Many of us who grew up in the Soviet Union find grimly familiar features in today’s Russia, including a blossoming official paranoia grounded in a siege mentality. But as Tolstoy might say, each paranoid regime is paranoid in its own way.

Putin’s long-standing view of the West as a cynical, transactional adversary has more in common with a gangland boss’s caution in the face of rivals than with the ideological competition that was still playing out even in the Soviet Union’s final relatively vegetarian years. But Putin’s fear of his own people threatens to reach a Stalinist fever pitch, even if it’s not quite there yet.

The arrest of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and the tightening travel restrictions for regime functionaries are symptoms of the first of these two patterns. The death of pro-war blogger Maxim Fomin, whose pen name was Vladlen Tatarsky, and the official handling of the bombing attack that killed him, is a clear sign of the second.

On the surface, the recent arrest of Gershkovich, allegedly for spying, is reminiscent of an event I watched unfold when I was still in high school — the Nicholas Daniloff saga.

Daniloff, like Gershkovich the son of a Russian immigrant to the U.S., was at the tail end of his posting as Moscow bureau chief for U.S. News and World Report in 1986, when he was framed by a Soviet contact who had handed him an envelope containing classified documents. The KGB was immediately there to arrest him, rather transparently so he could be exchanged for Russian intelligence officer Gennadi Zakharov, apprehended a few days earlier in New York. Both Daniloff and Zakharov were simultaneously released to their countries’ embassies two weeks later.

Gershkovich’s arrest appears to follow a similar pattern. A few days before Russian counterintelligence grabbed Gershkovich, the U.S. indicted and arrested Yevgeny Cherkasov, who had been studying in the U.S. under a false Brazilian identity. Prisoner exchanges with the West are nothing new for Putin’s Kremlin. Back in 2010 it received a group of Russian "illegals” from the U.S. in exchange for four people convicted of spying in Russia, including Sergei Skripal, whom Russia later tried to poison in the U.K.; late last year, it traded U.S. basketball player Brittney Griner, accused of smuggling a tiny amount of cannabis oil into Russia, for arms dealer Viktor Bout, who had been doing time in the U.S.

Unable to negotiate with the West, where leaders have now given up trying to talk to him and where a consensus has emerged that he is to be treated as a war criminal, Putin appears to have come to see hostages as his only leverage. He sees the West’s willingness to trade as proof that his enemies follow the same logic. That — and likely not a Soviet-style fear of defections — has dictated the tightening of travel restrictions for Russian government employees reported on Monday by the Financial Times’s Max Seddon, at first sight, another Soviet throwback.

Police and other regime enforcers have been banned from traveling to most countries since 2017; they’ve faced restrictions on leaving Russia since Putin’s war on Ukraine began in 2014. Even back then, the fear of unlawful arrests by Western special services was the official reason for the curbs. But now that athletes and journalists are fair game in Russia the way they never were in the Soviet Union — the Daniloff case was exceedingly rare since the Soviet authorities preferred to expel, not imprison Western reporters — anyone working for the regime is, in Putin’s eyes, a potential hostage if allowed to travel to the West.

Voluntary defections are likely only a secondary concern: More than a year into the current phase of the war in Ukraine, no senior Russian officials or enforcers are known to have fled to the West, even though some of them — especially those with property, cash and contacts in Western nations — had better chances to do so than their Soviet predecessors. The risks of such a move outweigh those of sticking with the regime even if one doesn’t believe anti-Ukrainian propaganda and is pessimistic about Russia’s future.

So Putin doesn’t appear to suspect disloyalty among officials. Since the massive invasion of Ukraine began, there have been no show trials of traitors or saboteurs at state enterprises, no charges of treason against generals, governors or government officials and the few dissenters among the Russian elite — notably, Anatoly Chubais, the veteran bureaucrat who was one of Putin’s early promoters — have been allowed to leave the country. Regime servants as a group have fallen into line, or at least fallen silent, so easily that Putin has had no reason to instill fear in them.Ordinary Russians are another matter.

In 2022 alone, some 5,000 people have been convicted of "discrediting the Russian armed forces” — that is, for protesting in various forms, mostly on the social networks, against the invasion. Some of them have received harsh sentences quite in line with Stalinist practice — one blogger, for example, was jailed for 8.5 years. Even though most of the political opposition has been imprisoned or exiled, the regime continues waging a ruthless war even on its rank-and file members. And while the pro-war opposition, which considers Putin too soft and too in thrall to his corrupt coterie, as well as the propagandists aligned with the Wagner mercenary army have been largely allowed to operate, each of these groups has received a powerful signal that the Kremlin is not interested in protecting them as its own. The murder of nationalist activist Darya Dugina last year and the killing of pro-Wagner milblogger Tatarsky show that, at the very least, the Kremlin is more interested in exploiting their deaths for propaganda purposes than in preventing them.

A Ukrainian woman was accused of blowing up Dugina with a car bomb; in the Tatarsky case, a 26-year-old St. Petersburg woman, Darya Trepova, has been arrested for allegedly handing Tatarsky a statuette stuffed with explosive before his meeting with fans in a St. Petersburg cafe owned by Wagner mercenary army founder Yevgeny Prigozhin. Trepova says she has been framed. In any case, Russia’s National Anti-Terrorist Committee, a government body coordinating anti-terrorist enforcement, quickly declared her an adherent of opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s banned Anti-Corruption Foundation. Indeed, Trepova’s name can be found in a leaked database of Navalny supporters that police have used to harass dissidents.

None of what the regime has undertaken so far compares even remotely with the horrible scale of Stalinist reprisals — and, of course, not even the elite, and especially not senior officials, were exempt from those. Putin, however, appears intent on showing the nation that he could go down that route if faced with more visible dissent than the current sporadic, rather timid antiwar protest. The ultrapatriots and the people around Prigozhin also have every reason to worry: For Putin, only the state and people who represent the state stand for Russia; all others are automatically suspect, even if they can be useful at times.

If Putin’s paranoia isn’t as gruesome as Stalin’s, it feels hopelessly grim in its own peculiar way. In a book documenting his career as a Cold War reporter, Nicholas Daniloff wrote, "The Soviet Russia I came to know was much more complex than a simple generator of evil.” I doubt anyone on the receiving end of Putin’s postmodern improvisations on themes from the Soviet past could be as optimistic.

Leonid Bershidsky is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s "1984” and Franz Kafka’s "The Trial.”