Grigory Yavlinsky

Grigory Alekseyevich Yavlinsky (Григо́рий Алексе́евич Явли́нский; born 10 April 1952) is a Russian economist and politician.

He has held numerous positions in the Soviet and Russian governments across different levels, including in the State Duma.

Yavlinsky was one of authors of the 500 Days Program, a plan for the transition of the Soviet regime to a free-market economy, and is the former leader of the opposition Yabloko party.

He has run three times for Russia's presidency.

In 1967 and 1968, he was the champion of the Ukrainian SSR in junior boxing.

He decided to become an economist during his school years.

From 1967 to 1976, he studied at the Plekhanov Institute of the National Economy in Moscow as a labour economist and took a post-graduate course there.

While a candidate of economics, he worked in the coal sector.

After finishing his postgraduate studies he was employed by the All-Soviet Union Coal Mines Department Research Institute.

His job was to draft new unified work instructions for the coal industry.

He was the first person in the USSR to complete this assignment.

To perform his duties, he had to go down the mines.

One of his shifts nearly ended tragically for him when the mine collapsed.

Together with four workers, he spent ten hours waist-deep in ice-cold water, waiting for help.

Three of his fellow sufferers died in hospital after their rescue.

Yavlinsky spent four years at this job.

He saw it as an opportunity to see the world hidden behind the propaganda posters.

He reported about the horrible conditions in which the coal miners lived and worked, but his reports had no impact.

In 1980, Yavlinsky was assigned to the USSR State Committee for Labour and Social Affairs in charge of the heavy industry sector.

In this position he began to develop a project aimed at improving the USSR labour system.

He identified two different ways to enhance the efficiency of the system: either establish total control over every move of every worker in the country or alternatively give enterprises more independence.

His report on the project did not prove popular with the head of the State Committee for Labour, Yury Batalin.

The KGB confiscated 600 draft copies of Yavlinsky's report and interrogated him several times.

When Brezhnev died in 1982, the KGB finally left Yavlinsky alone.

However, he had to stop working as he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a closed medical facility for nine months.

The drafts of his report were burned together with his other personal belongings as contagious.

From 1984, he held a management position at the Labour Ministry and then at the Council of Ministers of the USSR.

In this capacity, he had to join Communist Party of the Soviet Union, of which he was a member in 1985–1991.

He was head of the Joint Economic Department of the Government of the USSR.

In 1996 he ran against Boris Yeltsin, finishing fourth with 7.3% of the vote.

In 2000 Yavlinsky ran against Vladimir Putin, finishing third with 5.8%.

In the 2012 presidential election he was prevented from running for president by Russian authorities, despite collecting the necessary 2 million signatures of Russian citizens for his candidacy.

Yavlinsky was Yabloko's candidate for Russian President in the 2018 presidential election, when he ran against Putin and got 1.05% of the vote, according to the results.

Many of the election results were not recognised by his party due to corroborated allegations of irregularities.

Yavlinsky holds a PhD in economics from the Central Economic Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences; his doctoral dissertation was entitled "The socio-economic system of Russia and the problem of its modernisation".

He is a professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.

Yavlinsky was born in Lviv, Ukrainian SSR to Jewish parents.

His father, Aleksei Yavlinsky, was an officer, and his mother, Vera Naumovna, a chemistry teacher at an institute.

Both his parents are buried in Lviv, while his brother Mikhail still lives there.

He is related to Natan Yavlinsky, the nuclear physicist who invented tokamak.