A riddle wrapped in an enigma: Demystifying Russian managerial motivation

Western business people are eager to penetrate the vast Russian market that has opened up following the breakup of the Soviet Union and the fall of communism. Yet, many are discovering that their Russian contacts are like the 'riddle wrapped in an enigma' that Winston Churchill called Russia in decades past. Using a framework of five components of motivation, Sheila Puffer explains how Russian managers think and act in three time periods: the autocrat in pre-revolutionary tsarist times, comrade communist from the Russian revolution of 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the emergent entrepreneur in the fledgling market-oriented economy of the 1990s.