Leadership Quote by Anatoly Chubais

“Private property” sounds blandly technical here, but Chubais is wielding it like a blunt political instrument. In a post-Soviet setting, calling private property “fundamental” isn’t a civics lesson; it’s a demand that society stop treating ownership as provisional, reversible, or morally suspect. The phrase “very long-term” does the real work. It signals permanence, a one-way door. Not just markets, but a new social contract where yesterday’s state assets become today’s untouchable holdings.

Chubais, as an architect and defender of Russia’s 1990s privatization drive, is speaking to multiple audiences at once. To investors and Western partners, it’s reassurance: the rules won’t be rewritten, the state won’t snatch back what’s been sold, the future will look like capitalism rather than a relapse. To domestic critics, it’s a warning wrapped in institutional language: whatever you think about how property was acquired, disputing it threatens stability itself.

The subtext is that legitimacy can be manufactured through durability. If an arrangement lasts long enough, it graduates from controversial policy to “institution.” That’s both pragmatic and cynical: it asks people to confuse endurance with justice. In Russia, where privatization often meant insider deals, vouchers hoovered up cheaply, and the rapid emergence of oligarchic power, “private property” became less an ideal than a battlefield. Chubais’ sentence tries to close that battlefield by redefining the argument: not “who deserves what,” but “do we want a future at all.”