Leadership Quote by Anatoly Chubais

A mangled sentence can be a kind of manifesto. Chubais is trying to project continental reach - “the whole of Western Europe” - while simultaneously signaling that his real constituency isn’t voters, but “the business community.” In a post-Soviet context, that’s not a slip; it’s a tell. The phrase frames legitimacy as something conferred by networks of capital rather than by public trust, and it broadcasts fluency in the language that mattered in the 1990s: deals, access, and international acceptance.

The awkward grammar (“quite good”) does extra work. It suggests a speaker operating in translation - not just linguistically, but politically. Chubais was a chief architect of Russia’s market reforms and privatization drive, a period when Western advisers, investors, and institutions became gatekeepers for credit and credibility. The sentence reads like a credential offered to an external audience: I’m your guy; I’m known; I’m safe; I can talk to your people.

There’s also a defensive edge. By insisting he “knows” Western Europe’s business class, he implies that Russia’s future should be negotiated in boardrooms, not parliaments. It’s a worldview where economic modernization is inseparable from elite brokerage, and where proximity to Western capital is treated as proof of competence. The subtext is power-as-connectivity: not ideology, not charisma, but the ability to pick up the phone and make Moscow legible to Frankfurt.