This introductory chapter provides a background of neoliberalism. During the 1990s, the Russian case and the battles over “transition,” the Washington Consensus, shock therapy, and structural adjustment, stood as emblems of the neoliberal project's grandiose transformative ambition—and catastrophic failure. However, the dynamics of this period proved to be both contingent and temporally circumscribed, bracketed roughly by Soviet breakup in 1991 and the devaluation of 1998. Ten years beyond the collapse of the Washington Consensus—and with the luxury of a broadened and perhaps historically deepened perspective—the Russian case provides a good site for revisiting the legacy of an important and distinctive form of social government, and for asking how neoliberal reforms propose to reshape it.