Aging & Wisdom Quote by Anatoly Chubais

Bureaucracy is supposed to be a slow grind; Chubais gives us the blunt miracle of it suddenly working the moment the right person sits in the chair. The line reads like an administrative memo, but the drama is in the quiet boast: “should have” announces a tidy reformist ideal, then “I became the chairman” reveals the real mechanism of change. Policy doesn’t win because it’s persuasive. It wins because someone with leverage occupies the correct rung in the hierarchy.

The phrasing “immediately it was permitted” is the giveaway. “Permitted” implies a gatekeeper culture where initiatives don’t pass on merit; they pass when sanctioned. It’s passive voice with fingerprints: nobody is named as the decider, which is exactly the point. Power is present as an atmosphere, not an accountable actor. That’s classic late-Soviet/early post-Soviet institutional logic: committees and plans exist as symbols of modernization, while actual modernization is negotiated through relationships, titles, and the right signatures.

The “Young Scholars’ Committee” also carries a double charge. On paper, it’s generational renewal, a channel for talent. Underneath, it’s a controllable structure for managing ambitious youth inside the system, giving them a stake and a supervisor. Chubais, a politician formed in the technocratic currents that fed perestroika and the 1990s reforms, is documenting how reform happens in practice: not as mass persuasion, but as strategic positioning. The line’s intent is to present competence; the subtext is that institutional change remains personal, conditional, and quietly centralized.