(b. 19 Mar. 1956) Russian; Minister of Economics 1991 – 3 Gaidar is the son of the well-known writer Arkadi Gaidar and grandson of Vice-Admiral Timur Gaidar. A graduate from the economics faculty of Moscow State University in 1978, he was a postgraduate student supervised by Shatalin. After working as an economist in a number of academic institutes, Aleksandr Yakovlev made him the head of the economics section of the journal Kommunist. In 1990 he became the head of the economics section of Pravda. In spring 1991 he became head of the Institute of Economic Politics within the Soviet Academy of Sciences and in November that year Minister of Economics and first deputy chairman of the government of the Russian Republic. He stood for rapid marketization and had some success in stabilizing the rouble. Although he lost influence with Boris Yeltsin at the expense of the latter's former associates from Sverdlovsk, Yeltsin appointed him his plenipotentiary when Gaidar visited the USA in search of loans. He was dismissed in 1993.
Yegor Gaidar
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(b. 1956), economist, prime minister.
The public face of shock therapy, Yegor Timurovich Gaidar was a soft-spoken economist who, at the age of thirty-six, became prime minister in the turbulent first year of Boris Yeltsin's administration. He came from a prominent family: his father was Pravda's military correspondent, and his grandfather a war hero and author beloved by generations of Soviet children. Gaidar graduated from Moscow State University in 1980 with a thesis on the price mechanism, supervised by reform economist Stanislav Shatalin. He then worked as a researcher at the Academy of Sciences Institute of Systems Analysis. In 1983 he joined a commission on economic reform that advised General Secretary Yuri Andropov. In 1986, he formed an informal group, Economists for Reform, and from 1987 to 1990 he was an editor at the Communist Party journal Kommunism, under the reformist editor Otto Latsis. In 1990, he became a department head at Pravda and headed a new Institute of Economic Policy. Gaidar walked into the White House during the August coup and offered his services to Yeltsin aide Gennady Burbulis. With the support of the young democratic activists, Gaidar became a key player in Yeltsin's team, drafting his economic program and even the Belovezh accords, which broke up the Soviet Union. He later described himself as on a kamikaze mission to turn Russia into a market economy. As deputy prime minister (with Yeltsin serving as prime minister) and minister of finance and economics from November 1991, Gaidar oversaw the introduction of price liberalization in January 1992. Russia experienced a burst of hyper-inflation, but formerly empty store shelves filled with goods. Communist and nationalist opposition leaders unfairly blamed the collapsing economy on Yeltsin's policies and Gaidar's ideas. Gaidar was appointed acting prime minister in June 1992, but the Congress of People's Deputies refused to approve his appointment in December. He left the government, returning as economics minister and first deputy prime minister in September 1993, in the midst of Yeltsin's confrontation with the parliament. At one point in the crisis Gaidar appealed to people over television to take to the streets to defend the government. Gaidar took part in the creation of a liberal, progovernment electoral bloc, Russia's Choice, but it lost to red-brown forces in the December 1993 parliamentary elections, winning just 15.5 percent of the party list vote. Gaidar left the government in January 1994, although he stayed on as leader of Russia's Choice in Parliament. At the same time, Gaidar became head of his own think tank, the Institute of Transition Economies. In the December 1995 elections he led the renamed Russia's Democratic Choice, which failed to clear the five percent threshold. He spoke out against the war in Chechnya, but supported Yeltsin in the 1996 election. During the later 1990s Gaidar served more as an author and commentator than as a front-rank politician. He defended his record, advocated more liberal reform, and pursued business and academic interests. He was again elected to the Duma in December 1999 as head of the Union of Right Forces, an umbrella group uniting most of the fractured liberal leaders. The bloc went on to offer conditional support to President Vladimir Putin.
Bibliography
Gaidar, Yegor. (2000). Days of Defeat and Victory. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
—PETER RUTLAND
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| Yegor Gaidar Его́р Гайда́р |
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Acting
Prime Minister of Russia |
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| In office 15 June 1992 – 14 December 1992 |
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| President | Boris Yeltsin |
| Preceded by | Oleg Lobov |
| Succeeded by | Viktor Chernomyrdin |
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| Born | 19 March 1956 Moscow, RSFSR, Soviet Union |
| Political party | Union of Right Forces |
Yegor Timurovich Gaidar (Russian: Его́р Тиму́рович Гайда́р; Russian pronunciation: [jɪˈɡor tʲɪˈmurəvʲɪtɕ ɡɐjˈdar]; born March 19, 1956) is a Soviet and Russian economist and politician, and was the Acting Prime Minister of Russia from June 15, 1992 to December 14, 1992.
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Background
Gaidar was born in Moscow. He is the grandson of famous Soviet writer Arkady Gaidar, on the side of his father, Pravda military correspondent Timur Gaidar, who fought in the Bay of Pigs Invasion and was a friend of Raúl Castro. On his mother's side, he is the grandson of Pavel Bazhov. His daughter, Maria Gaidar is a leader of the political youth movement "Yes!" in Russia.
