From Brezhnev’s cold to Stalin’s whodunit, what the deaths of Russian leaders teach about the end of the Putin era

LONDON – The yellow of the death of Stalin. The bloodless coup to testify Khrushchev. The fatal “cold” of Brezhnev. These are some of the unusual and dramatic ways in which the leaders of the Kremlin left the scene in the past. The sentence uttered by the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the aftermath of the first anniversary of the Russian invasion, “it will be his own entourage that will eliminate Putin”, and the indiscretions gathered by the Financial Times according to which, if things get worse, the new nomenklatura could oust him “with a revolver shot, with cyanide or with another method”, reopen the hypotheses on the possibility that the Russian president will lose power because of the war.