53-year-old Roman Starovoit, Putin’s minister of transport, left his office in the 19th-century building in Moscow city center on July 7, recently remodeled in the ponderous traditional Russian style reserved for ministries, and walked past the big golden two-headed eagle at the entrance.
He drove his beloved new Tesla to the shady, manicured suburb of Rublyovka— favored by Russian elites since the tsars — parked the car in a quiet lot and shot himself. He knew what was coming — Putin had just signed the order for his dismissal, and the minister was facing criminal charges.
Since 2022, Russia’s senior figures have developed an odd habit of falling out of windows and committing suicide in mysterious circumstances, and yet Starovoit’s suicide came as a shock.
The signs so far indicate it was indeed suicide and that the minister may have been trying to protect his family from persecution by the FSB. Once again, Putin’s Russia appears more of an organized crime drama than a 21st-century government.
It appears to be the first suicide of a Russian minister in post-Soviet history: the last time officials of that rank took their own lives was in the aftermath of the failed KGB-orchestrated coup d’état in August 1991.
Starovoit served as minister for just over a year. He perfectly fitted the bureaucratic mold the Russian president favors: humble origins and an unremarkable education. He built his career within the Russian bureaucracy, first in St. Petersburg, then in Moscow, followed by a five-year stint as governor of the Kursk region, until he became minister of transport in May 2024.
In the 2000s and 2010s, he rose through the ranks during a time when the unspoken rule within the Russian bureaucracy was that they could steal as much as they wanted and get away with it, provided they remained loyal.
That changed on the eve of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Like everyone else among Moscow’s elites, Starovoit was well aware of the unfortunate fate of another Putin appointee: Minister for Open Government Mikhail Abyzov, once a close ally of former President Dmitry Medvedev, who has been jailed since 2019 and was sentenced to 12 years in 2023.
Abyzov, roughly the same age as Starovoit, was the kind of businessman who came to work in the government to get protection for his business assets. Smart, handsome, and well-educated, Abyzov made a lot of money doing business in the energy sector: in 2018, Forbes estimated Abyzov’s wealth at $600m.
He made sure to tick all the boxes to keep him and his family safe and wealthy: he acquired American citizenship for the three children from his first marriage — they lived abroad with their mother, often flying across the Atlantic to spend time in the family’s huge apartment in London and a villa in Tuscany. After a peaceful divorce, he lived with a model and flight attendant almost 20 years his junior, and the couple had a son.