[Russian short story summary: “A fairly typical story for early Pelevin about criminals who appeared after perestroika. The main character, a gangster nicknamed ‘Kobzar’, comes up with a convention for people like him. During the showdown, they will not kill with real weapons, but shoot paintballs. When a gangster is tagged, he should concede and calmly spend the rest of his days at a ‘fashionable resort’. Such a pleasant fate befalls the hero of the story himself.

But then a new bandit-savior comes to the subsequent showdown with an old authentic PPSh machine gun—one that fires real bullets. At this point, the writer and readers part ways with the heroes.”]

[I don’t buy the ending of the paintball story. He seems to be trying to imply the oligarchy will be gunned down and the “paintball equilibrium” broken and restored to the earlier everyone-killing-everyone state of nature.

But that doesn’t follow at all, because there’s no reason anyone will care about this random dude! He shot the leaders—so what? No one knows him, no one cares about him, they will easily kill him in vengeance, he has no power or influence or anything. Him shooting the leaders is no more meaningful than if they had all gotten food poisoning from the dinner instead.

The second-in-commands of the mafia will order him executed for breaking the rules and life will go on as everyone prefers the paintball equilibrium. The bosses failed, and paid with their lives, but they would’ve screwed up equally if the rogue agent had taken their ‘lives’ by tossing a paintball grenade onto the table—they had bad security which should’ve disarmed him of either paintball or gunpowder guns!

Pelevin also doesn’t seem to realize that this sort of equilibrium is pervasive in the world. Animals do this all the time: they have mock fights and accept the verdict of the fight, because both benefit from not taking fights all the way to the death. (In ants, a losing colony may voluntarily submit to enslavement/death.) Once you postulate that the paintball equilibrium has held for years and even the top mafia have submitted to it, you need a major shock to break it. It is a norm that only gets stronger with time.

Now, of course a spontaneous order like this can fail, but it needs to fail for bigger reasons. For example, a faction becoming convinced that paintball assassination no longer credibly reflects actual killing competence and that the method underestimates their power, and so they would gain from breaking it and returning to lethal methods; or by the system being disrupted on a large scale by defectors or newcomers or arrests etc.

So as presented, the ending totally fails for me once I get past the ironic twist and ask if it really justifies the implied parable. It does not.

It also has aged poorly. He published this in 1997, but Moscow organized crime-related violence has decreased enormously since the 1990s. The question isn’t, why does a paintball equilibrium ever form in Moscow, but rather why there wasn’t there one in the 1990s?

The blind spots here perhaps reflect a very Russian viewpoint: Pelevin might say, “Only a westerner could believe in the robustness of paintball equilibria or that everyone shooting each other is the exception rather than the rule.” But that Russian pessimism about better equilibria undermines any effort to reach or maintain one…]

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