simply dying in office, could the same machinery he spent his career strengthening suddenly require him to become its scapegoat?

So perhaps the real historical question is not “Is Putin the new Stalin?” Perhaps it is: “Is Putin Yagoda who succeeded so completely that he became the man Yagoda served?”And if that is the case, does reaching the top mean Putin escaped Yagoda’s fate, or merely postponed it until there is nobody left above him to protect him?