Leadership Quote by Anatoly Chubais

There is a whole political worldview smuggled into Chubais's dry, bureaucratic phrasing: the public is a moving target, the state is a machine, and the machine simply failed to keep up. By casting society's desires as "diversification", he borrows the language of markets and product demand, not citizenship or rights. People become consumers with shifting preferences; governance becomes logistics. The sentence sounds neutral, almost technocratic, but the moral argument is doing quiet work: if the apparatus can't "follow", then frustration, disorder, and even authoritarian "simplification" start to look like predictable outcomes rather than political choices.

The subtext is a defense of a particular post-Soviet moment, when Russia's sudden pluralism in the 1990s collided with institutions built for uniformity. "Diversification" gestures at the explosion of identities and expectations after the USSR: private enterprise, regional interests, new media, rising inequality, nostalgia, outrage. "State apparatus" evokes an inherited bureaucracy and security ecosystem trained to impose coherence from the top down. The mismatch Chubais names is real; his framing is strategic. It shifts the blame away from reformers and onto institutional inertia, while implying that rapid reform was less an ideological gamble than a forced march demanded by reality.

Coming from a politician associated with privatization and shock therapy, the line also reads as preemptive absolution. If society splintered faster than governance could adapt, then the social pain that followed can be recoded as transition cost, not policy failure. The elegance is in the passive voice: nobody chose to lag; the apparatus just couldn't. That grammatical softness is its sharpest edge.