The «conquest of Manchuria» the narrator idly wonders about, and the year «[19]05» Zhorik gives as Mityay’s true age, both point to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, fought largely across Manchuria and the Liaodong Peninsula and ending in a catastrophic, prestige-shattering defeat for the Russian Empire — the first time a major European power had lost a war to a non-European one in the modern era, and a direct trigger for the Revolution of 1905. A twenty-six-year-old soldier of that war, still twenty-six nearly ninety years later, wearing the aged, respectable face of a Soviet institute’s deputy director, is the reader’s first hard confirmation that the same infernal «contract» mechanism structuring Roman’s and Chicha’s storylines has been quietly running in the background for generations, entirely unremarked by the people around it.