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.

A literary club founded by the United Humanitarian Publishers (OGI) in 1998 in the apartment of journalist and music critic Dmitrii Olshansky (1978-), Proekt OGI represented one of the more successful attempts to reclaim the late-Soviet underground in the new, post-Soviet, capitalist world.

“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.

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.