“It’s all Chubais’ fault!”

One of the key ideologues of neoliberal economic reform during Yeltsin’s first presidential term, Anatoly Chubais presided over the grotesquely unequal distribution of state assets into private hands via the “voucher” system, enacted between 1992 and 1994. Though Chubais promised that each Russian citizen would be entitled to “two Volgas per voucher,” in reality, groups of “insiders” hailing from either the late-Soviet nomenklatura or the fledgling post-Soviet oligarch class were able to amass vast quantities of vouchers, concentrating a large percentage of public wealth in just a few hands. The voucher program left ordinary citizens, some of whom had poured life savings into vouchers, entirely in the lurch and led to widespread public anger against Chubais. On 16 January 1996, Chubais was asked to resign his position as deputy prime minister for economic affairs, though he would end up heading Yeltsin’s re-election campaign and resume working for the presidential administration during Yeltsin’s second term. During Chubais’ brief period of political exile, however, the media lost no time poking fun at both his policies and his relationship with his former boss. Here, we see the ending of an episode of the vicious political sketch show Kukly (Puppets), which ran from 1994 to 2002 on NTV. Until 2000, the channel belonged to media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky, a major beneficiary of Chubais’s voucherization. In the show’s forty-seventh episode, “Hostages” (27 January 1996), Yeltsin, Zyuganov, Yavlinsky, Zhirinovsky, and several others are held hostage on an abandoned bus, possibly by prototypical Chechen terrorists. After Russian soldiers storm the vehicle, the Yeltsin puppet emerges at dawn from its immolated carcass to intone: “It’s all Chubais’s fault. If not for Chubais, everything would have been great.”