The Redhead — Anatoly Borisovich Chubais (born June 16, 1955), a Russian political and economic figure, one of the architects and leaders of Russia's economic reforms in the 1990s. He earned the nickname «the redhead» for his distinctive hair color.
In 1991, Chubais became chairman of the Russian Federation's State Committee for the Management of State Property, and from 1992 served as deputy chairman of the Russian government. It was under his leadership that Russia's mass privatization program was developed and carried out.
Voucher (or «check») privatization was a large-scale economic reform carried out in Russia between 1992 and 1994. The core idea was to hand a portion of state property to citizens free of charge, through privatization vouchers.
Every Russian citizen received a privatization voucher with a nominal value of 10,000 rubles (roughly $20-25 at the time). The voucher was a special bearer security with several layers of protection, resembling a banknote.
In theory, every voucher holder could:
- Invest it in shares of the enterprise where they worked
- Buy shares in any other enterprise being privatized, at a voucher auction
- Invest it in a voucher investment fund (known by the Russian acronym ChIF)
- Sell the voucher to someone else
In practice, most Russians had no idea what to do with their vouchers. Many sold them for next to nothing to resellers, or invested them in ChIFs that often turned out to be financial pyramid schemes. Some enterprising citizens and organized groups bought up vouchers en masse and later acquired large blocks of shares in enterprises, giving rise to Russia's first oligarchs.
Chubais and his supporters argued that privatization was necessary for a rapid transition to a market economy and for creating a class of property owners. Chubais became famous for the line «Every voucher is a little piece of Russia,» as well as the promise that «two vouchers equal two 'Volgas,'» implying that a voucher's value would eventually match the cost of a Volga automobile.
The results of privatization, however, were mixed. Many industrial enterprises cut production or went bankrupt after privatization, and society split sharply along economic lines. The privatization process was accompanied by widespread abuse, a criminalized economy, and corruption.
The word «voucher» became a byword in everyday speech, and privatization itself was widely perceived as a swindle. Chubais remains one of the most polarizing figures in recent Russian history to this day: to some, a reformer who saved the country from economic collapse; to others, the man who sold off the nation's wealth.
The expression «not even the redhead understands it» in the context of the novel underscores the general confusion surrounding vouchers — even the reform's own architect supposedly didn't fully grasp the consequences of the process he'd set in motion, though publicly Chubais always defended the reform course as the right one.