What do Putin and his circle actually want Russia to become?
Not the slogan version. The real one.

If you strip away all the talk about “sovereignty,” “traditional values,” and “multipolar world,” you don’t see a modern state taking shape. You see a clan kingdom. A feudal system where power, money, and safety pass by blood and loyalty, not by law. Where ministries feel like family businesses. Where whole regions are treated like inherited estates.

They don’t want working democracy, independent courts, or real separation of powers. They know very well that without these things, efficiency drops and the country falls behind. That is an acceptable sacrifice. The goal is simple: everything that matters belongs to them and to their heirs.

Tonight we’re going inside House Putin, the real-life Game of Thrones at the top of the Russian state, to see how this feudal system works, and why its cracks are already showing.

Here’s our roadmap for tonight:

1. House Putin: The First Family – how the ruling house climbed to the top and built its private ecosystem of relatives, companies, and estates.
   
2. War Clans – how the security services and defense industry turned into armored family guilds.
   
3. Smaller Thrones in Provinces – how far this feudal map spreads beyond Moscow into regions and republics.
   
4. Wives and Lovers – how women around these men become legal shields, asset holders, and part of the armor.
   
5. Why This Kingdom Will Crack – what hereditary rule means for Russia’s future, for the war, and for the people trapped inside it.
   

My upcoming novel, The Snow Queen’s Spring, dives into the same hidden mechanics of Russia’s clan system: how favors, family ties, and silent obligations often decide more than any written law. Through the lives of ordinary people caught inside this hierarchy, the story shows how nepotism shapes careers, crushes hopes, and decides who gets protected and who gets sacrificed.

If you’d like to follow that journey as the book takes shape, you can join me on Instagram, Facebook, or subscribe to my newsletter. I share early fragments and research finds there. All the links are in the description.

Now, let’s step inside House Putin: The First Family.

House Putin: The First Family

At the center of this system stands one family. Not a party, not an ideology, but House Putin.

If you look at Proekt’s family tree of the Russian government, you see how widely this house has branched. The president’s cousins, their children, the women in his life and their kin, his daughters and their partners – twenty-six people in total – each has been given a place. Some get ministries. Some get energy companies. Some get media empires and foundations that live on state money. It is a full ecosystem around one man’s name.

The most visible branch comes from a late cousin, Yevgeny Putin. His daughter Anna Tsivileva is a deputy defense minister, promoted in wartime to oversee a department that spends trillions of rubles. Her husband, Sergei Tsivilev, runs the Energy Ministry. Her brother, Mikhail Putin, is a top manager at Gazprom, while another young relative owns shares in a business hub at Sheremetyevo airport, filled with state companies as tenants. This is not random career success. It is a single line of kin that now sits on coal, gas, electricity, and defense procurement at the same time.

Another branch is built on paternity that is obvious to everyone, although never publicly admitted. Putin’s own two daughters, Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova, head projects that receive lavish state support. One leads a cluster of medical and genetic companies that earn millions from clinics serving the Russian elite. The other runs Innopraktika, a foundation tied to Moscow State University that now wants to become a “one-stop shop” for high-tech and AI projects across the country. Their work may be serious. But their unique advantage is clear.

Then there are the women whose official status the Kremlin never explains but whose careers track perfectly with proximity to the throne. Alina Kabaeva, a former Olympic champion, spent years in the State Duma and today chairs National Media Group, a giant that controls key TV channels and newspapers.

There is a clear pattern. Wives and ex-wives with different last names. “Private” firms that feed almost entirely on state contracts. Property and shareholdings registered to cousins, in-laws, and adult children. Investigations into Putin’s circle show how villas, apartments, and dacha cooperatives are built so that everything is reachable, everyone is nearby, and almost nothing is formally his. On paper, the president is a modest public servant. In reality, his extended household lives in closed settlements around Moscow, with private security, their own infrastructure, and neighbors drawn from the same inner circle.

