Leadership Quote by Anatoly Chubais

A telltale shrug dressed up as historical explanation, Chubais frames technological change as the one force that slips the state’s grip. The line sounds modest, almost bureaucratic, but it’s doing aggressive political work: shifting the story of post-Soviet upheaval away from human agency and toward inevitability. If progress “couldn’t be predicted,” then the people steering reforms can present themselves less as architects with culpability and more as managers caught in a weather system.

The subtext is a rebuttal to the Soviet promise of total planning. In late Soviet and early post-Soviet political culture, the state wasn’t just a regulator; it was an oracle. Chubais punctures that myth by invoking “scientific and technical progress” as an external, unruly variable. It’s a neat inversion: the very domains the USSR fetishized - science, engineering, modernization - become the proof that central control is obsolete.

Context matters because Chubais is inseparable from Russia’s 1990s “shock therapy” reforms and privatization battles, where outcomes were brutal and uneven. This sentence offers a kind of alibi: reforms may have been chaotic, but chaos was baked into the era’s accelerating complexity. The phrase “by the state” lands with quiet provocation, suggesting a new hierarchy where markets, networks, and innovation outrun ministries.

It works rhetorically because it’s bloodless. No villains, no moral drama - just a technocrat’s fatalism. That cool tone is the point: it asks the listener to accept disruption not as a choice, but as the price of entering modernity.