"In a bed", then. I.e., his life was not shortened deliberately by other people. And Beria was never leader of Russia or the Soviet Union: he was head of the s

"In a bed", then. I.e., his life was not shortened deliberately by other people. And Beria was never leader of Russia or the Soviet Union: he was head of the spy service, a position held since 2008 by Alexander Bortnikov. You've heard about Beria, but probably haven't heard about Bortnikov because Bortnikov has been much much less violent and hasn't made a habit of raping Russian women in plain view on the streets of Moscow like Beria did. And I disagree with your assertion that the Putin regime is more autocratic than the other Russian / Soviet regimes since the death of Stalin. Opposition leader Navalny for example held that Crimea should be part of Russia; ditto Yeltsin. (And Russia's holdings in Donetsk, Zaphorizia and Kherson oblasts can be seen as necessary to make it viable to hold Crimea over the long term: the so-called land bridge.) If Putin dies suddenly, Russian politics probably goes on mostly the way it has been going: i.e., very slowly becoming more liberal and more committed to the rule of law, with some setbacks. (I do not deny that Yeltsin was more liberal than Putin.) Arguably the US's finest diplomat was George Kennan, who predicted before Putin became leader of Russia that NATO's policy of expanding eastward would eventually cause Moscow to react with military force, which Kennan correctly predicted would be misinterpreted by the West as a re-awakening of Russian imperialist ambitions. Kissenger was also against NATO expansion as were many other Western diplomats and international-relations experts.