Yegor Gaidar

Origins and early life

Yegor Gaidar was born in Moscow on 19 March 1956 into two dynasties of Soviet letters: his paternal grandfather was Arkady Gaidar, the author of the children's classics of the 1930s, and his paternal grandmother, Liya Solomyanskaya, born Rakhil in Minsk in 1907, came from a Jewish family whose father, Lazar Solomyansky, an engineer, had gone from the Bund to the Bolsheviks — the one grandparent on which this fiche rests, recorded by his father Timur Gaidar in his own memoirs; his mother was the daughter of the writer Pavel Bazhov.

Work and career

An economist of Moscow University, he edited the economics pages of the party journal Kommunist and of Pravda under Gorbachev, and in November 1991, at thirty-five, Boris Yeltsin made him minister of economy and finance of a Russia whose treasury was empty, whose shops were bare and whose state had ceased to exist a month later. On 2 January 1992 he freed prices, and in the months that followed abolished the state monopoly of foreign trade, cut the military budget and began, with Anatoly Chubais, the privatization of industry — the 'shock therapy' that ended the Soviet economy and filled the shops, at the cost of an inflation that wiped out the savings of a generation and an impoverishment that Russians have never forgiven him; this fiche states the controversy as it stands, between those who hold that his reforms averted famine and civil war, and those who hold that they delivered the country to the oligarchs.

Acting prime minister from June to December 1992, he was dismissed by the parliament, led the liberal party Russia's Choice in the Duma, founded the Institute for the Economy in Transition and wrote the histories of the Soviet collapse — Collapse of an Empire, of 2006 — that are his testament. He died of a pulmonary edema at his home near Moscow on 16 December 2009, at fifty-three.