This chapter begins the analysis of circuit-breakers that bring friction to the post-socialist transformations. The subtitle of this book, Legacies, Linkages, and Localities, serves as the organizing principle of this chapter. Institutional legacies produce friction that grinds against a smooth transition but preserve diversity for future recombinant strategies. Inter-enterprise legacies buffer firms and retard selection, but the redundant relations of loosely coupled networks produce the friction of ambiguity that guides entrepreneurial strategies. Multiple ordering principles of localities produce the friction that inhibits simple harmonizations but yield more complex ecologies that are the basis for regional development strategies. The chapter also introduces the concepts of compartmentalization, asset ambiguity, and local ecologies of meaning and examines how actors reconfigure legacies, linkages, and localities to forge pathways from state socialism.