ABSTRACT
This paper arises from interviews in 1996 and 1997 with 550 under 30-year-old entrepreneurs in seven former communist countries. Four of them are in EastCentral Europe (Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland), and three in the Commonwealth of Independent States (Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine); the latter act as a kind of control group to make clear the different developments although all seven societies started their new beginning in 1989 from the same line. Some distinctive features of small businesses in all the ex-communist countries are noted: the youth of the businesses and the inexperience of their proprietors, the absence of formal business support services, the radical outlooks of the entrepreneurs, their work-centred lifestyles, and the possibility of extremely rapid progress.
