The real source of the chaos of the new Russia is not the weakness of the police, the dominance of the mafia, the difficulty of constitutional reform, the undependability of Yeltsin, the spiraling inflation, the naïve policies of Western governments in their distribution of aid, the shortage of food, or the inefficiency of state-run factories. The problem is the ascendancy, in a society in which everyone was once asked to work for the common good, of a system of values within which everyone has an eye only on his own progress. It inheres in the impossibility of coherence in a country now run on the chance alignments and misalignments of hundreds of thousands of different, singular, individual agendas.