This chapter focuses on the language of community, on the ways in which Russian political actors join together signifiers related to state and society in order to construct community as a discursive object. As such, the purpose here is to extend the discussion of social relations in the preceding chapter into the area of social ontology, exploring how the words of respondents produce a conception of community congruent with those social relations themselves. The word “ontology” refers to that which appears in the eyes of the actors as something that is “there,” something that is not their doing but something with which they must somehow reckon. Narratives about community are like that, portraying social relations in objectified or “frozen” form (Cassirer, 1944, 1946; Lefebrve, 1969). Because the community which the speaker invokes can be separated in language from that same speaker – who talks about “it” – a discourse of community involves an act of alienation, not unlike Karl Marx's ([1867] 1906) “fetishism of commodities”, Georg Lukacs's “reification” ([1919] 1971) or Benedict Anderson's (1983) “imagined communities.” In all three instances, words give life to a construct apparently existing unto itself.