By Brian McDonald, Substack, 6/28/26
Brian McDonald is an Irish journalist who has lived in Russia for many years.
Sergei Ivanov’s death last week closes one of the more fascinating unfinished chapters in the story of Putin’s Russia. Just as his formal retirement earlier this year marked the start of what will be the gradual exit of the political leadership that came to power in Russia in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Ivanov was a silovik who might have been president, who for a time seemed to stand nearer than anyone else to Vladimir Putin’s confidence, and his career rose so high that even its ultimate failure had the proportions of triumph.
At 73, his passing came months after he had left his final post, the ornate but diminished title of special presidential envoy for ecology and transport. It might have seemed a strange last office for someone who had sat at the centre of the state as defence minister, secretary of the Security Council, first deputy prime minister and head of the presidential administration, but he embraced it with gusto and was very obviously an animal lover.
His life was tied to Putin’s in myriad ways as both came out of Leningrad and both passed through the world of Soviet intelligence at the same time. Ivanov was rather dry, brusque, controlled, albeit courteous in private by many accounts, but, in contrast to his old friend, almost entirely without warmth in public where he spoke as if speech were a procedure requiring clearance. Although ironically, he sounded more engaging when speaking English than his native Russian.
In the middle years of Putin’s first presidency, Ivanov thrived in the system being built around him, security-minded, European enough to understand the West, suspicious enough not to trust it, patriotic without the circus element of a Zhirinovsky or Rogozin, bureaucratic without being merely grey. He knew languages and the intelligence world, he understood the global system better than most men around Putin and once belonged to the camp that believed Russia could still deal with the old West, or at least with its serious parts.
But he also carried the hard instincts of the security collective and he could be blunt to the point of brutality. As defence minister he presided over an army still crippled by corruption, hazing, bureaucratic rot and the miserable inheritance of the 1990s. The Andrey Sychyov case, in which a conscript was so savagely abused that he lost his legs and genitals, became one of the darkest symbols of that era and Ivanov’s handling of it did him no credit. At the same time, his ministry fumbled the transformation of the Russian armed forces, leaving that task to fall to others.
Yet Ivanov’s defining contest was with Dmitry Medvedev rather than NATO, Washington, Brussels, Ukraine or Chechen militants.
By 2007, the choice of Putin’s successor had become the great court drama of Moscow and Ivanov and Medvedev were elevated together, compared endlessly, and watched for clues in seating arrangements, television coverage, Red Square pageants and presidential body language. Ivanov had the harder profile and where he suggested some form of continuity, the more youthful Medvedev offered a form of progress through legality and modernisation. For a Russia newly rich on oil, with a booming consumer market, but still resentful of humiliation and not yet fully tired of liberal vocabulary, both versions had their uses.
Then Putin went and chose Medvedev, surprising many Russia watchers, and that was the hinge on which Ivanov’s career turned. He didn’t vanish, however, and remained fairly powerful, then became stronger again in 2011 when he was appointed head of the presidential administration, just as Moscow was facing the Bolotnaya protests and Putin was returning to the presidency. In that role he managed the hardening of the system after 2012, the conservative turn, the suspicion of street politics, the tightening attitude to NGOs, media, sexuality, education and the whole world of dissent.
This period was the revenge of officials who regarded the Medvedev interval, with its talk of modernisation, Skolkovo, photo ops with Steve Jobs, burgers with Obama, and cautious media thaw, as frivolous or merely unserious and Ivanov saw liberal gestures as weakness and Western praise as a trap. Although he did show up on a BBC documentary called “Putin, Russia and the West” where he fondly spoke of his relationship with former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Fundamentally, he was never really master of the machine and his relations with parts of the FSB establishment were complicated because he’d come from foreign intelligence, which meant he was never fully absorbed into the internal-security clan. In Russia, where power is tribal as well as personal, closeness to Putin isn’t always enough as Alexey Kudrin, and a few others, could testify.
His departure from the presidential administration in 2016 was carried out smoothly as he was moved sideways into ecology and transport, as left-field an exit ramp as could be imagined in Moscow. There were rumours of ill health, and a fondness for good whiskey, amid a deeper private grief that engulfed his final decade. In 2005, his eldest son Alexander was involved in a traffic incident in Moscow in which a 68-year-old woman, Svetlana Beridze, was struck and killed on a pedestrian crossing. The case was later closed, but the episode became another Russian parable about rank, influence, elitism, immunity and the excesses of the children of power.
Then, in 2014, Alexander drowned in the United Arab Emirates and his death was said to have struck Ivanov with exceptional force. For years, Kremlin insiders would say he hadn’t gotten over it, and was no longer “the old Sergey.”
Whatever was really going on at home, Ivanov was now more often seen with tigers, leopards, birds and bears than with his old government colleagues. There were meetings with international celebrities, including an almost hard to comprehend set piece with Pamela Anderson, to promote the causes that had become his official brief.
Putinism was made by a generation of Saint Petersburg lawyers, intelligence officers, state managers, security men, technocrats, oil people, court ideologues and opportunists. Some were loud and performative but Ivanov belonged to the less voluble inner species, where he was the confidant who knew where the bodies were buried and was too disciplined to mention the cemetery.
The fact that he could have been president adorns all his media obituaries, but most of them miss the nuance that the presidency in Putin’s Russia wasn’t a prize waiting for the most qualified candidate, and was instead a function inside Putin’s own design. Medvedev received it because Putin needed that version of the future in 2008 and Ivanov didn’t because he represented another one. He also had more potential to form an independent power base and would have been less certain to hand back the keys to the Kremlin after a single term, which likely played a role.
Ivanov was also known to take a dim view of those who stole and would most likely have launched a major anti-graft crackdown if he’d found himself calling the shots, which earned him enemies in advance.
In the end, Sergei Ivanov showed what one possible Putin succession might have looked like, harder, colder, more openly security-driven, less theatrical than today’s ideological circus, but no less committed to the supremacy of the state. Like so many players in Russian history, he became something more melancholy than a failure, a man with the knowledge that the warm breeze of the future had once passed close enough for him to feel its heat.