■ Ethnographies of postsocialist Europe and Eurasia have observed the moral resistance of post-communist communities in the face of an impinging capitalism, highlighting the continuity of such sentiment with both pre-communist and 20th-century ideologies of social justice. This article suggests that, valuable as these accounts have been, together they can leave the false impression that post-Soviet change is a confrontation between two separate, antagonistic forces: a local world of social embeddedness and moral obligation versus an exterior, supercultural, individualistic market logic. To challenge that notion, this article draws upon ethnographic observations in St Petersburg (1998—9, 2003) to treat the so-called `transition to capitalism' as a set of questions and moments of interpretation: junctures when people consider the multiple implications and valences of the practices in which they might engage. Such morally charged performance can have important and cumulative social effects, but cannot be adequately understood in terms of set moral `codes' that work in opposition to the marketplace.
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