Leadership Quote by Anatoly Chubais

Chubais is smuggling a political defense into what looks like a technical observation: if there is no single, standardized “capitalism,” then Russia’s rough-edged, oligarch-heavy 1990s can be framed not as a botched transition but as a locally specific version of the system. The line works because it shifts the argument from morality to mechanics. “Economic mechanism” sounds like gears and levers, not choices and winners. It implies that capitalism is an engineering problem with national customization, not a power struggle with predictable casualties.

The subtext is aimed at two audiences who rarely agree. To Western advisers and investors, it signals sophistication: Russia isn’t rejecting the market, it’s building its own model. To domestic skeptics furious about privatization, it offers plausible deniability: don’t blame “capitalism” as such; blame a particular design, a particular style, a particular historical inheritance. In one sentence, he dilutes responsibility across culture, institutions, and path dependence.

Context matters: Chubais is one of the emblematic architects of post-Soviet “shock therapy,” a period that produced both a market economy and a credibility crisis for liberal reform. Saying capitalism comes in national styles is a way to reclaim agency after the fact. It’s also a warning: importing the American or Swedish template won’t automatically graft onto Russian realities. The rhetorical trick is that it sounds descriptive while quietly being prescriptive: accept the messiness of Russia’s version as the price of having a version at all.