In recent years, numerous scholars have critiqued the unfortunate shorthand with which Western discourse has frequently rendered postsocialist transition (Zhang 2001, Humphrey 2002, Yurchak 2006). This discourse presents “a vision of (post)socialist transition as a progressive and unilinear move toward a known end: liberal capitalism and democratic polities” (Zhang 2001:5), and represents postsocialism through a series of binaries: public/private, official/unofficial, state/society. In this formulation, Russia is understood to be both immature—that is, a younger democracy, at an earlier developmental stage—and stalled, because its current patterns do not always indicate movement toward more familiar Western forms of democracy. The latter condition is framed alternately as the result of enduring Soviet practices—the stubborn residue of a corrupt and failed system—or, according to a path dependence model, as continuing proof of a historical disinclination toward participatory systems of government. Anthropologists of postsocialism, among other scholars, have pointed to the fact that framing Russia in this way makes possible the continuation of a cold war logic that collapses and obscures the immeasurable complexity that attended the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and contributes to the perpetuation of associations between socialism and bleakness. In this accounting, the socialist world is unremittingly, monochromatically grey, punishing, and repressive. Enduring associations like these make the (much chronicled) presence of forms of “Soviet nostalgia” in the postsocialist context confusing. Indeed, nostalgia for the Soviet era, when seen through this lens, only substantiates the idea that Russians are inherently both lovers of autocracy and gluttons for punishment.