Wealth & Money Quote by Anatoly Chubais

“Killing the private property” is deliberately blunt phrasing, the kind of moralized verb choice that turns an economic category into a crime scene. Chubais isn’t arguing about efficiency curves; he’s indicting a worldview. By framing Marxism and Leninism as centered on the destruction of private property, he collapses a sprawling ideology into a single animating impulse: not building a fairer system, but annihilating ownership itself. That simplification is strategic. It makes the Soviet project read less like a botched modernization attempt and more like an intentional assault on ordinary life - the home, the plot of land, the small enterprise, the inherited sense of “mine.”

The intent is also self-exculpatory. Chubais, a key architect of Russia’s 1990s privatization, speaks from a political biography constantly litigated in public memory. In a country where “reform” became synonymous with oligarchs, chaos, and plunder, he re-centers the argument on first principles: whatever the painful outcomes, the alternative was an ideology defined by confiscation. The subtext is a dare to nostalgia. If you miss the Soviet order, are you prepared to endorse its foundational act of property death?

Context matters: post-Soviet Russia is a battlefield over legitimacy, and property is the most charged symbol. Chubais uses ideological shorthand (“Marxist economy,” “Lenin ideology”) like a prosecuting attorney’s refrain. The repetition functions as a drumbeat: this was not an accident, not a deviation, but the point.