ABSTRACT
According to a classical understanding of entrepreneurship, young Soviets in the late 1980s were not supposed to be good at inventing and running private businesses because their generation was raised in a society in which private business was practically nonexistent. And yet, in the late 1980s, great numbers of young people quickly started creating new private businesses and turned out to be exceptionally good at it. Clearly, the mere adoption in the Soviet Union of the laws on individual private activity (1986) and on cooperatives (1988) could not teach anyone overnight how to be a businessman. These people acquired particular entrepreneurial knowledge and skills long before the collapse of the Soviet state, not necessarily by acting as managers in Soviet industry or dealers on the black market, but by having to operate within the Soviet system itself. How did this happen? To answer this question, I will use an analytical tool that is broad enough to encompass under one rubric of “entrepreneurship” diverse and seemingly disconnected phenomena from both the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. To create this analytical tool, I will consider the concept of entrepreneurship through the angle of Foucault’s concept of governmentality (1991), emphasizing the aspects of entrepreneurship that involve organizing and governing people, institutions, relations, objects, and ideas.
