The research question of this book is: How and why have entrepreneurship and business practice in Russia emerged in their current form ? Entrepreneuriale in Russia cannot be divorced from business practice in general, partly because of the emergence of owner-directors from the privatisation process, and partly because neither the proper Russian word Predprenimatelstva , nor the more commonly used biznes , make any distinction between large companies and entrepreneurs in a Western sense. In this book the question is studied primarily by linking the characteristics of modern Russian business practice to the past, both that of pre-revolutionary Russia and of the Soviet Union The major proposition of this work is that Russian business practice is distorted compared with Western ideas because of a long history of distrust between individuals and authority. It will be shown that this distrust, involving government more for the benefit of an elite than for the people, not only began many hundreds of years ago, but carried through the Soviet Union and into post-Soviet Russia with a change of actors, but with the same pervading atmosphere.