Leadership Quote by Aleksandr Lebed

Lebed’s line lands like a blunt instrument dressed up as reform: if “80%” of people need to be made law-abiding “again,” the problem isn’t a few bad actors, it’s the state itself. The number is conspicuously imprecise but emotionally exact - big enough to signal national emergency, tidy enough to sound managerial. He’s not pleading for mercy; he’s indicting the system for producing criminals at scale.

The real knife twist is “a thief against his own will.” Lebed borrows the language of coercion to launder the moral stain of corruption, reframing businessmen not as predators but as hostages. In a post-Soviet economy where rules shifted faster than institutions, “entrepreneur” could mean pioneer, profiteer, or scapegoat depending on who held power that week. By claiming policy “makes” theft inevitable, he suggests legality has become a trap: to operate is to violate, to comply is to fail. That’s a potent populist move because it offers absolution to ordinary participants in a gray economy while reserving blame for distant lawmakers and bureaucrats.

Context matters: late-1990s Russia was a thicket of contradictory regulations, selective enforcement, and rent-seeking - a place where the line between “business” and “crime” was often drawn after the fact, usually in someone else’s favor. Lebed’s intent is to position himself as the strong, clean hand: not just tougher policing, but a political reset where the state stops weaponizing complexity. The subtext is transactional: give me power, and I’ll make the rules make sense - and, not incidentally, decide who gets to be “law-abiding” again.