The open letter that became known as the “Letter of the Thirteen” (titled "A Way Out of the Dead End"), signed by thirteen of post-Soviet Russia’s most powerful businessmen ahead of the 1996 presidential election, reflected the power of capital in post-Soviet politics.

Launched at the same time as the Russian Booker and funded by the newly minted oligarch Boris Berezovsky (1946-2013), the Triumph Prize promised an even broader program of cultural guardianship and philanthropy.

“A Way Out of the Dead End,” an op-ed co-authored by prominent Russian “oligarchs” and published in the Wall Street Journal-like daily “Kommersant” in April 1996, which announced their intention to use their considerable media resources to sink the Communist Gennady Zyuganov in the upcoming 1996 presidential election.

The first post-Soviet Lada model, the VAZ-2110, appeared in 1995 and sold for between $5,000 and $8,000. Targeted at the emerging middle class, the car represented the manufacturer’s hope that Russian production and consumer power could come together to build a domestic market that would advance the economy beyond raw materials extraction and imported consumer goods.

In 1994, Alexander Solzhenitsyn staged a theatrical return to Russia, flying from America to Magadan, then returning by train from Vladivostok to Moscow. The journey and the salvific importance Solzhenitsyn attached to it soon became the target of much derision, as well as some praise.

In the weeks leading up to the Second Chechen War, Russia’s right wing publications reminded their audiences of the humiliation of the First Chechen War, and called for—nationalist, racist, brutal—revenge.