This article provides an in-depth exploration of the nature of the cultural shift in business norms in two former Soviet Union republics: Estonia and Belarus. While questioning the linearity of existing models describing social—cultural change and, drawing on Lotman’s model (1990), the paper points to a complex interplay of past and present, Western and local traditions in the transformational context of the post-Soviet countries. The analysis is based on a set of semi-structured in-depth interviews with Belarusian and Estonian entrepreneurs, who conveyed their attitudes towards transition and current management practices in the region. Exploring the issue on both a temporal (pre-Soviet and post-Soviet) and a spatial (Western/non-Western) axis the paper discusses the relationship between the ‘importing’ and ‘exporting’ of values, which take place across each of them, and concludes with what the analysis can tell us about cultural transformation more generally.

This paper explores the role of favor exchange practices—Chinese guanxi and Russian blat —on investment and entrepreneurship. In both societies policies which supported marketization were undermined by actual institutions, including an insufficient legal structure for enforcing contracts. But cultural resources armed Chinese and Russians differently to react to these circumstances. Guanxi practice allowed people to create networks, to build trust, and to reach out. It was a tool which could be used to build enough trust to allow business transactions to succeed—capitalism without contracts. In contrast, Russian blat devolved into corruption, and faded in importance for ordinary citizens. Without a way to build trust or extend networks, Russians retreated into defensive involution, and engaged in predatory behavior against those outside their small circles of friends. Instead of capitalism without contracts, Russia suffered the depredations of capitalists without capitalism.