Leadership Quote by Anatoly Chubais

Chubais is selling inevitability with a velvet glove. The line is framed as cultural confidence - Russia will "find its own way" - but the real work is defensive: it pre-emptively rebuts the most dangerous charge facing any post-Soviet reformer, that modernization equals imitation, and imitation equals humiliation. By naming the United States and France, he’s not making a comparative politics point; he’s triangulating. America signals capitalism and a U.S.-led order, France signals Europe’s civilizational prestige and its own republican tradition. He dismisses both so he can claim reform without surrender.

The subtext is also a warning to outsiders and a promise to insiders. To outsiders: stop expecting Russia to converge on your institutions or timelines. To insiders: any reforms I’m pushing are not "foreign". That distinction mattered intensely in the 1990s, when Chubais became synonymous with "shock therapy", privatization, and the chaotic birth of oligarchic capitalism - changes widely read as imported, IMF-adjacent, and socially brutal. "Own way" becomes a rhetorical escape hatch: if outcomes disappoint, it’s not because the model was copied poorly, but because Russia is exceptional by nature.

It’s a nationalist-sounding sentence that can be used by almost anyone, which is precisely why it’s effective. Liberals can hear pragmatic pluralism; conservatives can hear sovereignty. The ambiguity is the point: in a society traumatized by collapse and allergic to lectures, "own way" isn’t a policy plan so much as a permission slip for power to define the destination later.