The Father of Russia’s Oligarchs Won’t Be the Last to Go
By the time he left this week, Anatoly Chubais, architect of the country’s 1990s privatizations, was no longer in Putin’s inner circle. His departure still matters.
When Anatoly Chubais was still in Moscow.
Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/BloombergIt’s a defection already being brushed off by the Kremlin as a “personal” issue. Of course. The truth is that as Moscow gets bogged down in a Ukrainian war far more costly than imagined, the abrupt departure of a crucial figure of the post-Soviet years — a man who helped push Vladimir Putin into power by giving him his first Kremlin job — will sting.
Anatoly Chubais’s name evokes the mayhem and hope of that first decade of post-communist life. He was an economist, a market reformer, a red-haired pioneer under Boris Yeltsin who launched a thousand asset sales. At breakneck speed, Chubais dismantled a decrepit economic system and, in the process, turned a handful of men into billionaires. He’s frequently been blamed (even targeted) for the unequal distribution of wealth that resulted, but he described his choice at the time as “between bandit communism or bandit capitalism.”