This secrecy is the oddest thing about Russia’s would-be aristocracy. Real aristocrats in history showed off their status. Castles, coats of arms, public titles: the whole point was to flaunt that you stand above the common herd and above the law. Putin’s house wants the same privileges but hides them under layers of shell companies, fake divorces, and second-tier last names.

Why? Partly because Russia still pretends to be a republic with laws. Partly because the people running it know that what they have built cannot survive sunlight. So House Putin does the only thing it can: it keeps telling citizens that nothing is personal while quietly turning the country into one large family business.

War Clans

If House Putin is the royal family, the war clans are its armored guard. These are the people from the KGB, FSB, army, and defense industry.

For ordinary Russians, the siloviki are still sold as stern patriots who keep chaos at bay. In reality, they form a separate estate inside the estate. People with security backgrounds are heavily overrepresented in top posts. They bring a specific culture. Hierarchy. Secrecy. Suspicion of any independent institution. Their instinctive response to every problem is control and punishment, not competence and law.

And the money they make is never fully safe. Because there is no rule of law, the same system that once helped you hide assets can strip you of everything when your protector falls. Since 2023, prosecutors have sharply increased confiscations of officials’ property. In corruption cases, courts seize entire portfolios of houses and land, including those registered to relatives.

This is the hidden tragedy of the war clans. They spent decades wrecking the legal system so they could rule by personal favor. Now they know one thing: if they ever slip from the horse, there is no court, no constitution, no independent press that will defend their rights. There is only the next clan, already sharpening its knives.

Smaller Thrones in Provinces

In Moscow, the clans sit on ministries and state banks. In the regions, they sit on territories. For many governors and local bosses, the real goal is not to run a province well. It is to turn that province into a family estate that can be handed down like a castle and its lands.

On paper, Russian regions are part of a federation. Governors swear loyalty to the constitution. Parliaments vote on budgets. Courts claim independence. In reality, most of these structures are wrapped in tight local networks of kin and trusted allies. Elections are heavily managed. Competition is weak. Once a group settles in, it will only bring its own members aboard.

The most extreme example is Chechnya. Since 2000, the republic has basically been ruled by one family. First, Akhmad Kadyrov as head of the region, then his son, Ramzan. The local government is filled with relatives: brothers, sisters, uncles, cousins, and in-laws. Some run ministries or districts. Others control security structures and lucrative state-backed projects.

In recent years, the process has sped up. Ramzan’s teenage son, Adam, has been given one senior post after another, from police and National Guard-related roles to a seat on the regional security council. Other sons and nephews are placed in ministries or as heads of “youth” and sports departments. This is a dynasty teaching itself to rule.

The same logic appears in Dagestan and other national republics. There, power has long been built on clan and family ties, with local terms like “tukhumstvo” describing rule by extended kin groups. Even when Moscow parachutes in a new leader with promises to fight corruption, the pattern repeats. Old bosses fall, their networks are broken, and soon a new circle of relatives and associates grows around the new appointee.

Business elites in the regions are woven into this system. Huge state contracts in construction, garbage collection, and real estate go to those local tycoons who keep close ties to the ruling house in their republic. The main condition is loyalty. No serious political ambitions. No independent media. In exchange, they are allowed to squeeze money from the region and park it in Moscow or Dubai.

For ordinary people, this local dynasty system bears no good. If a governor’s relative runs the main construction firm, and his ally heads the local court, and his cousin owns the television channel, where do you go with a complaint about a stolen tender, a collapsed house, or a crooked conscription office?

Wives and Lovers

If you want hereditary power but you can’t say it out loud, you need tricks. In Russia’s top circles, those tricks often involve wives, ex-wives, girlfriends, and “private” businesswomen who somehow end up owning real estate and companies tied to men in high office.

Russian law at least pretends to fight conflicts of interest. Officials must declare income, property, and the assets of spouses and minor children. They cannot run businesses directly or hold foreign bank accounts. On paper, this sounds like control. In practice, it has produced a wave of “sudden divorces” and mysterious rich relatives.

