The Hidden Center

"Every minor work has a secret author and every secret author is, by definition, a writer of masterpieces. Who writes the minor work? A minor writer, or so it appears. The poor man's wife can testify to that, she's seen him sitting at the table, bent over the blank pages, restless in his chair, his pen racing over the paper. The evidence would seem to be incontrovertible. But what she's seen is only the outside. The shell of literature. A semblance," said the old man to Archimboldi and Archimboldi thought of Ansky. "The person who really writes the minor work is a secret writer who accepts only the dictates of a masterpiece...

"Excuse the metaphors. Sometimes, in my excitement, I wax romantic. But listen. Every work that isn't a masterpiece is, in a sense, a part of a vast camouflage. You've been a soldier, I imagine, and you know what I mean. Every book that isn't a masterpiece is cannon fodder, a slogging foot solider, a piece to be sacrificed, since in multiple ways it mimics the design of the masterpiece. When I came to this realization, I gave up writing. Still, my mind didn't stop working. In fact, it worked better when I wasn't writing. I asked myself: why does a masterpiece need to be hidden? What strange forces wreath it in secrecy and mystery?

...Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it."
- Roberto Bolaño, 2666

It took me a long time to read this book--so long that it has already stopped being fashionable. I read The Savage Detectives late, too, but very quickly: after you get through the first, deliberately naif-puerile-bohemian section, the rest is an irresistible and momentous narrative that engulfs you whole. I have nothing but praise and admiration for it; there are few works of literature that better capture the experience of being around poets and feeling in pursuit of something, and do it with so little sentimentality or cynicism. With 2666, I am much more conflicted.

First, the book is long. It is long for a host of good reasons, and the length does become less pressing as one nears the end; still, the weight imposes a certain dread and a set of expectations that the narrative is not designed to fulfill. Originally, Bolaño wanted it to be published as five books (primarily for financial reasons). I can't help but wonder if it would not have been better that way, especially because it would have fit more neatly with his earlier work. Second--and this is of course a related complaint--the individual parts are uneasy with one another. Sometimes Bolaño seems enraptured by their separate plotlines and pursues them further than they should really go, only to be pulled back by the centripetal force of the novel's center.

This "hidden center," as we are informed by the brief concluding essay, is something Bolaño thought of as crucial to the narrative. It is supposed, of course, to be tied in with the date 2666 (which is not, to my knowledge, even mentioned), and it has something to do with the murders and with the city of Santa Teresa. We are evidently to puzzle over the book and find it, and all the mysteries and loose ends will be revealed. I cannot be the only reader who resents having to play this kind of game. I resent it in Joyce, I resent it in Cortázar, and, depending on my mood, I definitely resent it in Eco. (I'll make an exception for Pale Fire.) It amounts to a kind of crude literalist interpretation of every author's fondest wish--to be read carefully. Invariably these puzzle-box novels carry with them a claim of profundity, but the artificiality of the device belies this and reduces them to the status of a Choose Your Own Adventure. This is even worse when the author is dead and hence no longer able to make ex cathedra pronouncements à la J. K. Rowling.

Fortunately, 2666 is admirably capable of redeeming itself. Bolaño's real gift as a writer is not simply his sensitivity to mysterious, unarticulable driving forces. It is also his ability to make new stories sprout from every nook and cranny of the narrative. In 2666, minor, rich, barely relevant stories are everywhere: they're found in notebooks, in casual conversations, on the Internet. Every murder, even, is its own story. It is precisely these literary blooms--which, under the theory of the hidden center, would no doubt appear as "minor works"--that give the most rewarding structure to the book. Forget Santa Teresa; Bolaño has other stories to tell.

My own reading, then--adopted, in true contemporary spirit, in contradiction to the author's explicit statements--is one in which the center disappears. The Savage Detectives is a spiral with no center, or rather with a center consisting of an insoluble (?) puzzle. 2666 is too. The lines converge towards some kind of point, sure, but this point is in effect an emptiness. One can give this emptiness a mystical twist--or see it as a red herring. It matters little. 2666 might disintegrate, but its stories remain.

The Search for Classicism

Especially pernicious was the effect of the scholarly conviction that Russia had shared in the European Enlightenments … Geography and education shaped Psalm-quoting peasant, alien Ukrainian divine, and Radishchev. Most Russians who read in 1750 read pretty much as they had in 1650. No mandated educational reform had ever questioned their Orthodox books, religion, or assumptions about the earthly sojourn. The Church grudgingly accepted Ukrainian hierarchs, but denied them the printing press; elite and popular society denied them an audience.

