ABSTRACT
Adopting market business codes and institutions will not be easy in today’s Russia. Not only has the first decade of privatization left Russia with a deformed, rather than reformed, set of institutions and values, but it has also implanted a powerful set of stakeholders who are determined to sustain the status quo and frustrate change. Furthermore, there is no historic business code to reclaim or build on that is appropriate for today’s Russia. The small number of czarist era business practices and institutions that were suitable for a market economy and that would have been useful today were almost all destroyed with the Bolshevik takeover and the seventy years of communism that followed. Moreover, most businesses in the czarist era were in an early stage of development, with only weakly defined rights and enforced rules of law. The czarist government controlled commerce and manufacturing and only gradually did it agree to liberalize so that few of the operating procedures and codes were comparable to those applicable in the West at the time. Even then that was more than eighty years ago. In the interim, the Soviets had no interest in keeping up with the way the market evolved in the West.
