ABSTRACT
Levi's carnival, Moscow's highly colourful city-branding initiatives, Putin's Hitchcockesque vanishing act, the Vegas mall's Museum of Show Business, IKEA's circus, Louis Vuitton's giant-sized steamer trunk there is, it would seem, no end to the spectacle at the heart of modern Russia's consumer culture. A spectacle of a rather different sort but nevertheless intimately linked to this new culture occurred in August 2015, when a group of individuals masquerading as Cossacks burst into the Auchan hypermarket in one of St Petersburg's Mega Malls. With the wind from the Kremlin comes the chilling realisation that their world of Vogue counts for nothing next to the will of the omnipresent, omniscient God' lurking just across Red Square. Pelevin's text is of course a grotesque caricature, a piece of self-referential fantasy written at a time when the Kremlin was occupied not by Vladimir Putin, but rather by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.