An attitude toward the Latin Classics, toward Cicero, is a useful tool in measuring degrees and styles of Westernization in early-modern times. Education and the geography of empire produced a complex cultural slope in eighteenth-century Russia. A handful of resident Germans, Ukrainians, and a few others, subscribed to the humanist values that had defined education in Europe since 1500. The Russian government, and a minute portion of the upper and middling classes of Russian society[,] flirted with the Latin culture of the West between 1650 and 1789, through the mediation of their annexed Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belorussian co-religionists, or through imported German scholars. It never exceeded a flirtation; it never developed into a love-affair.
- Max Okenfuss, The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism in Early-Modern Russia (1995)

For the last week and a half, I’ve been boring everyone in my program with my Road to Damascus story about this book. I showed up in graduate school to study the Enlightenment in Russia; after reading this, I’ve become convinced that no such thing ever existed. The inevitable handful of scientists and reformers—Lomonosov, Radishchev—cited by Soviet historiography are not only isolated exceptions but also far less illuminé than we were led to believe. Russia was not just peripheral to the Enlightenment, it didn’t even speak its language.

I’ve already begun thinking of possibilities for revising my project, which will inevitably crop here from time to time. For now, however, I’m preoccupied with a more distant reverberation of Okenfuss’s thesis: the origins of the Silver Age. This period poses a peculiar problem for cultural historians, because there seems to be no reason why a conservative and educationally backward country should suddenly have developed into the world’s foremost crucible for avant-garde artistic and literary movements. Of course, nineteenth-century Russian literature was already influential—but so was the French and English, and it was not until the Great War that an analogous cultural transformation took root in those countries.

The standard explanation would seem to be the intelligentsia, culturally radical because of its “separation from the people.” But that classic thesis has also been challenged in recent decades—and besides, there is no a priori reason to see a link between cultural radicalism and “separation.” After all, it is precisely deracinated elites who are the biggest devotees of pseudo-folk, pseudo-traditional, and pseudo-popular culture. (As, for instance, with Marie Antoinette’s little village at Versailles.) Moreover, the petty-bourgeois and Jewish intellectuals who formed the bulk of the creative avant-garde were not the stereotyped “Voltairean” noblemen of the eighteenth century: they were originally men of the people, and felt themselves as such.

The solution one can derive from Okenfuss’s book is clearer: the Russian avant-garde was so radical because Russian classicism was so superficial. (As Mikhail Epstein would put it, it was the image of classicism rather than its reality.) Even if nineteenth-century Russian poetry did partake of the same compromises with Horace and Virgil that characterized poetics elsewhere, this was a personal creative commitment rather than a cultural imperative inculcated by centuries of educational tradition. So when the stresses of capitalist “takeoff” began fracturing Russian society in the 1890s, the toga was not difficult to slough off.

The same effect accounts for the poetics of Osip Mandelstam. It was no contradiction that his project for remaking or regenerating Russian culture involved such a heavy dose of obscure allusions to Pindar and Catullus; a genuine classicism would have been an innovation rather than a reactionary return. One sees in “The Horseshoe Finder” and in the heavy granite of Stalinist hotels the same longing for a workable illusion of the past.

Against the University

In modern times, the diligence of public teachers is more or less corrupted by the circumstances which render them more or less independent of their success and reputation in their particular professions. Their salaries, too, put the private teacher, who would pretend to come into competition with them, in the same state with a merchant who attempts to trade without a bounty in competition with those who trade with a considerable one. If he sells his goods at nearly the same price, he cannot have the same profit, and poverty and beggary at least, if not bankruptcy and ruin, will infallibly be his lot. If he attempts to sell them much dearer, he is likely to have so few customers that his circumstances will not be much mended. The privileges of graduation, besides, are in many countries necessary, or at least extremely convenient, to most men of learned professions, that is, to the far greater part of those who have occasion for a learned education. But those privileges can be obtained only by attending the lectures of the public teachers. The most careful attendance upon the ablest instructions of any private teacher cannot always give any title to demand them. It is from these different causes that the private teacher of any of the sciences which are commonly taught in universities is in modern times generally considered as in the very lowest order of men of letters. A man of real abilities can scarce find out a more humiliating or a more unprofitable employment to turn them to. The endowment of schools and colleges have, in this manner, not only corrupted the diligence of public teachers, but have rendered it almost impossible to have any good private ones.

