Chapter 2 presents a statement of the book’s theory. The geography and demography of the post-Soviet space suggests a strategic game with three actors, all second-guessing each others strategies: peripheral elites in Russian-speaking communities, “national” elites in the capital, and elites in the Kremlin. The output of bargaining processes is the distribution of symbolic cultural goods. The game is played in two stages. In the first, inside Russian-speaking communities, elites attempt to coordinate to threaten to secede, or not. In the second stage, bargaining takes place between the capital and the potentially seditious community. If bargaining breaks down, the Russian government might intervene. We outline the analytic narrative structure that organizes the remainder of the book. The theory is formalized in a mathematical appendix (Appendix A).