Former Russian Finance Minister and distinguished economist Yegor Gaidar passed away at his home outside Moscow at the age of 53. Gaidar is best known as the architect of "shock therapy," the rapid privitization of the Russian economy in the early 1990s. He also served for several months as prime minister under Boris Yeltsin's presidency. He was also a longtime friend of Foreign Policy and served for many years as a contributing editor and member of our editorial board.
The tributes have begun pouring in from Gaidar's friends as well as his enemies today, but one of the most moving was a post on the American Enterprise Institute's Enterprise blog by Leon Aron, director of Russian studies at the AEI and a friend of Gaidar's. It is reprinted in full here with his permission:
Egor Gaidar, the man to whom Boris Yeltsin entrusted Russia’s free-market revolution, died yesterday. He was 53.
Every time we had dinner in D.C. or Moscow in the past seven years,
he looked worse and worse. He took bad care of himself. He drank more
and more. Last time I saw him in his favorite D.C. restaurant,
Morton’s, he looked like an old man and, formerly a hearty eater and a
gourmand, barely touched his steak.
He was deeply depressed—by the direction Russia was taking; by his
inability to do anything about it; and by the vicious calumny spread by
the Kremlin about Russia’s freest years, the 1990s, and about his
reforms, which literally saved the country from the famine everyone
expected in 1992. It will take decades to clear out the Augean stables
of the monstrously irrational and wasteful Soviet economy, but the
first few, heaviest shovelfuls were Egor’s.
Throughout it all, he continued to write complicated and important
books that only a brilliant economist and economic historian could have
conceived and produced, and that future generations of Russians will
enjoy and appreciate. (We were fortunate to publish excerpts from his
last book, The Death of an Empire, as an AEI paper.)
Following Yeltsin’s death less than three years before and that of
the “godfather of glasnost,” Alexander Yakovlev, in 2005, it is almost
like nature itself has conspired to make the Gorbachev-Yeltsin-Gaidar
revolution an aberration and Putinism Russia’s norm. As if Dostoevsky’s
Great Inquisitor was right when he told the imaginary Christ: you have
come to make people free, but they don’t want to be free.
I know that this is not so, and I know, too, that deep down, Egor
did not believe this. But it must have been so hard to keep faith. The
last eight years have gradually killed him. He died of a broken heart.
DENIS SINYAKOV/AFP/Getty Images
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