Russia is a marginal but pointed reference in the book’s account of capitalism and class power. It is not presented as an active setting or as the site of a narrated scene; instead, the country appears in a parenthetical historical contrast that qualifies the book’s broader claim about how ruling elites preserved themselves.

Historical Reference

Russia enters the argument during a discussion of the transition from an openly predatory form of capitalism to a society divided by a middle class. The book states that the elite managed to preserve itself “apart from in Russia,” implying that Russia represents an exception to the general process being described. No further explanation of that exception is supplied in the relevant passage, so the country’s significance remains deliberately narrow: it marks a limit to the book’s sweeping account rather than becoming a developed historical case.

Russia and Marx

The reference to Russia is tied directly to Karl Marx. The book describes the initial capitalist order as the world in which Marx preached communism and violent insurrection against the ruling elite, then notes that Marx lived in London, the capital of the British Empire, and was buried there. Russia therefore functions as a counterpoint within an argument otherwise anchored in Britain and in Marx’s analysis of class antagonism.

Class Argument

The book’s treatment of Russia is inseparable from its account of the Ownership Class and the 99 percent. It argues that, under early predatory capitalism, workers broadly opposed the rich, while the later creation of a self-interested middle class supplied the elite with collaborators, managers, gatekeepers, and enforcers. Russia is mentioned only to qualify the claim that this strategy enabled elites to save themselves everywhere, but the larger conceptual opposition remains between the Ownership Class and those whose labor and political loyalties sustain it.

Relation to the Wider Political Critique

Russia is also indirectly connected to the book’s claim that Donald Trump’s insurgency represents a return to far-right rule and “ultra plutocracy.” The text contrasts this politics with the radical left’s call to overthrow the elite and to establish a state serving the General Will, the Commonwealth, and the Common Good. In that framework, Russia is not analyzed as a contemporary political model; it is a brief historical marker inside a polemic about whether capitalism can preserve concentrated wealth without reproducing class domination.

Narrative Significance

Because Russia receives no scene, character, institution, or sustained description, its narrative role is referential rather than geographic. The country helps expose the limits of a universal historical formulation while reinforcing the book’s preferred historical axis: British capitalism, Marx’s response to it, and the continuing struggle against plutocratic power. Its brevity is itself significant. Russia is invoked to qualify the argument, then the narrative returns to the central conflict between the elite and the social forces that either resist or serve it.