Politics & Power Quote by Anatoly Chubais

Chubais is doing a piece of political stagecraft that looks modest but lands as a power move: he’s refusing the “bookish reformer” costume and opting for the “practiced operator.” In the early post-Soviet scramble, legitimacy was a scarce currency. Saying he’s coming “not from the academic position” is less about credentials than about immunizing himself against a familiar accusation: that market reforms were being imported by theorists with clean hands and no accountability to real voters, real budgets, real chaos.

The subtext is a quiet demotion of the intelligentsia as a ruling class. Academia in late Soviet and early Russian political culture signaled abstraction, ideology, and the tendency to lecture rather than govern. By foregrounding the St. Petersburg city council, he invokes the gritty workshop of local administration - where shortages, patronage networks, and public anger can’t be solved with seminars. It’s also a coded nod to a specific ecosystem: St. Petersburg as a talent pipeline and a web of loyalties that would later dominate federal power. “City council” sounds democratic and municipal; it also hints at proximity to the deals, alliances, and compromises that actually move a state.

The line’s intent, then, is preemptive positioning. Chubais is telling skeptics: I’m not here to theorize your lives into a spreadsheet; I’ve already been in the room where the lights flicker and the bills don’t add up. In a moment when “reform” could read as either salvation or swindle, he’s claiming the one thing that sells in a collapsing system: practical credibility.