IN THE COURSE OF HIS SHORT BUT LIVELY career, Deputy Prime Minister Anatolii Chubais has learned how to stay afloat amidst shifting political tides. He is a savvy user of the mass media – interviews with him have regularly appeared in the press, always at the right time and always creating the image of a devoted idealist. Newspapers full of scandalous stories about corrupt Russian bureaucrats have carried laudatory portrayals of Chubais’s indifference to material gains: he lives in a two-room flat, drives an old Zhiguli, and earns a modest salary.1