Were there no public institutions for education, no system, no science would be taught for which there was not some demand, or which the circumstances of the times did not render it either necessary, or convenient, or at least fashionable, to learn. A private teacher could never find his account in teaching either an exploded and antiquated system of a science acknowledged to be useful, or a science universally believed to be a mere useless and pedantic heap of sophistry and nonsense. Such systems, such sciences, can subsist no-where, but in those incorporated societies for education whose prosperity and revenue are in a great measure independent of their reputation and altogether independent of their industry. Were there no public institutions for education, a gentleman, after going through with application and abilities the most complete course of education which the circumstances of the times were supposed to afford, could not come into the world completely ignorant of everything which is the common subject of conversation among gentlemen and men of the world.
- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, book V, chapter I

A half-century ago, the anarchist Paul Goodman--hardly a Murray Rothbard type--pointed out that free trade was, for its time, a profoundly anarchist idea, as were universities and joint-stock companies. Save for a few disappointingly classist moments, Adam Smith's book is very much in that spirit. His descriptions of the web of senseless trade regulations have something of the élan of a Bakunin (or, well, a Marx); even if the mind-bogglingly complex system of bounties, drawbacks, imposts, and prohibitions would have seemed normal to a British contemporary, when aggregated in one place they make a powerful aesthetic impression.

His attack on the universities--tucked away in a sub-subdivision of the book on sovereign expenditures--partakes of the same impulse. It is easy to miss, however. Since there is very little substantively new in his arguments against scholastic pedantry and Catholicism, it would be natural to assume that the liberal articulation given to them here is just an attempt to reheat some ancient polemical leftovers. In lines like "Casuistry and an ascetic morality made up, in most cases, the greater part of the moral philosophy of the schools. By far the most important of all the different branches of philosophy became in this manner by far the most corrupted," Smith reprises his attack on casuistry in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, serving only to further reinforce that impression.

What is truly new here, though, is Smith's defense of--what amounts to--a petty-bourgeois artisanal norm of scholarship. Instead of using state-enforced privileges to distort the educational market, the craftsman-artisan offers his services on the basis of their utility. This necessarily has implications for intellectual life: if "exploded systems" are no longer being taught, it becomes more difficult for them to weigh like a nightmare upon the brain of the living. Even if it does have certain uncomfortable similarities to modern arguments about voucher schools, Smith's economically-grounded attack on public education is compelling: it offers a materialist account of the history of ideas that does not rely on the convenient eighteenth-century fiction of gradual enlightenment.

In a way, then, even if his ideal would prove even less realistic fifty years later, Smith was still ahead of his time. There's some anticipation here of the working-class, anti-classicist educational reformers of the nineteenth century, of the Deweyan vision of progressive education, of Paul Goodman himself. And in our day, the heirs of Smith's project are the online universities and for-profit colleges that have sprung up over the last decade. They provide their customers with a service they need at a price they are willing to pay, without any of the puffery and nonsense about the Decline of the Liberal Arts that mainstream academia is so infatuated with today.

For the other irony of Smith's work is that, unlike the imposts and bounties and drawbacks, the old universities have not disappeared. They continue to teach exploded systems for an increasingly insupportable price and with a rapidly diminishing return. And the thoughtful people who ought to be Smith's intellectual heirs, instead of finding ways to disengage from a system which by definition is more invested in its own institutional priorities than in anything else, have followed their own incentives and defended it against all comers. I don't blame them--graduate school, as I'm slowly learning, is a substantial investment of time and energy and money. But I can't help thinking that the intellectual climate after the collapse of the university system will be healthier, and more useful, than it is now.

