"The kind of capitalism I hate most is crony capitalism, the friends who decide. These are things which should be killed in Russia"
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A politician who helped midwife Russia’s chaotic leap into capitalism railing against “crony capitalism” is less a confession than a defensive maneuver. Chubais’s line draws a bright moral boundary between an acceptable market order and the rigged, insider-driven version Russians actually experienced in the 1990s. The phrasing is telling: “the friends who decide” reduces a sprawling system of patronage into an intimate clique, a kitchen-table oligarchy. It’s a populist image meant to reroute anger away from “capitalism” as such and toward a narrower villain: backroom loyalty replacing rules.
The intent is political triage. By naming cronyism as the hated exception, Chubais tries to rescue the legitimacy of reform itself. In the post-Soviet context, privatization, voucher schemes, and “loans-for-shares” deals created fortunes that looked indistinguishable from theft to ordinary citizens. Condemning crony capitalism is a way to argue that the problem wasn’t the turn to markets, but the capture of markets by networks tied to power.
The subtext is also an admission of how Russia works: economic outcomes are decided less by competition than by proximity to the state. “Should be killed in Russia” isn’t policy talk; it’s moral theater, the language of purges and hard resets. That choice of verb signals both urgency and impotence: only something as absolute as “killing” seems adequate, because incremental reform can’t survive a system where friends, not institutions, do the deciding.
The intent is political triage. By naming cronyism as the hated exception, Chubais tries to rescue the legitimacy of reform itself. In the post-Soviet context, privatization, voucher schemes, and “loans-for-shares” deals created fortunes that looked indistinguishable from theft to ordinary citizens. Condemning crony capitalism is a way to argue that the problem wasn’t the turn to markets, but the capture of markets by networks tied to power.
The subtext is also an admission of how Russia works: economic outcomes are decided less by competition than by proximity to the state. “Should be killed in Russia” isn’t policy talk; it’s moral theater, the language of purges and hard resets. That choice of verb signals both urgency and impotence: only something as absolute as “killing” seems adequate, because incremental reform can’t survive a system where friends, not institutions, do the deciding.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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