Politics & Power Quote by Anatoly Chubais

"The red directors were one of the main political forces. Another force was the former Soviet ministers who lost everything because of the transformation of the Soviet Union to Russia"

Anatoly Chubais, Politician

About this Quote

Power in the 1990s wasn’t a clean break from communism so much as a knife fight among the people communism left behind. Chubais’s phrasing is bluntly strategic: he reduces the chaos of post-Soviet politics to two blocs with grievances, networks, and institutional memory. “Red directors” is loaded shorthand for the industrial bosses who ran Soviet enterprises and emerged from privatization not as relics, but as operators with factories, local patronage, and leverage over jobs and wages. Calling them “one of the main political forces” strips away the romantic narrative of democratic awakening and replaces it with the logic of organizational muscle.

The second force he names is even more telling: “former Soviet ministers who lost everything.” That line carries a quiet warning. These aren’t abstract losers of history; they’re dispossessed insiders with knowledge of the state, access to security services, and a personal score to settle. Chubais doesn’t paint them as villains, but he doesn’t sentimentalize them either. “Lost everything” frames their politics as revenge economics: a hunger to claw back status, property, and authority by any means available.

Context matters: Chubais was one of the chief architects of Russia’s market reforms and privatization. He’s not neutrally describing the landscape; he’s defending a contested legacy. By emphasizing the strength of those who felt robbed by the transition, he implies that reformers were battling entrenched counter-elites, not merely managing policy. The subtext: Russia’s new order was born encircled, and the fight over ownership was always a fight over the state itself.

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About the Author

Anatoly Chubais (born June 16, 1955) is a Politician from Russia.

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