Leadership Quote by Anatoly Chubais

A line like this works because it pretends to be a dry clarification while smuggling in a whole worldview about what Russia is for in the post-Soviet order: not a sovereign economic actor, but a talent reservoir to be tapped by richer systems. Chubais, the face of Russia’s shock-therapy privatization in the 1990s, is speaking from inside the era when “integration with the world” often meant selling assets cheaply and exporting brains expensively.

On the surface, the sentence is almost comically narrow. Not “investment,” not “technology transfer,” not “joint ventures,” not “rule of law.” Just hiring. The specificity is the point: it reframes national “interest” as individual exit. If Russian engineers get recruited to Microsoft, Russia “wins” by proximity to global capital, even if the value they create accrues elsewhere. It’s a neoliberal syllogism delivered with bureaucratic bluntness: markets allocate talent; therefore, the nation’s best outcome is to be chosen by the market.

The subtext is defensive and faintly cynical. It’s aimed at critics who demand visible, domestic gains from globalization. Chubais answers by lowering the bar to something hard to argue against (jobs for smart Russians) while dodging harder questions about hollowed-out industry and the state’s bargaining power. In a country where the 1990s are remembered as a decade of extraction and humiliation, the quote lands less as pragmatic realism than as an inadvertent confession: Russia’s role is to supply human capital to someone else’s empire of innovation.