Wealth & Money Quote by Alexander Rutskoy

“Strong economy” is the kind of phrase politicians reach for when they want to sound humane while staying safely abstract. Rutskoy’s line wraps economic policy in a moral mantle: growth isn’t presented as a technocratic goal but as a duty to “the people.” That framing matters in a post-Soviet context where legitimacy was suddenly up for grabs and daily life was defined by shortages, collapsing institutions, and whiplash reforms. If politics can’t promise stability, it tries to promise jobs.

The sentence is also doing careful work with agency. “We must do everything we can” implies urgency and resolve, but it’s conveniently non-committal about methods. In early 1990s Russia, “promote growth” could mean rapid privatization, state-directed support for industry, or some hybrid of the two. The vagueness is the point: it lets a leader signal competence to market reformers while still sounding protective to workers who feared being sacrificed to “shock therapy.” “Create jobs” is the most emotionally loaded part of the statement, because unemployment was newly visible and politically explosive in a society that had been promised full employment as a birthright.

Rutskoy, positioned near the top of a volatile executive branch, is implicitly arguing that economic performance is the real referendum on government. The subtext is less about GDP than about authority: if the state can’t deliver bread-and-butter security, someone else will claim the mandate to do so, by elections or by confrontation.