Is Russia a fascist state? A totalitarian one? A dictatorship? A cult of personality? A system? An autocracy? An ideocracy? A kleptocracy? For two days last week, some of the best Russian minds (and a few non-Russians) met in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to debate the nature of the Putin regime and what it may turn into when Putin is no longer in power, whenever and however that may come to pass. The gathering was convened by chess champion and politician Garry Kasparov, who, like the overwhelming majority of the roughly four hundred participants, is living in exile. People came from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Malta, and the Baltic states, but Vilnius was chosen for its geographic and symbolic proximity to Russia.

Mafia states murder people, just like the Mafia does—but they murder only the people who are immune to coercion and blackmail: journalists, for example, or defiantly independent actors like the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, shot dead a year ago in Moscow. “But these murders, and even imprisonments, are on a much smaller scale than in traditional dictatorship because they are not necessary,” says Magyar. Most of the time, coercion will do the job—and mafia states, unlike some others, are pragmatic and do not murder for the sake of it.

The transition from Stalinism to Goodfellas has robbed ideology of its grand historical reach. The mafia-state model proposes thinking about ideology as it would exist in a family. Sometimes the patriarch will have to remind the family of how it thinks of itself—what it sees as its core identity. In the case of Russia, this is Putin proclaiming “traditional values.” Most of the time, the family thinks only of what the outside world is: in the case of Russia, it thinks it is rotten and hostile. This combination serves the same purpose as a totalitarian ideology—it isolates and mobilizes society—but it is more fluid and unevenly applied, in part because a mafia state may not require constant mobilization.

The family is probably the most important part of Magyar’s model. As with any family, it is not a voluntary association: one can be born into it, one can be adopted into it, but one cannot leave it. In the case of Putin’s Russia, few people have tried. Most high-level officials in Russia move from post to post, sometimes losing and sometimes gaining perquisites. Putin’s first prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, who left the family in 2004, was one of a very small number who opted to exit altogether. He told me that Putin, directly and through proxies, made him a series of offers that were not meant to be refused. The offers grew in insistence and the threats became more blatant. Kasyanov refused, and became an opposition agitator and leader of a small opposition party. What has probably kept him alive is that he was never particularly successful or popular. Still, in the last couple of months he has been repeatedly threatened, and in February was attacked by a large group of men in Moscow.

Fortunately for Kasyanov, he was never really adopted into the family. A technocrat from the Yeltsin era, he was sort of the experienced butler who kept the house machinery running while the family moved in. Lesin, on the other hand, was adopted. He was family. He had spent most of his life working in the media; his own company, Video International, was one of the first private businesses in the Soviet Union. Under Boris Yeltsin, Lesin had been in charge of reorganizing state media and in 1999 he became minister of the press, a job he combined with helping Vladimir Putin run for president. Once Putin was elected, it was Lesin who carried out the mafia-style takeover of Media-Most, the country’s largest independent media company. To engineer the takeover, Lesin had the state gas monopoly take unilateral control of Media-Most’s debts and then call them in. When Media-Most’s founder and owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, resisted, he was arrested and held for three days, until he agreed to sign over the company and leave the country.

Unlike most of the Putin clan, Lesin did not grow up with Putin, or serve with him in the KGB, or work with him in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s, and this limited his stature. When one of the native members of the mafia, Yuri Kovalchuk, wanted to take Lesin’s company, Video International, for himself, Lesin was in no position to resist (on paper, Lesin had cashed out of the company years earlier in order to take a series of government jobs, but in reality he continued to profit from it). One of Lesin’s original business partners had died by then, and the other was forced to sell, becoming the hired CEO of his own company.* For Lesin, this would have been a reasonable price to pay for remaining in the family: after a brief break, he was restored to high-level posts in the Putin machine.

In late 2014, however, Lesin abruptly ran into trouble with the family. Rumor had it that he had a falling out with Aleksei Miller, a native member of the Putin clan who is CEO of Gazprom, the state oil conglomerate. As a result, Lesin lost his job as head of the media company nominally owned by Gazprom—in effect, one of several large management structures that control the Kremlin’s media and business interests. Then Lesin left the country, going to Switzerland and, last year, to the United States, where he has long owned property. At a time when much of the clan—including Kovalchuk—is banned from even entering the United States, this was tantamount to abandoning the family. He might have been sent to the doghouse—but that did not give him the right to walk out and slam the door. At a time when any number of Western law-enforcement agencies are investigating the business operations of the Russian elite, Lesin was roaming too far and too freely on enemy territory.

This culminated in his dead body turning up in a Washington, D.C. hotel room last November. In his report last week, the medical examiner stated that in addition to the blunt trauma to the head, Lesin had suffered blunt trauma to his neck, torso, arms, and legs. The New York Times has reported that there was no sign of forced entry to the hotel room but that Lesin did “appear disheveled” when he returned to the hotel after the altercation that caused the injuries. In other words, it looks like Lesin was beaten within an inch of his life and then deposited back at his hotel. He probably had reason to go up to his room, alone, instead of seeking medical help. He died there, and he was found the next morning.

When Lesin’s death was first announced last fall, no one had a kind word for him. The Russian state media, large parts of which he had run, published terse obituaries that said he had died of a heart attack. Articles in the tiny independent media sector and posts by journalists on social networks brimmed with bile. Lesin was remembered as cruel, dishonest, and conniving, and those were probably not his worst qualities. It was perhaps a unique case of a man who seemed to have failed to charm a single person in his entire life.

There are myriad ways to kill a person. Many of them have been used against enemies of the Putin regime: they have been shot, poisoned with at least a couple of different substances, and have suffered mysterious heart attacks. Each killing sends its own message, and most at least try to create the illusion of deniability. Whoever killed Lesin was apparently trying to do the opposite. Mafia clans sometimes like to remind their members that rules are not to be broken.

* Disclosure: In 2011-2012 I served as editor-in-chief of a publishing house owned by Sergei Vasilyev, the third cofounder of Video International. I reported to Vasilyev and worked with many VI executives, since the company sold advertising and provided distribution services to the publishing house. Also, in 1996-2001 I worked for Itogi, a weekly newsmagazine owned by Media Most, the Gusinsky holding. I was the reporter who covered Gusinsky’s arrest and the deal that resulted.