Politics & Power Quote by Anatoly Chubais

Chubais isn’t bragging so much as filing a claim: legitimacy through administrative muscle. In one sentence he rewrites the origin story of Russia’s early reform cohort, positioning himself and his circle not as theorists or ideologues, but as the rare people who’d actually run a machine that still had to collect trash, pay salaries, and keep the lights on. “We start to operate as the bureaucrats” is tellingly unromantic. The verb is operational, almost clinical, like a pilot describing an emergency checklist. It’s a quiet rebuttal to a common indictment of the 1990s reformers: that they were reckless economists playing with a country.

The subtext is a defense against hindsight. By emphasizing “practical bureaucratic management” in “complicated condition of 1990,” he invokes the chaos of late-Soviet collapse and the administrative vacuum that followed. The point isn’t merely that things were hard; it’s that competence itself became a kind of political capital. If the state is breaking apart, then the ability to make it function even minimally becomes an argument for why you should be entrusted with larger, riskier transformations.

There’s also a subtle sleight of hand in “the only ones in the whole Russian team.” It narrows the field to a small vanguard and elevates it above rivals who may have had ideas, popularity, or moral claims, but not the bureaucratic know-how needed to execute policy. Chubais is signaling the technocrat’s creed: history doesn’t reward the pure; it rewards the operators who can get a signature, a decree, a system to move.