Leadership Quote by Anatoly Chubais

Power, in this framing, isn’t exercised by persuasion; it’s exercised by paperwork. Chubais’s line lands with the chilly pragmatism of a post-Soviet operator who has watched ideals get chewed up by institutions that don’t exist yet. “Somebody who will speak the same language” sounds like a plea for mutual understanding, but the language he’s really privileging isn’t Russian or English. It’s the idiom of contracts, mandates, and enforceable commitments - the dialect of a state trying to become legible to itself.

The second sentence sharpens the subtext: “we couldn’t have any kind of discussion without permission.” That word does a lot of work. It implies that even conversation is not neutral; it’s a regulated activity, contingent on authority. In liberal democracies, debate is presumed to precede rules. Here, rules precede debate, because without a “legal framework,” talk becomes theater: promises you can’t compel, negotiations you can’t verify, reforms you can’t stabilize.

Chubais, associated with the 1990s Russian “shock therapy” era and privatization, is often read as a technocrat who believed procedure could substitute for trust. This quote fits that worldview: you don’t fix fragmentation with charisma; you fix it by building systems that force cooperation, or at least simulate it. There’s also a defensive note - a way to justify stalled dialogue by blaming the absence of authorization. If nothing can be discussed “without permission,” then accountability migrates upward, away from the people doing the discussing.