An uneducated, former manual worker who liked to drink, Voroshilov’s chief qualification for the job was that he could out-toady anyone when it came to sucking up to Stalin. Putin similarly promotes people on the basis of slavish loyalty – how else, for example, could his former bodyguard, Alexei Dyumin have become a regional governor?  

These kinds of people naturally only tell their bosses what they want to hear. Most notable in this respect was Lavrentiy Beria, head of Stalin’s secret police. “A lot of functionaries have recently fallen prey to shameless provocation and the sowing of unrest,” he said to Stalin on the day before the Germans launched their invasion of the Soviet Union. “We have to reduce [those] secret agents … to the dust of concentration camps, as aids to international provocateurs wishing to bring us into conflict with Germany.” Beria also reassured Stalin that “my people and I … are staunchly maintaining your view: Hitler will not attack us in 1941.” 

It was not possible to be more wrong. Yet despite all this, Beria kept his job and carried on torturing and killing Stalin’s opponents sycophantic real or imagined. 

However, it isn’t just that dictators like Stalin and Putin are surrounded by sycophants. It’s that even when some individuals decide to risk everything and speak the truth, they are attacked for doing so – their warnings left unheeded.  

On June 17 1941, five days before the Germans invaded, Stalin received a report from Vsevolod Merkulov, Commissar for State Security, saying that an intelligence source from within the German air force command had revealed that “an attack [on the Soviet Union] may be expected at any moment.” Stalin scrawled across the report: “To Comrade Merkulov. You can tell your ‘source’ from the German Air Headquarters that he can go and fuck his mother. This is not a ‘source’, but a disinformant.’

Like Stalin, Putin has a habit of lambasting anyone who does not wholeheartedly support his judgement. Just before the outbreak of war with Ukraine, for instance, he publicly reprimanded his spy chief, Sergei Naryshkin, for not immediately parroting the required party line, and in the process reduced his spymaster to a stammering wreck.