Gaidar, Yegor Timurovich (1956- )

Russian politician and economist. He served as first deputy prime minister in charge of the economy, then early in 1992 was made acting prime minister - a title that was never confirmed because of the opposition of an increasingly hostile Russian parliament. That opposition grew too strong for his continued tenure of office; President Boris Yeltsin accepted his resignation in December 1992, and he was replaced by Viktor Chernomyrdin. He later returned to the government, again as first deputy prime minister in charge of economic reform 1993-94.

The ‘shock’ Gaidar administered to the economy in January 1992 - liberalization of most prices, removal of barriers to trade, semi-convertibility of the rouble, deep cuts in public spending (especially in the military budget), slashing of subsidies to companies - was followed by a massive and rapid privatization programme, administered by Anatoly Chubais. The pace was frantic, though he was forced to slow down and to restore some budget cuts owing to growing and increasingly militant opposition.

His ‘shock therapy’ has been held by most Russians and some outside observers as being a major contributory factor in the partially corrupt and unpopular reception of capitalism in Russia. It could, however, be argued that his reforms were stopped in their tracks, and that the corruption that increasingly marked political and economic life grew because of the lack of reform, not because of it. Yet his great weakness was the lack of a political base; he relied wholly on Yeltsin's support both as acting prime minister and when he later returned to the government. His party, ‘Choice of Russia’, did much less well than expected in the polls in 1993 and was all but eliminated from parliament in later elections. Gaidar remained, however, an influential figure outside government and parliament, frequently being consulted by Yeltsin as well as by foreign political leaders, bankers, and economists.

Yegor Gaidar was born into the Soviet elite; his father was Pravda's military correspondent, and his grandfather, Igor, was both a hero of the Civil War and one of the best-known children's story writers of the Stalin period. From the early 1980s, Gaidar studied Western economists and, by the late1980s, was beginning to advance theories of increasingly radical liberalization in the pages of Pravda and the Communist Party's monthly journal, Kommunist.

The natural leader of a group of talented, young, and Western-oriented economists, Gaidar was recommended to Boris Yeltsin as the cabinet minister in charge of economic reform for the new Russian government that Yeltsin was forming in the latter part of 1991, after winning the election for the presidency of Russia - though Russia was still part of the USSR. Gaidar drafted the speech Yeltsin gave in October 1991 that set out a course for radical economic reform.