Science & Tech Quote by Anatoly Chubais

Chubais’s line reads like a manifesto for a particular kind of Russian modernity: one built fast, from the top, and tethered to global markets rather than insulated from them. As a chief architect of Russia’s post-Soviet economic “reforms,” he wasn’t praising the Internet as a cultural playground; he was treating connectivity as infrastructure for capitalism, state capacity, and national relevance. The word “should” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not a prediction, it’s a directive aimed at a political class tempted by nostalgia, protectionism, or the comforting fiction that Russia can modernize on its own terms without integrating into the systems that set standards, prices, and legitimacy.

The subtext is a wager: globalization is not a threat to sovereignty but a lever for power. “Support” implies agency, as if Russia can choose to be a co-author of globalization rather than a passive recipient. That’s aspirational branding, but also a defensive move against critics who saw the 1990s opening as a humiliating loss of control. By framing Internet development as “very speedy,” Chubais taps a perennial Russian political fantasy: leapfrogging stages of history through technology and administrative will. It’s the same impulse behind crash industrialization, just updated for the network age.

Context sharpens the irony. In practice, Russia’s Internet did grow quickly, yet the state later learned that networks don’t just accelerate commerce; they accelerate scrutiny, opposition, and coordination. The quote captures a brief moment when connectivity looked like a one-way street toward prosperity, before it became a battleground over information, influence, and who gets to define “global” in the first place.