Russian capitalism and its entrepreneur
How the state, the market and a short horizon shape the figure of the entrepreneur, and why anyone who has ever built a platform recognises it.
People tend to talk about the entrepreneur as if it were one and the same figure everywhere: someone with a nose for opportunity who takes the risk onto himself. For a long time I thought I was roughly that person too, until I noticed how finely my own instinct was tuned to one particular environment. The figure doesn't hang in the air. It gets shaped by the order around it: institutions, the market, relations with the state. The Russian case is convenient because that order shows through almost without anaesthetic, which makes the shaping itself easier to watch.
A capitalism grown out of collapse
Western capitalism came together over centuries, and the institutions that held it in check grew up alongside it: property rights, the contract, an independent court. The Russian kind grew another way: fast, out of the collapse of the previous order. The market arrived before any settled rules of the game. This is not a lag in development. It is a different starting point, and here the entrepreneur works from the very beginning where the rules are movable and rest on more than the law.
Hence the first trait of the figure. It treats uncertainty as air. In this environment uncertainty is the ordinary background of the work, and nobody experiences it as an emergency. Knowing how to work without guarantees is no feat here. It is the condition under which the business exists at all.
The state as partner and as risk
In the liberal picture the state is an outer frame: it sets the rules and stays out of the game. In Russia it is at once the biggest player, the referee, the source of money and the source of danger. Closeness to it can be capital, and a year later that same closeness turns into exposure. The entrepreneur has to read the market and the political weather both, and here the forecast lies more often than the meteorologists do.
Out of this grows a particular competence: keeping relationships alive and sensing the climate, changing register at the right moment. It is navigation in an environment where the economic and the political sit at one table, in the same room.
Survival as the horizon
The third support is survival. Where the planning horizon is short and the ground keeps twitching, entrepreneurship often becomes a way to hold on: to keep the business and the team going until next year. This changes the ethics of the figure. Risk stops being a thrill and becomes routine. Flexibility here has nothing to do with business books; it comes from the plain arithmetic of staying alive.
What comes out is a figure with little resemblance to the romantic visionary or to the calm administrator. For this figure, resilience and room to manoeuvre matter more than growth at any cost. Whether that is admirable I won't try to judge. More often it is just what's left once everything else has become unreliable.
The flag nobody switched off
Here I have to step down from generalities, because my actual job is about the same thing, only in miniature. For seven years I've been building platform machinery in a bank, and lately a feature-flag system on top of Unleash, the one that rolls functionality out to millions of users. A flag is a switch: turn it on and the new logic reaches some slice of people; turn it off and it is as if that logic never existed. We call this release risk management. In practice it is the right to change the rules of the game with a single commit, without asking the people those rules land on.
Once, during a review, I came across a flag switched on almost a year earlier for a specific experiment. The experiment had long since ended, its author had moved to another team, and the flag was still sitting in the on state, with three neighbouring services now depending on it, simply because that is how things had settled over time. Turning it off was frightening: no telling what would break. Leaving it meant admitting that a temporary fix had become infrastructure. We left it. I am still not sure that was a mistake.
That small thing taught me more than a couple of political economy books did. Rules in a living system are rarely adopted by anyone with ceremony. They accumulate: someone shipped a flag, someone built on top, and nobody ever got around to removing it, and now the system's behaviour rests on a decision no one consciously made. The Russian market of the nineties, seen from here, looks much the same: not a conspiracy or a plan, but a layer of temporary flags that nobody switched off.
An objection suggests itself, and I put it to myself: am I stretching an engineering metaphor over the whole history of a country? A flag in a config and privatisation are quantities of wildly different size, and the comparison is striking precisely because it is so easy to lie with. The objection is fair. I am not reducing one to the other; I am only saying the mechanics feel familiar, because in both cases the same asymmetry is doing the work: the rules get changed by whoever has access, and the consequences land on whoever doesn't.
Why this is bigger than Russia
One could close the subject by calling it local colour. I don't think that. The conditions that were there in Russia from the start, movable rules, the enormous role of platforms and infrastructures, the short horizon, an economy and a politics grown into each other, increasingly describe the world around us as well. The platform economy reproduces the same environment without guarantees: a "partner" who carries the risk himself, and rules that shift with the next app update. A courier learns about a new pay formula much the way my user learns about new logic: after the fact, once it has been deployed.
A year ago we were deciding who should get access to the production flag admin. Hand it to many and rollouts go faster, but one day someone flips the wrong toggle on a Friday evening. Keep it with a few and it is safer, but then a small group holds the master switch over a product that hundreds of people live inside. We chose the few. I voted for that, and I still feel a faint discomfort about it: I built one more border between the people inside the rules and the people under them.
And here an uncomfortable thought catches up with me. I criticise the environment without guarantees and at the same time I build it, with my flags and my dashboards where a living person shrinks to a "conversion" row. As an engineer I mostly like this, and as a researcher it worries me, and gluing the two halves into one smooth position is something I can't do. Probably it is more honest not to glue them yet.
So I read the Russian entrepreneur as an early draft of a general situation. His environment looked like a strange local anomaly right up until a similar environment began forming everywhere. To study him is to look at a possible future of work, and at my own work along with it, because the platforms in which this subject takes shape are written partly by me.