Wealth & Money Quote by Anatoly Chubais

A bureaucrat’s dream, dressed up as market realism: the state doesn’t just “see” what the economy needs, it can translate that insight into action by moving prices like levers on a control panel. Chubais is speaking from the crucible of post-Soviet transition, when Russia’s leadership was trying to swap the command economy’s dead hand for something that looked like capitalism without surrendering the state’s steering wheel. The line performs a careful rhetorical two-step: it pays respect to “demand” (the sacred term of market economics) while quietly reasserting the primacy of the state as the entity capable of interpreting it correctly.

The subtext is paternalistic and technocratic. Ordinary price signals are framed as insufficient or noisy; someone must “understand” them properly, and that someone is the state. Prices become not information emerging from millions of decisions but an “instrument” for policy implementation. That phrasing matters: instruments are played. It implies a conductor, not a crowd.

It also functions as political insulation. If prices rise or fall painfully, the logic suggests it’s not arbitrary coercion but enlightened calibration, a rational response to “demand.” In a society scarred by shortages, hyperinflation, and the chaotic redistribution of the 1990s, this is an attempt to legitimize intervention as modernization rather than relapse into planning.

Chubais’s sentence captures the Russian reform paradox: invoking the market to justify central authority, promising efficiency while keeping the right to decide what the economy “really” wants.