Back in the 2010s, Russian media and anti-corruption activists noticed a pattern: dozens of State Duma deputies divorced just before they had to file tax declarations. The parliament’s own ethics commission admitted that fake divorces were possible. Regional commentators called them the most common trick for hiding assets. After divorce, the ex-wife conveniently becomes an independent businesswoman with property that no longer appears in the official’s paperwork.

That’s how officials “get rid” of businesses and real estate: by passing them to spouses, former spouses, and adult children. Respectable family men suddenly turned into “lonely” politicians with several children and no wife, right after anti-corruption laws were tightened.

Navalny’s investigations into Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s family are a classic case. Activists found that his daughter owned luxury apartments in elite Moscow complexes worth hundreds of millions of rubles. A separate investigation tracked a huge mansion outside Moscow. First, the land was registered to Shoigu’s daughter as soon as she turned eighteen. Later, records were altered so that the property appeared under the name of his wife’s sister. In parallel, media noticed that some names quietly vanished from the public property registry once these links were exposed.

Sanctions have made this strategy even more visible. Western governments now routinely sanction not just officials and oligarchs, but also their wives, ex-wives, partners, and adult children, because so many assets are formally in their names. Investigations into oligarch Arkady Rotenberg, for example, describe how he registered property through closed-end funds and an unofficial wife to shield it from Russian and foreign scrutiny.

Can a woman climb high in Russia without marrying or being born into a clan? Formally, yes, it’s possible. Valentina Matvienko, Elvira Nabiullina, a few others prove it. But they rise not as independent political figures with their own base. They’re promoted as hyper-loyal service staff.

Matvienko is the perfect symbol: governor of St. Petersburg, now the speaker of the Federation Council. She’s always covering for whatever the Kremlin decides: Crimea, war, rubber-stamp laws that shred the constitution. That’s the price: your name becomes a human shield for decisions you didn’t make but never resisted. Your personal history is welded to crimes you can no longer walk away from. No normal retirement. No honest memoirs. No chance to say, “I didn’t know.” When this system falls, women like her won’t be remembered as pioneers who broke a glass ceiling. They’ll be seen as part of the armor that protected the clans while they looted the country.

Why This Kingdom Will Crack

If you look at this whole picture from above, it seems stable at first. A ruler who trusts only family. Security clans that enforce his will. Regional dynasties that keep local order. Wives and ex-wives secretly holding property. But this is not a modern state. It is a personalist regime, a form of rule that causes three things. Heavier repression. Worse economics. And more stupid decisions.

When everything depends on one man and his inner circle, loyalty matters more than competence. People are promoted because they are “ours,” not because they know how to run an army or a power grid. That’s how such regimes become more corrupt, more prone to wars, and weaker in the long run.

Freedom House’s latest reports describe Russia bluntly as a kleptocracy: a system whose defining feature is the plunder of public wealth by ruling elites. Tens of thousands of officials are caught in corruption offenses each year. The most common schemes involve abuse of office and misappropriation of budget funds. All of this is the natural byproduct of the clan system, not a glitch.

The war against Ukraine has only sharpened these contradictions. To keep the clans loyal under sanctions, the Kremlin has to let them continue feeding on state contracts, parallel imports, and new war budgets. But at the same time, it needs scapegoats and cash. That is where the new wave of confiscations comes in.

This is the final irony of Putin’s “Game of Thrones” project. If you have spent twenty years destroying independent courts, free media, and constitutional limits so that law never touches you, then law will not protect you when your turn comes.

Today, mid-level judges, deputy ministers, and provincial oligarchs watch their peers lose everything in sudden corruption cases and “patriotic” confiscations. And they realize a simple truth: in this kingdom, your rights last exactly as long as you are useful to the house at the top. The day you fall from grace, there will be no one to speak up for you.

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