Talking to Ourselves

The consciousness of economic inadequacy, leading necessarily to a historical turning point, was tightly connected to the consciousness of moral inadequacy. The Russian people could not remain in the Chinese contemplation of their own perfections, in the Chinese confidence that they were superior to every nation in the world, if only because of the geographical location of their country: oceans did not separate it from the Western European nations. Driven by the force of circumstances, it had first to leave the West for the East; but as soon as it had managed to entrench itself there, to establish government, it necessarily had to confront its Western neighbors, and the confrontation was very enlightening. At the very same time, under the same ruler, when the East, the eastern neighbors of the Russian people, turned out to be completely powerless before Muscovy, when three Tatar kingdoms were subjugated and the Russian people marched unopposed through North Asia down to the Eastern Ocean--under the very same ruler there were horrible failures in the West, where the struggle concluded with Russia being forced to surrender even its own lands to the enemy. It became clear that as much as the Eastern neighbors were weaker than Russia, so much were the Western neighbors stronger. This conviction, undermining the Chinese view of its own perfection, naturally and necessarily created in the living people a drive to become closer to those nations which had shown their superiority and to adopt from them that which had made them stronger; the Western nations turned out to be stronger in their knowledge and art, and thus it was necessary to learn from them. From this point, from the reign of Ivan IV, the reign when the East was conclusively defeated, but when the powerful tsar, the conqueror of Kazan and Astrakhan, turning his weapons to the West, suffered terrible defeats--from this very point the thought of the necessity of becoming closer to the West, of the need to reach the sea and learn from seafaring nations, became the overriding concern of the state and the best Russian people.
- Sergei Solovyev, History of Russia Since Ancient Times (История России с древнейших времен), vol. XIII, chap. 1

As part of my field preparation, I've been reading chunks of Solovyev and Klyuchevsky, two of the most renowned late-Imperial Russian historians. (To read all of Solovyev's history would be a life's work--Proust, compared with his 29 volumes, is a piker.) I've also touched upon the acrimonious and overblown Western debate surrounding Edward Keenan's "Muscovite Political Folkways." After all this, I can't help coming to one conclusion: the narratives around which the historiography of Russia is structured are not primarily of historical value. Rather, they are conversations that Russia holds with itself about its own identity and potential, or conversations that the West holds with itself about the possible valences of its relationship to Russia. However well-sourced and well-footnoted, a work of Russian history that places itself in this tradition is first and foremost a voice in this long-running argument.

From some points of view, this is a good thing. Carl Becker, for one, would have applauded the harnessing of history to present concerns. Perhaps it is even possible to see some value in the nation-building this kind of history promotes. But these advantages, I think, are drowned out by the corrosive power of a narcissistic focus on identity. Solovyev and Klyuchevsky are both driven irresistibly to impose their views of what Russia should have been upon the Russia that was: the former projects Westernizing concerns upon an elite to which the Westernizers' program would have been utterly foreign, while the latter ruminates nostalgically about the lost constitutional potential of the zemskiy sobor. Western scholars, too, find their commitment to historical accuracy drowned out by the rearguard battle against Cold Warrior historiography--a quarrel that ultimately revolves around Soviet, and not Muscovite, despotism.

Of course, to some extent every historical intervention carries an implicit or explicit ideological load. But in the case of pre-Petrine Russia, the relative paucity and narrow scope of the available sources seems to give free rein to arguments whose interpretive originality is based only on their ideological dimension. This, paradoxically, has a restrictive effect: as social and cultural historians of other regions try more and more to write politics out of their work, the questions asked by historians of Russia remain fixated on the state. (Despotic or not? Kinship-based or not? Reformist or not?) It is difficult even today to avoid Putin or Brezhnev's looming shadow in reading Russian history.

I'm interested in the eighteenth century, where things are a little bit looser. Nonetheless, the problem of writing a history that is undecomposable into national autopsychoanalysis is one that is of principal importance for my work. For my part, I imagine that I can approach it from the angle of individuality: the intellectuals I am beginning to study are not defined by their Russianness, or even by their elite and exclusive status in Russian society, but by their membership in the kind of transnational network whose Western threads have long been picked up by an attentive crowd of scholars. My hope is that there can be some maneuver by which the Russian state can be made to disappear analytically--a magic trick which would be, if not convincing, at least interesting.

There are chinks in this proposal. Among the most important is this: if these intellectuals were able to participate in intellectual life outside of Russia, it is because they were allowed to do so as part of an openly-articulated Westernizing project pursued by the tsars. Therefore, they cannot escape the state-centric narrative even in the very small spaces of their independence. And as I try to write about them and carve out this space historiographically, I am still part of the fatal conversation--even if I am only trying to change the subject. There is, it seems, no escape.

Generation Pelevin

Let us try to briefly explain what Kika means by "the secret of money." Money, in his opinion, is precisely the "crude oil" that remains after human beings, the form that the life-force they invest in labor takes after they die. The amount of money in the world constantly increases, because more and more lives flow into this reservoir. From this Kika draws an impressive conclusion: the world financial clique, manipulating the flows of money, controls the souls of the dead, like the Egyptian mages in the movie The Mummy Returns use their magic to control Anubis's army (the careful reader of the Macedonian Critique will note that Kika feels somewhat more confident using examples from the cinema than philosophical categories).