Professional life
Gaidar graduated with honors from the Moscow State University, Department of Economics, in 1978 and worked as a researcher in several academic institutes. A long-time member of the Communist Party and an editor of the CPSU ideological journal Communist during the perestroika, he turned a liberal during the time of Yeltsin's reforms. In 1991 he quit the Communist Party and joined Yeltsin's government.
While in government, Gaidar advocated liberal economic reforms according to the principle of shock therapy. His most well-known decision was to abolish price regulation by the state, which immediately resulted in a major increase of prices and amounted to officially authorizing a market economy in Russia. He also cut military procurement and industrial subsidies, and reduced the budget deficit. Gaidar was the First Vice-Premier of the Russian Government and Minister of Economics from 1991 until 1992, and Minister of Finance from February 1992 until April 1992.
He was appointed Acting Prime Minister under President Boris Yeltsin in 1992 from June 15 until December 14, when the anti-Yeltsin Russian Congress of People's Deputies refused to confirm Gaidar in this position and Viktor Chernomyrdin was eventually chosen as a compromise figure. Gaidar continued to advise the new government. On September 18, 1993, he was again appointed the First Vice-Premier under Chernomyrdin as a deliberate snub to the opposition. He had active role in the Russian constitutional crisis of 1993: on October 3, he famously spoke on live television, calling on common Muscovites to defend Yeltsin's regime. In 1993 Duma elections, in the aftermath of the crisis, Gaidar was the leader of the pro-government, liberal bloc Russia's Choice and was seen by some as a possible future Prime Minister. However, due to the bloc's failure to win the plurality of votes in the election, Gaidar's role in the government diminished and he finally resigned on January 20, 1994.
Positions held
- Director of the Institute for the Economy in Transition www.iet.ru
- Executive Vice-President of the International Democratic Union (Conservative International)
- Steering Committee member "Arrabida Meetings" (Portugal)
- Member of the Baltic Sea Cooperation Council under the Prime-Minister of Sweden
- Member of the Editorial Board of "Vestnik Evropy" (Moscow)
- Member of the Advisory Board of the "Acta Oeconomica" (Budapest)
- Member of the Advisory Board of the CASE Foundation (Warsaw)
Honorary positions
- Honorary Professor, University of California, Berkeley.
- Terry Sanford Distinguished Lecturer, Duke University
- Honorary Academy member of the Ukrainian Academy of Management
- Honorary Director, Russia- Ukraine Institute for Personnel and Management
2006 illness and alleged poisoning
On November 28, 2006, Yegor Gaidar was found unconscious in County Kildare, Ireland where he had been presenting his new book Lasting Time: Russia in the World. He was taken to a Dublin hospital but doctors said there was no serious threat to his health. There have been suspicions of a poisoning but Gaidar and his close ally Anatoly Chubais have refrained from accusing the Russian Security Service.[1] On December 6, 2006, Gaidar did claim in an op-ed published in both Russian-language and English-language publications, that he was poisoned by adversaries of the Russian authorities. He did not elaborate on who these adversaries may be.[citation needed] He repeated his claim on the BBC programme Hardtalk.[2]
Talks and interviews
At a talk show with Yevgenia Albats on June 17, 2007, Gaidar predicted a probable sequence of future political events in Russia based on his personal sources and expertise. In response to one-sided recognition of Kosovo by Western powers, Russia will recognize independence of Abkhazia and South Osetia. This will lead to a military conflict of Russia and Georgia, and urgent changes in Russian Constitution.
His books
- Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, by Yegor Gaidar, Brookings Institution Press (October 17, 2007), ISBN 0-815-73114-0.
- Russian Reform / International Money (Lionel Robbins Lectures) by Yegor Gaidar and Karl Otto Pöhl (Hardcover - Jul 6, 1995)
- Days of Defeat and Victory (Jackson School Publications in International Studies) by E. T. Gaidar, Yegor Gaidar, Michael McFaul, and Jane Ann Miller (Dec 1999)
- State and Evolution: Russia's Search for a Free Market by E. T. Gaidar, Yegor Gaidar, and Jane Ann Miller (Hardcover - Aug 2003)
- The Economics of Russian Transition by Yegor Gaidar (Aug 15, 2002)
- Ten Years of Russian Economic Reform by Sergei Vasiliev and Yegor Gaidar (Mar 25, 1999)
References
- ^ Second Russian in poison mystery, November 29, 2006
- ^ Shown on BBC World 19 February 2008
External links
- Yegor Gaidar's Project Syndicate op/eds
- Yegor Gaidar's home page
- Speech, explaining the underlying reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union
| Political offices | ||
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| Preceded by Oleg Lobov |
Acting Prime Minister of Russia 15 June 1992–14 December 1992 |
Succeeded by Viktor Chernomyrdin |
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Mentioned in
- Russia's Democratic Choice (Russian history)
- Civic Union (Russian history)
- Committee for the Operational Management of The National Economy (Russian history)
- Arkady Ivanovich Volsky (Russian history)
- People's Party of Free Russia (Russian history)
- Shock Therapy (Russian history)
- Grigory Alexeyevich Yavlinsky (Russian history)
- Union of Right Forces (Russian history)
- October 1993 Events (Russian history)
- Transition Economies (Russian history)
- Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin
- Idealism (Russian history)
- Democratic Choice of Russia
- Gaidar
