The workshop is based on a chapter of a book manuscript tentatively entitled “Russian Innovation and Intellectual Property: What Went Wrong”. Relying on archival materials and semi-structured interviews, the book examines Soviet and Russian 100-year history of institutional experiments with legal forms, incentives, and organizational arrangements in search of an optimal system of knowledge production and diffusion. The chapter advances an argument that the Soviet legal institutions ensured that the pharmaceutical industry remained part of the healthcare system and not part of trade and examines the effects of transplanted rules of intellectual property on pharmaceutical innovation in modern Russia.