The collapse of communism offered the unprecedented opportunity to observe but also seek to direct societal change. In the early 1990s, Western academics, policy advisers and law reform experts embarked with rare confidence on the task of designing Eastern Europe’s ‘transition to market’. The ‘designer’ spirit in advising, but also prescribing, the adoption of particular policies and legislation, inspired largely by Anglo-Saxon legal templates and corporate realities, was especially pronounced in the case of Russia’s corporate governance reform. It is also in Russia where this approach met its most spectacular downfall and demonstrated its irrelevance in preventing rampant abuses of shareholder rights and corporate structure more generally.