The oligarch Gen Startov, founder and ideological inspiration of the mega-corporation «Table-M,» specializing in the extraction, processing, and sale of rare-earth metals, came into business from Komsomol. Partners and co-owners of Gen—his wife Aschka and former coursemate Guram Yasnoshvili—also came from there, like many other new Russian tycoons. When and how did the advanced part of the youth wing of the Communist Party transform into the vanguard of market economics?—that’s the question posed by Buzz Okselotl, a Russian émigré writer composing an epic about the Startov family. And he answers himself: miracles like that happen in nature, when on an ugly half-dried branch a living shoot suddenly grows.