ABSTRACT
Accounting has been going through rapid changes in Russia ever since the Russian Finance Ministry decided to replace the country’s centrally planned accounting system with a market-based system in the early 1990s. A whole generation of accounting practitioners had to change to a new system they knew nothing about-1.5 million, according to one estimate (Smirnova, Sokolov, and Emmanuel 1995). There were no textbooks or educational materials available in the Russian language. There were no teachers to teach the new system. Universities had to start teaching the new system to a new generation of students, but their professors had never studied the new system they were being asked to teach.
