Putin’s Destructive ‘Deathonomics’ Doomed to Failure, Lea and Taskin Argue
Paul Goble
Sunday, April 5, 2026
Staunton, April 2 – The term “deathonomics,” introduced by Vladislav Inozemtsev to describe the way in which Putin has used monetary payments to get Russians to die for him in Ukraine not only is far more pernicious than many assume but is doomed to failure, according to Aaron Lea and Borukh Taskin.
The two Israeli analysts of Russian background say that Putin’s deathonomics is “rooted in the GULAG and not merely as a metaphor but through an actual economic genealogy. The GULAG was the core of the Stalinist economy, a system in which death was embedded within the production plan as depreciation (kasparovru.com/material.php?id=69CE4433B2723).
“Stalin, at least, feigned the construction of a civilization—canals, factories, mines,” the two analysts argue; but “Putin creates nothing save for the short-term consumption of the payouts issued for death. Operating within the Russian Federation today is the GULAG motto: ‘You die today; I’ll die tomorrow.’"
This represents the quintessence of an ethics of survival at the expense of others—a mindset in which the present feeds upon the future. Varlam Shalamov understood that the Gulag’s primary product was the elimination of the "inner witness"; for a person who survives through complicity or silence loses the capacity to bear witness against the system.”
In Putin’s Russia, they point out, “a family which accepts a death payout has effectively silenced not only its own voice but also the very question of meaning; the "coffin money" has purchased their consent, rendering their conscience an inconvenient burden.” But this transaction does more than that.
“When death becomes a private contractual arrangement between the state and a contractor, the very space of shared existence—what the ancient Greeks termed the polis—is abolished. Deathonomics supplants political will with a market transaction, thereby rendering collective refusal structurally impossible while engaging in an act of demographic cannibalism.”
As economists have shown, Lea and Taskin observe, this process costs “the economy 30 to 40 years of potential labor, tax revenue, and innovation for every person killed—replacing long-term human capital with short-term inflationary demand, and effectively transforming into a financial pyramid scheme where the interest is paid in the lives of those yet unborn.”
But as it does that, it also dooms the Putin system because that system “rests on a temporal arbitrage as the Kremlin pays more for death than a life is worth. Yet this reosurce is finite, the labor market is overheated, and wages on the home front are rising even as the pool of individuals for whom contract payouts exceed lifetime earning potential falls.”
And that means, the analysts say that “Putin has fallen into the trap of escalating subsidies: lower the payouts, and recruitment collapses; raise them, and budgetary ruin accelerates. The true civilizational tragedy lies not in the fact that this pyramid scheme will eventually collapse, however, but in what will be left in its wake.”
Russian society, of course, “will survive deathonomics, but it will continue with a rewritten moral code, one in which the price of a human life having been established, ‘the inner witness,’ the moral compass within [that survivors of the GULAG talked about] has been abolished.”
“Consequently,” Lea and Taskin argue, the era of "Post-Putinism" will not usher in a new, democratic Putin figure; rather, it will entail the absolute dominion of the security services over a population that has unlearned how to be human.” But even that is not the most serious consequence of Putin’s innovation.
Whatever some think, “deathonomics is not the cause of the economic catastrophe” now facing Russia. Rather I is the very embodiment of the maxim, ‘you die today and I’ll die to tomorrow,’ an invoice for centuries of the systemic devaluation of the individual, now being presented for settlement which generations yet unborn will be obligated to pay.”
