Following Babel's suggestion, I construe the aestheticization of banditry as an approach that reveals the ambiguous status of law in contemporary Russia. When a lack of criteria renders such usual questions as "What has been done?" and "Who is to blame?" unanswerable, it is only the question "How was it done?" that produces the necessary differentiating effect. I am not interested in reading the obsessive fascination with the stylistic re-packaging of the criminal world, stimulated by the market-driven efforts of Russia's cultural industry, as a sign of the overall criminalization of the post-Soviet society. Rather, I argue that the aesthetic clashes of the bandit style can be seen as a historically specific attempt to organize symbolically the state of outlawry: When the opposition of the legal vs. the illegal loses its normative meaning, it is the stylistic excess of the criminal order of things that is called upon to reflect the condition of social disorientation.