Rather than offering a basic retelling of the socio-economic disruptions of Russian society in the 1990s, this essay is interested in elaborating a form of inflationary affect in the literature of that time. To some extent the affective grammar of contradiction is mediated by a desire for Europeanization/Americanization, modes of integration hardly at one with Russian prerogatives, or indeed with the outlook of European states and the United States themselves. Yet such an assessment only begins to scratch the surface of the contradictory symptoms in play, some of which have themselves morphed into a specific neoliberal caricature of state capitalism, one where zombie Soviet figures wander among new class formations that believed for a while the market would decide on a passable nomenklatura. Inflationary affect here is a sense of change that exceeds normative assessment and the binary of Soviet and post-Soviet formulae. The frisson of affective and effective change can be discerned in the popular and provocative works of Victor Pelevin, who is simultaneously emblematic of Russian postmodernism in the Nineties (at least its third wave) and yet singularly at odds with how its “post” is conceived. In Generation “P” (1999), Pelevin’s novel set in early Nineties Moscow, capitalist realism is not simply the opposite of socialist realism, but publication now necessitates the acknowledgement of property relations up front. Indeed, the novel is replete with the force of property as a kind of hyperbolic escape from assets held in common. The “inflation of happiness”, as it is called, is a specific example of affective antinomy in this regard.