Leadership Quote by Anatoly Chubais

A policy that once kept the Soviet state afloat later became something you weren’t supposed to understand. Chubais’s line lands like a dry confession: the New Economic Policy wasn’t merely a historical episode, it was a live wire. NEP (Lenin’s 1920s semi-market detour) proved an uncomfortable point the USSR spent decades trying to un-prove-that socialism, when confronted with collapse, had already reached for markets and incentives. If that precedent is taken seriously, the entire moral architecture of “planned purity” starts looking less like destiny and more like branding.

The intent is political, not archival. Chubais, a key face of Russia’s 1990s privatization, is pointing at the Soviet system’s selective memory as both a cautionary tale and a rhetorical weapon. By saying NEP study was “almost forbidden,” he implies that orthodoxy required amnesia: the regime couldn’t afford citizens (or economists) learning that there were alternative Soviet futures, and that pragmatism once beat ideology.

The subtext is also self-exculpating. If the USSR suppressed lessons from its own market experiment, then the post-Soviet turn to capitalism can be framed as retrieval rather than betrayal: not a Western import, but a suppressed domestic option resurfacing under crisis. “Almost forbidden” does extra work, too-it suggests taboo without needing a citation, evoking the familiar Soviet atmosphere of quiet prohibitions and career-ending curiosity.

Context matters: Chubais is speaking from the winner’s lectern of the transition years, where rewriting the Soviet past was part of legitimizing the present. NEP becomes a mirror held up to a system that demanded certainty and punished nuance.