The Wild Nineties

New Russian statehood was born in the throes of lawlessness, powerlessness, and freedom bordering on anarchy. After a long stagnation of the 1970s and 1980s—when a couple of generations of Soviet people were lulled to sleep—events suddenly gained frightening speed. You had to run just to stay in place, and think and make decisions very quickly, to get ahead of entropy. Most people weren’t ready for this: the old rules turned out to be useless, past achievements no longer mattered, and experience stopped working.

An ordinary guy, Romka, who learned business the Soviet way back in the 80s, is extremely dissatisfied with himself because, as he sees it, he’s not keeping up. The obstacle is his painfully outdated scrupulousness about moral questions. Business topics change, but every time he remains one step away from big money: “If you’re so smart, why are you so poor?” Youth is uncompromising.