This Special Issue is an attempt to contribute to the scholarly conversation on emerging market MNEs that has been taking place in International Business outlets in general and on the pages of the IJoEM in particular. But as the title of the special issue clearly communicates, we take a step away from the highly popular term "emerging markets", which itself is grounded on the assumption of similarity among various countries clustered in this group: instead, we focus solely on MNEs from Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).