Those considering Russia’s future must look at the facts, something Ivanov’s death has only made more urgent. The former KGB general was 73, the same age as his more junior KGB colleague, Putin. He was smart, tough, powerful, and not very nice; none of which saved him from the ultimate fate of all humans.
Unless Putin has found the secret to eternal life (something he was heard discussing with another 73-year-old, the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping), death will come for him too. With no designated successor, there is a risk that a country bristling with nuclear arms and an elite that repeatedly airs its grievances against the 21st century might be left rudderless.
There was a time when Ivanov was considered a possible successor. The two men had known each other since the 1970s, when both served in the Leningrad department of the Soviet KGB.
Although the careers of the two former Soviet spies as well as their mindset seem quite similar at first glance, their paths diverged after the collapse of the Soviet regime, and they had very different experiences of the tumultuous 1990s. Putin left the KGB at the moment of the 1991 coup d’état to join the democratic Leningrad mayor Anatoly Sobchak, while Ivanov continued to serve in the intelligence agency that became the SVR.
In 1991, Putin became head of the Committee of External Relations of the City Hall of St. Petersburg, responsible for the delivery of food supplies, a job that involved navigating between criminal bands and new capitalist entities in the city, a sometimes lethally dangerous game that provided dubious experience for his future leadership. Meanwhile, Ivanov navigated the long corridors at the Moscow HQ of the foreign intelligence agency.
Inside the KGB veterans’ community, Ivanov was always ranked higher than Putin. After all, during the Cold War, Ivanov served in Western Europe and Africa, unlike Putin, who had never left the Communist East until the Soviet Union collapsed. Within the Soviet intelligence hierarchy, Ivanov reached the rank of general, unlike Putin, whose final KGB rank was lieutenant colonel.
By 1999, when Ivanov entered the national spotlight thanks to his closeness to Putin, who appointed him secretary of the Security Council, Russian intelligence had largely succeeded in selling to both Russian and international audiences a wholly fictitious narrative: that the foreign intelligence branch of the KGB should be regarded as the most liberal and least violent part of the Soviet security apparatus — not unlike its Western counterparts — because it had not participated in repression inside the country and had been exposed to Western values. That narrative was wrong on both accounts, but was nevertheless accepted by many as a fact. As senior figures in this supposedly less ideological movement, both Putin and Ivanov benefited.
Carefully cultivating his public image, Ivanov also made sure journalists noted his command of English and his love of The Beatles. Taken together, these qualities made Ivanov the ideal product of the KGB — worldly, rational, experienced and not inclined to violence. Or such was the image he projected. The reality was different, as soon became clear.
In May 2005, when Ivanov was serving as Putin’s defense minister, his 28-year-old son, Alexander, drove his Volkswagen into a 69-year-old woman on a Moscow street. She died instantly.
The official investigation found Ivanov junior not guilty, and many suspected a cover-up. When the victim’s relatives refused to accept the verdict, the police opened a new investigation — this time against the victim’s son-in-law, accusing him of assaulting the younger Ivanov at the scene of the accident. It effectively silenced the family, which stopped talking to journalists. Ivanov senior was the first to claim that it was his son, not the dead woman, who had been the victim of brutality.
When faced with a crisis involving his own family, Ivanov proved vindictive and brutal — though he never quite reached the level of his friend, Putin. Ivanov’s objective was to silence the victim’s family, and he imitated an approach adopted by the KGB in the late-era Soviet Union, when the Committee of State Security pressured Soviet dissidents into silence and obedience through a variety of means, but stopped short of killing them. It was nonetheless very effective.
On the institutional level, Ivanov was not much different.
A year before his son killed the pensioner, Ivanov had sanctioned the first assassination carried out abroad by Russian military intelligence in the post-Soviet era. In February 2004, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a Chechen warlord and former vice president of the breakaway republic, was killed when his white Toyota Land Cruiser exploded in the Qatari capital, Doha.
The operation was carried out by officers from a newly created unit within Russian military intelligence, established by Ivanov, then defense minister. He was proud of the operation, even though it was botched. The assassins were arrested by the Qatari authorities, and it took the Kremlin a considerable and embarrassing effort to get them back to Moscow — where they received a hero’s welcome.
Ivanov largely failed in his attempt to reform the Russian army, but he did achieve something as defense minister; the Qatari assassination started a long tradition of Kremlin-sponsored killings abroad by military intelligence. These were often sloppy, badly organized and executed, but always brutal.
What might have happened — in Georgia, and later in Ukraine — if Putin had chosen Ivanov as his successor? After all, that would have made him president from 2008-12. Might Ivanov, the KGB general, have been a rational and less aggressive leader?
It is tempting to imagine this. By all accounts, he was less reckless than Putin. Apparently, Ivanov’s dream was to create some sort of nationalist state within Russian borders, not Stalin’s aggressive imperial war machine, which Putin’s Russia increasingly resembles.
But Ivanov shared with Putin the same defining trauma — the humiliation of the KGB as a result of the collapse of the Soviet empire. And just like Putin, he believed Russia should be ruled by the security services and the military, because those were the only institutions he truly trusted.
Unlike Putin, however, Ivanov never had his own team. Even as defense minister, he was constantly manipulated and misled by his generals.
Ironically, that weakness would probably have made confrontation with the West more, not less, likely. Even if Ivanov himself had resisted responding with violence to the trigger points of KGB paranoia, such as the Arab Spring or the popular revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, the security services would have demanded such a confrontation, with or without his consent.
And that is perhaps the main lesson for those thinking today about Putin’s successor. In wartime, the first candidates will inevitably come from the security services or the military.
It is highly unlikely that anyone elevated to the Kremlin from the ranks of the security services would be interested in ending Russia’s war with the West.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation was published in 2025.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
