Yegor Gaidar

Yegor Timurovich Gaidar (Его́р Тиму́рович Гайда́р, ; 19 March 1956 – 16 December 2009) was a Soviet and Russian economist, politician, and author, and was the Acting Prime Minister of Russia from 15 June 1992 to 14 December 1992.

He was the architect of the controversial shock therapy reforms administered in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which brought him both praise and harsh criticism.

He participated in the preparation of the Belovezh Accords.

Gaidar was born in 1956 in Moscow, RSFSR, Soviet Union, the son of Ariadna Bazhova and Pravda military correspondent Timur Gaidar, who fought in the Bay of Pigs Invasion and was a friend of Raúl Castro.

His paternal grandfather was Soviet writer Arkady Gaidar and his maternal grandfather was writer Pavel Bazhov.

Despite the Turkic-sounding surname, Gaidar was Russian; his grandfather, originally called "Golikov", adopted the name "Gaidar" from the Khakas language as a nom-de-plume.

Gaidar married the daughter of writer Arkady Strugatsky during his time at the university.

His daughter, Maria Gaidar, was one of the leaders of the Russian democratic opposition.

Gaidar graduated with honors from the Moscow State University, Faculty of Economics, in 1978 and worked as a researcher in several academic institutes.

A long-time member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and an editor of the CPSU ideological journal Communist during the perestroika, he joined Boris Yeltsin's camp during Perestroika.

Many Russians held him responsible for the economic hardships that plagued the country in the 1990s that resulted in mass poverty and hyperinflation among other things, although liberals praised him as a man who did what had to be done to save the country from complete collapse.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, who advised the Russian government in the early 1990s, called Gaidar "the intellectual leader of many of Russia's political and economic reforms" and "one of the few pivotal actors" of the period.

One of Gaidar's most outspoken critics was the Yabloko economist and MP Grigory Yavlinsky, who had proposed since 1990 a 500 Days programme for the transition of the whole USSR to market economic, which was first backed and then dismissed by the government of Nikolai Ryzhkov.

In 1991 he quit the Communist Party and was promoted to Yeltsin's government.

While in government, Gaidar advocated free market economic reforms according to the principle of shock therapy.

His best-known decision was to abolish price regulation by the state, which immediately resulted in a major increase in 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 15 June until 14 December, 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.

Gaidar was often criticized for imposing ruthless reforms in 1992 with little care for their social impact; however, the country back then was in a desperate state of economy and was on the brink of a famine.

Russia had no currency for buying import goods, at the same time, no-one gave credits as the country was essentially bankrupt.

The collapse of the Soviet social system led to serious deterioration in living standards.

Millions of Russians were thrown into poverty due to their savings being devalued by massive hyperinflation.

Moreover, the privatization and break-up of state assets left over from the Soviet Union, which he played a big part in, led to much of the country's wealth being handed to a small group of powerful business executives, later known as the Russian oligarchs, for much less than what they were worth.

The voucher privatization program enabled these few oligarchs to become billionaires specifically by arbitraging the vast difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities and the prices prevailing on the world market.

Because they stashed billions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts rather than investing in the Russian economy, these oligarchs were dubbed "kleptocrats."

As society grew to despise these figures and resent the economic and social turmoil caused by the reforms, Gaidar was often held by Russians as one of the men most responsible.

On the other hand, the ubiquitous goods deficit of the Soviet years disappeared and it became possible to buy all goods in the shops.

Per capita calorie consumption under Gaidar diminished by 3.5% from 2526.88 kCal to 2438.17 kCal.

According to Franklin Foer writing in The Atlantic, however, "when Yegor Gaidar ... asked the United States for help hunting down the billions that the KGB had carted away, the White House refused."

On 18 September 1993, he was again appointed the First Vice-Premier under Chernomyrdin as a deliberate snub to the opposition.

He played an active role in the Russian constitutional crisis of 1993.

On 3 October, he famously spoke live on Russian television, then broadcasting from an emergency station near Moscow, as there was fighting going on in the Ostankino complex, calling on Muscovites to gather to defend Yeltsin's government so that Russia would not be "turned into an enormous concentration camp for decades".

In the 1993 Duma elections, in the aftermath of the crisis, Gaidar led the pro-government 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 20 January 1994.

During the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia Yegor Gaidar, Boris Nemtsov and Boris Fyodorov were in Belgrade, Yugoslavia on a mediation mission.

Gaidar died of pulmonary edema, provoked by myocardial ischemia on 16 December 2009.

From July 2009 until June 2011 she was Deputy Chair of the Government of Kirov oblast.

In 2015 and 2016 she was vice-governor of Odesa Oblast in Ukraine.