Leadership Quote by Anatoly Chubais

The line lands like a deadpan indictment of late-Soviet managerial culture: the real conversation is happening in the shadows, while the official conversation obsessively rearranges the scenery. Chubais sets up a split-screen. In one frame, he is “communicating with the directors” of Soviet enterprises, where actual power, constraints, and tradeoffs are understood with grim clarity. In the other, the “official discussions” perform governance as theater, reducing systemic breakdown to cosmetic tweaks like “the color of the walls.”

The intent is not subtle: expose institutional dishonesty. Even his phrasing does the work. “I see that it is wrong” signals a reformer’s discomfort with back-channel dealing, but also a pragmatic admission that the formal system is too hollow to use. That moral wince is important; it frames his informal engagement not as corruption-for-fun but as a forced workaround inside a decaying bureaucracy.

The subtext is a broader critique of Soviet incentive structures. When nobody is rewarded for confronting reality, meetings become rituals of safety: talk about paint, not production quotas, shortages, or the political terror of admitting failure. Chubais is also, knowingly or not, pre-justifying the kind of “shock” reforms he’d later champion: if official institutions can’t even name the problem, legitimacy migrates to whoever can act, even if the methods feel compromised.

Context matters: this is the voice of a technocratic modernizer watching a command system ossify into meetings about appearances. It’s not just a complaint about incompetence; it’s a warning about what happens when a state’s public language becomes disconnected from its private reality.