WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Is Vladimir Putin’s endgame a return to feudalism?

A longtime ally of the Russian president and former inner circle tycoon, Sergei Pugachev, charged this week that Putin was making “serfs” of businessmen as he accuses them of crimes and confiscates their wealth.

“Today in Russia there is no private property,” Pugachev said in an interview with the Financial Times. “There are only serfs who belong to Putin.”

Pugachev is not the first to speak of a return to serfdom in the wake of recent actions by Putin to defy Western sanctions and continue his piecemeal incursion into Ukraine.

“Putin Brings Back Serfdom” was a comment posted last week by Leonid Bershidsky, a Russian journalist now living in Berlin, on Bloomberg View.

Bershidsky cited Putin ally Valery Zorkin, chairman of the Constitutional Court, as saying recently that Russia’s abolition of serfdom in 1861 might have been a mistake.

In the feudal system, serfs were bound to work for the lord of the manor in exchange for protection and means of subsistence, but had no ownership rights. The practice disappeared in Western Europe in the Middle Ages.

Russia was one of the last major countries to emancipate serfs as Czar Alexander II sought to defuse the buildup of revolutionary pressures that nonetheless engulfed Russia in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution.

The subsequent Soviet state was more like a kleptocracy than the communist vision of Karl Marx, as party leaders enjoyed the fruits of the country’s natural resources and industrial prowess.

Oppression, in fact, is necessary to hold the sprawling territory together, whether it is the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union or the current Russian Federation, says author Robert Kaplan.

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“Russia’s landmass encompasses half the longitudes of the earth, with the result that central control must be oppressive merely to be effective,” Kaplan, chief geopolitical analyst for the Stratfor consulting group, wrote in an article this week. “The way in which President Vladimir Putin rules Russia is merely a culmination of how Russia has been ruled for more than a millennium.”

The Russian Parliament took its first vote this week — the day after Putin’s birthday — to approve a bill that would allow individuals in Putin’s inner circle subject to Western sanctions to seek compensation from the government for any confiscated assets abroad. Moscow could in turn expropriate foreign assets in Russia to pay the compensation.

It would be hard to imagine legislation that could do more to discourage foreign investment. And much of the damage is already done, whether or not Russia completes the legislative process to enact the bill into law.

Putin’s economic regime is often characterized as crony capitalism, but the disregard for property rights — the cornerstone of capitalist enterprise — is revealing it as something else.

There are indeed cronies — Kaplan uses the word “camarilla,” a term for courtiers who enjoy the ruler’s favor — but less and less of capitalism.

For one thing, these courtiers, like Pugachev, can fall into disfavor. The government seized his multibillion-dollar shipping empire in 2012 and chased him out of the country for his alleged role in the failure of a bank that required a government bailout.

Last month, Moscow placed another multibillionaire oligarch, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, under house arrest and then took steps to expropriate an oil company that is part of his empire and which state-owned oil giant Rosneft is said to covet.

Putin may be building a quasi-feudal economic system, but Kaplan is also worried that whatever would replace him would be worse.

“Voices in the Western media wax hopeful that Putin can be toppled if he miscalculates on his military intervention in Ukraine,” Kaplan says. “But were that to occur, it is more likely that Russia itself could weaken or fall into chaos, or that an even more brutal dictator would emerge to forestall such chaos.”

A full or partial breakup of the Russian Federation would be a more likely outcome than any sort of Western-style democracy taking hold, Kaplan fears, and that would have its own potential for disruption.