This is the solution to the riddle of the Soviet people's disappearance after its death. The plesiosaur who once splashed around where the Arabian desert is now burns up in the engine of a Japanese Honda. The life of the Stakhanovite miner ticks inside a diamond Cartier watch or foams in a bottle of Dom Perignon being drunk on the Rublev Highway. Then comes an even more audacious turn: in Kika's opinion, the goal of the Gulag was to create an alternative reservoir of life-force that would in no way connect with the one which was controlled by the financial magnates of the West. The victory of communism was to take place when the amount of communist "human crude," forcibly extracted from people, would exceed the reserves of postmortem life-force under the control of the West. This is what was meant by the goal of "defeating capitalism in economic struggle." The communist human crude was not simply money, although it could serve that function as well. By its nature it was closer to a Will filled with suffering, extracted in pure form. But the unthinkable happened: after the system collapsed, the Soviet human crude began to be pumped over to the West.
- Victor Pelevin, Диалектика переходного периода из ниоткуда в никуда (The Dialectic of the Transitional Period from Nowhere to Noplace) (2003).

I've loved Pelevin for a long time--ever since I read Generation 'П'. The primary reason, of course, is that his cynicism, like that of one of his characters, is "boundless, like the view from the Ostankino TV tower"; while it's been fashionable for a while to extol the virtues of sincerity, a trained cynical eye is uniquely well-suited to washing the excreta of ideology away from one's perceptions. Anyway, that's what I tell myself. I haven't been to Russia in a long time and have no claim to insider knowledge of its workings, but reading Pelevin's work delivers an image of "the way things really are" that happens to precisely correspond with my expectations. It's the literary equivalent of overpriced Brighton Beach pelmeni.

Each of Pelevin's novels takes place in a kind of quasi-mystical mythological setting: pseudo-Babylonian, pseudo-Buddhist, pseudo-Egyptian, pseudo-Sufi. Inevitably the underlying ontological reality beneath the mysticism is revealed, explicitly or implicitly, to be money. Our life, Pelevin thinks, is permeated by money to such an extent that it is the deepest level of Being. One of his characters says in his (rather unsatisfying) recent book, Farewell Songs of the Political Pygmies of Pindostan: "We are learning to dream about shit, because shit is an omen for money." Another responds: "And if you remember that life is a dream, then you have the formula for contemporary civilization and culture."

But if the mystical trappings are just window-dressing, what of the other main content of his books--the trenchant sociopolitical critique? In this context one particular image seems especially revealing. In Generation 'П', one character says that in post-communist Russia the stage of primitive accumulation of capital is also the final stage of the accumulation of capital. In Dialectic of the Transition Period, published two years later, the stage of primitive accumulation is described as having been left behind. Now, obviously the transition can be explained in a number of ways--increasing Putinization, for instance. But the point is that no argument or discussion about the theoretical shift is provided. If it's convenient for him, Pelevin says there's only one stage; if later he decides that adding another stage would be more clever, he adds it without a second thought.

Thus the recipe for a classic Pelevin text would include one or two consistent basic ideas--"everyone's bought and paid for," "socialism fucked us one way, capitalism fucks us a different but mostly identical way"--and then a verbal outfit designed to be as terminologically-trendy and Anglophone-hip as possible. (Since his audience consists mainly of powerless Soviet-educated intellectuals, he relies heavily on reappropriated Marxist jargon, which everyone already knows to be drained of substantive content.) In fact, one could construct a Pelevin generator to pump out annual volumes of witty cynical culture-critique and dead-end plots indefinitely.

The kicker being, of course, that his work would be as true and insightful as ever--and I say that in all sincerity.

The Old Revolution and the New

From this point of view, the most relevant question is that of the role of violence in revolution. Traditionally, violence has been included in the overwhelming majority of definitions given to this phenomenon by representatives of all sorts of schools and tendencies. Many researchers see violence as one of the determining indicators (or even the only mark), distinguishing revolution from evolutionary changes. Yet an important distinguishing feature of the current Russian events, as has been noted above, has been the absence of any large-scale acts of violence that would involve substantial swathes of the population and materially affect the rate and direction of ongoing changes. It would not be correct to claim that the contemporary Russian revolution was entirely nonviolent. But the role of violence in it was highly limited, and violent acts cannot be considered a fundamental feature of Russia's development in the last decade of the twentieth century ...

