There’s something about the post-Soviet worldview that invites and invents conspiratorial thinking. Eliot Borenstein’s forthcoming book—drafted entirely in public on his blog “The Plot Against Russia”—argues something similar. The undermining of a guiding ideology, the breakdown of social ties, and the persistent weakness of the state all led post-Soviet subjects to look for alternative ways of understanding the world, new foundations for navigation and belonging within an environment they no longer recognized. The boom in statistical investigations—led by the sociologists at VTsIOM (which is a topic of my own research)—represents one response to this crisis of trust. If traditional sources of authority—the state, communist doctrine, social hierarchies—are no longer to be trusted, VTsIOM statistics suggested, where should you turn but to cold hard numbers?

Others grasped for more dubious ballasts. With the opulence of Wild West capitalism on display throughout the country, many turned to get rich quick opportunities that ranged from scam partnerships to pyramid schemes. At the same time, a non-monetary mysticism—replete with everything from television hypnosis to powerful cults—offered new spiritual salves for the lost post-Soviet soul. (Borenstein has written wonderfully on both pyramid schemes and cults in the 1990s.)

In this environment, perhaps it is not surprising that the 1990s and early 2000s also saw a boom in literary conspiracies. Contemporary authors from Aleksandra Marinina and Sergei Lukyanenko to Viktor Pelevin and Olga Slavnikova framed the world as a defined by vast underground machinations. Marinina’s wildly popular detective novels featured sleuth-protagonist Nastya Kamenskaya doggedly picking at a case until it revealed not only its immediate perpetrators and victims, but also its connections to nationwide systems of malfeasance and iniquity. Lukyanenko’s neo-gothic fantasy framed post-Soviet life as the inevitable continuation of an epic battle between the forces of light and of darkness. Petty post-Soviet criminality—from tax evasion to turf battles over local bazaars—represented nothing but the shadow games of heroic warriors locked in a grand struggle for dominance.

While such devices might well derive from the genre conventions within which Marinina and Lukyanenko work, the extraordinary popularity of both of these authors during the 1990s suggests that they managed to transcend the usual limitations of pulp fiction. Indeed, similar devices found their way into mainstream literary fiction (a category that is notoriously difficult to define, but that might be understood in this context as those works nominated for post-Soviet Russia’s major literary prizes). Among such works in the 1990s and 2000s, several of the most culturally significant feature vast conspiracies at the center of their fictional worlds. The most prominent practitioner of this trend is likely Viktor Pelevin, who emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s as a literary novelist with popular appeal, the author who best captured the Zeitgeist. Perhaps no book better conveys that spirit of the times than Pelevin’s 1999 Generation ‘P’, whose general plotline became standard for later Pelevin novels. The disaffected young protagonist, Vavilen Tatarsky, through a combination of naïveté, luck, and psychedelic mushrooms finds his way from a kiosk selling cigarettes to the heights of the burgeoning advertising world of the new Russia. But that world is not simply a land of executive suites, German automobiles, and pure cocaine (though it is all those things). It is also a deeply mystical society with ritualized killings and which controls, or even creates, the simulacrum that the rest of the world takes for Russian politics. Deputies to the state duma are nothing but holograms, following scripts developed by admen for television consumption. Yeltsin is a hologram too. “Think about it,” one character says, “have you ever actually seen one of them?” As Tatarsky climbs to the top of the advertising world, he realizes it is not only a new and powerful aspect of post-Soviet capitalism, it is in fact the mechanism that controls that entire world, that generates that world’s disorienting logic. These post-Soviet conspiracy novels, it seems, needed to imagine some kind of logic behind a world whose internal rules and structures had been so disrupted and jumbled that brute force and random chance seemed the only organizing principles.

Other times of uncertainty have provoked conspiratorial thinking in Russian literature. The plots of classical works like Dostoevsky’s Demons and Andrei Bely’s Petersburg are formed out of fears of the nihilist and anarchist undergrounds of their times. These classical conspiracies, however, differ in at least one important way from their contemporary counterparts: they depict conspiracies of incompetence. Dostoevsky’s nihilists and Bely’s revolutionaries don’t know what they’re doing. They can’t hold their conspiracies together. And because of their incompetence, combined with a sense of self-righteousness and an appetite for violence, their plots end so tragically. In some sense these conspiracies succeed—Verkhovensky sows murder and chaos and Ableukhov’s bomb goes off—through entanglements of idiocy. Contemporary conspiracies, on the other hand, are nothing if not competent. Pelevin’s mystical advertisers successfully dupe the public. Marinina’s criminal masterminds are just that: masterminds. Even post-Soviet imaginings of nineteenth-century nihilists and anarchists (the very same groups depicted by Bely and Dostoevsky) like that in Boris Akunin’s State Councillor (1999), show competent conspiracies of intelligent revolutionaries.

The appeal of conspiracy theories in their contemporary incarnation, it seems, is precisely in their competence. In order for a conspiracy to be satisfying it has to successfully impose its own kind of logic on the world. Indeed, conspiracy theories are one way of making sense of a world seemingly organized by nothing but violence and chance. In this way, they are like religion: they give order to the universe by ascribing an almost supernatural power to a being or organization and relieving the rest of us of individual burdens that have grown too heavy. But unlike religious prophets, the tellers of conspiracies distance themselves from those assigned the supernatural power. Conspiracy theorists frame themselves as good prophets of malign powers, as enlightened ones who are at odds with the forces they reveal.

Both contemporary and classical authors of conspiracies distance themselves from their depicted conspirators, but the difference lies in their relationship to power. By depicting incompetent revolutionaries, both Dostoevsky and Bely implicitly align themselves with the locus of political power. The conspiracy is revealed as ridiculous, if tragic, and manifestly incapable of organizing society. The organization of society, the logic of the novel’s world, or even the novel’s truth, then, lies outside of the conspiracy, where both the author and the current power structures also reside. Contemporary authors also reside outside of the conspiracies they depict. But by portraying conspiracies capable of organizing society, of producing the world’s logic, and the novel’s truth, contemporary authors position themselves not within, but against current power structures. Herein lies the difference between classical and contemporary conspiracies: the first express anxieties of instability undergirded by a deep and implicit trust in the status quo, while the second search for meaning, for any sort of logic (even an insidious one) in a world completely deprived of a status quo, and in which anything approaching a new world order should be approached with grave distrust.

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