ABSTRACT
Scholarly literature on the early development of shuttle trade regularly stresses the open borders as one of the leading factors in the flourishing of this phenomenon in post-socialist countries after 1989. Nonetheless, the situation looked different in Amjany. Mass shuttle trade appeared almost simultaneously with the first attempts to regulate cross-border movement in the region where, people were used to crossing the administrative boundary between the two Soviet republics any time they needed. Trade and the deficit of commodities in Belarus and Lithuania shortly before and after their independence were among the main reasons for establishing border control on the BelarusLithuania border. Therefore, the initial aim behind the borders appearance was the economic security of the two countries in the context of economic and social transformations of the early 1990s, which pushed people to consider trade as a means of survival and made shuttle trade a mass phenomenon in Amjany.