Even well before the Russian events some specialists had already expressed doubts about considering violence as a fundamental characteristic of revolution. The most complete analysis of this problem, in our opinion, was presented in A. Cohan's work "Introduction to the Theory of Revolution." The author points out the internal contradiction suffered by the majority of definitions, when the list of defining traits includes both large-scale violence and social changes ... Further on, Cohan links the possibility of nonviolent revolutions in the twentieth century with the spread of the philosophy of nonviolence, taking as examples the movement for the liberation of India headed by Gandhi and the black civil rights movement in the US associated with the name of Martin Luther King. Despite the brevity of Cohan's argument, some of the unique features of his approach deserve closer scrutiny...
- Irina Starodubrovskaya and Vladimir Mau, Великие революции от Кромвеля до Путина (Great Revolutions from Cromwell to Putin) (2001).

Great Revolutions is a brilliant book--and it has aged remarkably well. Starodubrovskaya and Mau argue that the trajectory taken by the dying Soviet Union after 1985, culminating in the rise to power of Vladimir Putin in 1999, was in fact a classic revolutionary arc following neatly in the well-worn tracks of seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century France. The argument is persuasive even in the smallest details, such as the perennial complaint of the doomed moderate (Gorbachev) that he is squeezed on one side by conservatives and reactionaries (Ligachev) and on the other by radicals demanding more decisive action (Yeltsin). If we accept this formulation, we suddenly become much more capable of explaining the political dynamics of post-communist Russia; thankfully, neither the Western return-to-Stalin narrative nor the Russian sovereign-democracy narrative end up winning out. (Although in some ways Putin does represent a return to Stalin, according to this theory: they are both post-revolutionary dictators attempting to exert consolidating force in the post-Thermidorean climate).

Of course, there are differences between the Russian events and their historical predecessors. The most important for Starodubrovskaya and Mau, since they see the root of revolution in economic limitations, is the fact that 1985-1999 represents a transition between Fordist industrialism and post-Fordist post-industrialism, unlike previous revolutions, which were attempts to transition from pre-modern to modern forms of economic organization (or, in the case of Russia and Mexico, from modern to Fordist forms). The determining factor here is the USSR's inability effectively to adjust to the needs of a knowledge and service-based economy. All this is not implausible. But the authors identify another major difference: the absence of large-scale violent events or violent popular mobilizations. Their explanations rely on arguments about the acceptability of violence in contemporary societies and the new regime's unwillingness to use it.

All that is good as far as it goes, but it misses a crucial dimension of the events. Actually, I was initially skeptical about this book because I had missed it too. I did some research once about the interpretation of 1991 in terms of theories of revolution; to my surprise, the polls and reports that I found all pointed to an extraordinarily low and evanescent level of popular confidence in and mobilization around the transformation, from perestroika down to the mid-oughties. I concluded that there could not have been a revolution--that even a "revolution from above" would have led to deeper and more lasting changes in the popular mindset.

My misinterpretation of the events and this book's lack of adequate explanation of the absence of violence have a common element: the premise that a social revolution must engage and reshuffle society down to its lowest levels. But in reality there is no reason to make this assumption at all. It is probable that a post-industrial revolution, taking place as it does in a country that had necessarily been revolutionized twice before, does not need the masses to actively participate--their productive potential has already been unlocked by the previous transformations. It is a revolution of elites, in which social hierarchies are broken down and rebuilt but fundamental assumptions about social structure remain unquestioned. It was this inability to see that a revolution can follow the classic trajectory, and yet avoid the masses, which prevented me from reading the Russian events as analogous to France and England.

Starodubrovskaya and Mau, on the other hand, ignore a potent aspect of Russian life in the '90s: the unceasing flood of assassinations, hits, and random shootings of businessmen and politicians around the country. I would argue that this flood was not only not insignificant but in fact an integral part of the revolutionary process. Much as previous revolutions needed terror and armed revolt to work out the conflict between elites and masses, here the elites relied on their own particular forms of violence to settle conflicts amongst themselves. They could be smaller in scale because the elites were less numerous--but that did not prevent violence from spiraling out of control, as it did before Putin's arrival, or from revealing a reasonably coherent victorious coalition once the dust settled. In the end, if the "Russian Mafia" would not play the role of Robespierre, who would?