Management in Eastern Europe

Abstract

Russian managers’ experience of the collapse of the communist system in the early 1990s has been particularly acute, for a number of reasons. The Soviet system of economic management had since 1917 functioned as the model of organizing economic activity in the socialist states. By the end of the 1980s, when the communist regimes of CEE began to collapse, the Soviet model had been in place in the Soviet Union for over 70 years. There were therefore few people still alive with any memory or experience of pre-1917 forms of economic organization. Russia, moreover, had changed substantially from a predominantly agricultural and in many respects despotic state to one which had developed a significant heavy industrial and military base.