What the defenestration of Ravil Maganov says about Russia

In my travels when I was still persona grata in Russia, I never got the sense that their windows were unduly flimsy or inviting. Nonetheless, the tally of Russians and Russian-connected individuals who have met their end by jumping or falling out of windows is such that it has become a rather tacky and tasteless meme.

Most recently, Ravil Maganov, chair of the Lukoil conglomerate died after falling out of a window in Moscow on Thursday. This follows on the heels of the death in Washington DC of Dan Rapoport, an American businessman who used to be active in Russia before leaving and becoming a critic of the regime. He apparently jumped from an apartment building in Georgetown.

Beyond this, there has been a spate of suicides and deaths among senior Russian businesspeople of late, like the apparent murder-suicide on the Costa Brava, where according to the Spanish police, a former manager from liquefied natural gas producer Novatek killed his wife and daughter and then himself.

In all these cases, the police have claimed no evidence of foul play and each of the departed was described as having been depressed and hitting the bottle beforehand. None of that satisfies those who automatically seen the Kremlin’s hand in all such fatalities.

In the post-Litvinenko, post-Skripal, post-Navalny poisoning era, any time a senior Russian dies for whatever reason, someone will claim foul play. Every dead Russian is an an ‘oligarch’ (none of those who have died of late, even Maganov, merit this title) or a ‘prominent critic of Putin’s’ (despite some claims, Lukoil had not criticised the Ukraine war, just expressed bland hopes for its ‘soonest termination’). The killings follow a ‘Kremlin playbook,’ and the regime that left Polonium smeared all over London and thought seeing the Salisbury Cathedral spire was an adequate cover story, is assumed to have ninjas on hand able to carry out perfect murders without leaving a trace.

The likely truth is much more complex, and says some important things about what is going on in Russia today.

First of all, it is clear that the Russian state does kill. Just ask opposition leaders Alexei Navalny or Vladimir Kara-Murza, both of whom were poisoned by the Federal Security Service (FSB), even if they survived. Or Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal – although you can’t, as one is dead and one in hiding. None of these operations could have been carried out without a sign-off from the very top.

More often, though, it is people within the state apparatus, motivated either by a belief that they are acting on the Kremlin’s behalf or in the pursuit of their own vendettas or, more often, corrupt business. When opposition figure Boris Nemtsov was gunned down in 2015, his enemy was likely indulging a feud of his own but probably felt it was also a gift for Putin, even though in practice it deeply embarrassed Putin and caused something of a behind-the-scenes crisis.

On the other hand, when police Major-General Boris Kolesnikov apparently managed to push past two guards and leap to his death from a sixth-floor window while under arrest, back in 2014, this seems to have been part of a turf war over control of (lucrative) economic crime investigations between the police and the FSB.

Most of the killings that really do look like foul play are actually about money, not politics, and have nothing to do with the Kremlin beyond that this regime allows murder to be an acceptable business practice.

Part of the answer is that there likely is something of an undeclared business war going on, as the pressures of sanctions and the new realities of Russia’s North Koreanisation upset the old balance of power and money. ‘Raiding’ – taking over businesses through fraudulent use of the legal system’ – is on the rise again, and so too are more ruthless ways of stealing assets and resolving disputes.

But it is also likely that there are genuinely more suicides. Some minigarchs are cushioned by their political krysha – ‘roof’, or protection – or the nature of their businesses. Others are seeing their wealth and dreams collapse.

There is a whole body of scientific research on the methodologies of suicides, not least how ‘fashions’ can rise, how different cultures favour different approaches (Americans go for guns, predictably enough, while Koreans go for hanging), and also which are most likely more cries for help (overdoses, for example), than serious bids to end it all. Jumping is one of the more reliable ways of actually dying (with a fatality rate more than twenty times that of overdosing). At least some of these figures could well have genuinely been trying to kill themselves.

That also says something about the mood in Russian business circles. The hawks may be enjoying their current dominance (even if they too must be getting concerned at the way the ‘special military operation’ isn’t quite going to plan), but for many businesspeople, the future is looking grim, especially as Putin’s national security adviser in all but name Nikolai Patrushev hints that the time may be coming for massive renationalisation.

While the state will kill when it chooses, the current spate of deaths and suicides actually tell us more about the real mood of Russia’s business elite, either turning on each other with murderous determination, or despairing at the end of the good times they used to enjoy.