Politics & Power Quote by Anatoly Chubais

“First Soviet election with alternative candidates” is the kind of phrase that sounds bland until you remember how explosive it was in 1989. Chubais is pointing to a hinge moment: late-perestroika politics, when the USSR was experimenting with something that looked like pluralism while still carrying the muscle memory of one-party control. The intent here isn’t nostalgia. It’s credentialing. He’s staking a claim to authorship in Russia’s long, uneasy transition from managed unanimity to managed competition.

The subtext sits in the quiet self-emphasis: “I myself arranged special training.” Training for whom, and for what? In mature democracies, candidates learn retail politics; in the late Soviet context, “training” reads as a technology transfer. How to campaign, how to speak to voters, how to use the new rules without getting crushed by the old ones. It also hints at the emerging class of reformers who believed that politics could be engineered: build institutions, teach actors, tweak incentives, and history will cooperate.

Chubais’s line carries an implicit defense against later accusations that the 1990s reforms were imposed, elitist, or indifferent to public consent. He’s reminding listeners: we tried to create competition; we prepared people to participate. At the same time, it reveals a paternalistic streak common to technocratic reformers: democracy as a skill to be taught from above, not a social force erupting from below.

Contextually, it lands as a small autobiographical fact with a big political message: I wasn’t just in the room when the Soviet system cracked; I helped widen the crack.