The present volume is the first of three books to be published by Edward Elgar reporting the results of a programme of research into the restructuring of employment in Russia. The following two volumes will focus on the segmentation of the Russian labour market and on household survival strategies. This book started as an investigation of the formation of a labour market in Russia. However, the question is not as simple as it might appear at first sight. There is no consensus as to whether or not there was a labour market in the Soviet Union and there is certainly no consensus about the functioning of the labour market in Russia today. This is not just a reflection of the fact that there has been very little empirical research on the soviet or Russian labour markets, but also of the absence of a coherent theory of the labour market: there is not even any consensus as to what a labour market is and what its role should be. Exploration of the anomalies of the Russian labour market therefore poses questions of much wider significance.