Politics & Power Quote by Anatoly Chubais

Power, in Chubais's telling, is not a set of institutions so much as a room full of guys. The line is almost comically bare: no policy detail, no ethical wrestling, no acknowledgement of public pressure or democratic process. Just a man who "went to government" to "make changes", and remembers "a number of guys" who mattered. That offhand phrasing is the point. It normalizes a worldview where transformation is engineered through personal access, not public mandate.

Chubais is inseparable from the Russia of the 1990s, when "changes" often meant shock therapy, privatization, and the rapid conversion of state assets into private fortunes. In that environment, government was both the lever and the prize: the place you went to rewrite the rules and decide who would benefit from them. The quote reads like an unguarded admission of how reform really traveled - less through transparent institutions than through informal networks, patronage, and elite bargaining.

The subtext is a quiet defense: the important work required proximity to "important figures", and the speaker was pragmatic enough to seek it. But it also betrays a thin conception of legitimacy. Ordinary citizens are absent. So are laws, parties, and procedures. What remains is a memory of proximity and hierarchy, a politics narrated as career logistics.

Even the vagueness functions as self-protection. "These changes" stays abstract; "a number of guys" stays nameless. It’s a sentence built to acknowledge the clique without indicting it - a snapshot of post-Soviet governance where the most consequential decisions could be described, casually, as something you handled with the right people in the right place.