Leadership Quote by Anatoly Chubais

Chubais is doing something rarer than a policy pitch: he is puncturing the performance of policy. The line reads like an aside from inside the machine, where “Western experts” function less as advisers than as an audience whose approval can be staged. “Transparent ideal” is the giveaway phrase: it frames reform not as a contested social bargain, but as a clean, exportable model that photographs well in IMF reports and conference panels. He’s naming the temptations of post-Soviet technocracy: produce the right-looking blueprint, collect legitimacy, and call it modernization.

Then he undercuts it. “Which will be very good but never happen” isn’t cynicism for its own sake; it’s an acknowledgement of the political physics that derailed 1990s Russian privatization. Reformers could draft textbook privatization, but they couldn’t conjure the prerequisites: enforceable property rights, credible courts, insulation from oligarchic capture, a state capable of policing its own auctions, and a public willing to tolerate the distributional shock. Without those, the “ideal” is theatre - a document that certifies virtue while the real economy is carved up by whoever has proximity to power.

The final clause, “that means nothing,” lands as both warning and confession. Chubais is rejecting reform as moral signaling. He’s also implicitly justifying compromises that outsiders would label dirty: better an imperfect privatization that happens than a pure one that doesn’t. The subtext is blunt: in Russia’s transition, feasibility wasn’t a footnote. It was the policy.