Yegor Timurovich Gaidar

Every Soviet child knew Yegor Gaidar's surname. His grandfather Arkady Gaidar, a boy commander of the civil war, was the national children's author of Timur and His Squad; his maternal grandfather Pavel Bazhov wrote the Ural folk tales of The Malachite Box. Born in Moscow in 1956, he spent his childhood in Cuba and Yugoslavia following his war-correspondent father: a boy raised at the centre of the revolutionary myth while seeing socialism's other experiments with his own eyes.

At the Moscow University economics faculty he walked the honour student's path while digging into Hungarian and Yugoslav reform economics and the forbidden Western canon. As economics editor of Kommunist, the party's theoretical journal and citadel of the planned economy, he published pieces that exposed, along the very edge of censorship, the reality of subsidies, deficits and monetary overhang.

Born into the system's highest caste, he calculated the bankruptcy of the system's economy more exactly than anyone. That paradox would push him, at thirty-five in the autumn of 1991, into the surgeon's place over a ruined economy.

Gaidar began his fateful collaboration with Anatoly Chubais in 1983. Chubais was the informal leader of a group of economists at the Leningrad Engineering-Economics Institute who held seminars discussing possible paths toward market-oriented reform of the socialist economy. Their meeting connected reform-minded economists in Moscow and Leningrad.

From 1984, Gaidar and the Chubais group were drawn into preparing documents for the Politburo Commission on Improving the Management of the National Economy. The commission was tasked with drafting a moderate program of economic change, championed by the younger generation of Politburo members led by Gorbachev; the Hungarian economic reforms of 1968 served as the model. Though the commission's proposals were ultimately rejected, Gaidar later recalled that "a team of people formed who understood what was happening in the Soviet Union, could work together, and could adapt their proposals to the country's realities."

The economic seminar held in 1986 at the Zmeynaya Gorka guesthouse near Leningrad was a decisive turning point. There, a subgroup including Gaidar and Chubais met separately from the main gathering to discuss market reforms in earnest: the deepening financial crisis in the USSR, reform of the banking system, and property rights. Similar seminars followed in 1987 and 1988. At the 1988 meeting, the idea of the unavoidable collapse of the Soviet Union was explicitly articulated for the first time. These seminars brought together the core figures (Pyotr Aven, Oleg Ananyin, Vyacheslav Shironin) who would later join the government.

The watershed moment came in July 1990 at an international seminar in Sopron, Hungary. On one side were prominent Western economists such as William Nordhaus and Rudiger Dornbusch; on the other, nearly the entire future Russian reform team: Gaidar, Chubais, Aven, and others. For the first time, a full program of radical reform was debated: shock therapy, price liberalization, financial stabilization, and drastic spending cuts to prevent hyperinflation. Yevgeny Yasin, who attended, later testified: "By then the confidence in the correctness of the path we had been groping toward in our own research became complete. Among the specialists there were no more doubts."

Pyotr Aven characterized Gaidar's leadership this way: "In education, in the drive to become a leader, in personal qualities, Gaidar was the leader of this whole team from the very beginning. … We each had our own academic field and, besides that, reforms. But Gaidar had no academic field of his own apart from these reforms. He was entirely absorbed by the ideas of reform."

In the autumn of 1991 Yeltsin handed economic plenipotence to this nearly unknown economist. The treasury was empty, grain procurement had collapsed, and by Gaidar's own account the big cities' food stocks were being counted in weeks. On 2 January 1992 prices were freed. The shelves filled within weeks, but prices rose twenty-five-fold in a year and the people's savings evaporated. He became acting premier in June; in December the Congress of People's Deputies refused to confirm him, and Yeltsin put up Chernomyrdin instead.

There followed a brief return as first deputy premier in 1993, a spell in parliament, and retreat to the Institute for the Economy in Transition he had founded; in 2006 he wrote Collapse of an Empire, a fiscal anatomy of the Soviet fall. He died suddenly in 2009, at fifty-three.

No verdict in modern Russian history is more sharply divided. The defence: a courageous surgeon who prevented famine and civil war. The charge: a doctrinaire experiment that pushed tens of millions into poverty. His own answer never changed: the alternatives had been exhausted by 1991, and what he did was not a choice but first aid.

After leaving government in 1994, Gaidar returned to the Institute for the Economy in Transition (now the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy), which he had founded in 1990, and remained its director for life. The Institute was more than a think tank. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, it drafted the core legislation behind Russia's major economic reforms: the Tax Code, the Budget Code, and the law establishing the Stabilization Fund. Gaidar himself, as a Duma deputy (1993–1995 and 1999–2003), steered these bills through the Budget and Taxation Committee. Under Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov (2000–2004), he advised on nearly every significant economic decision without holding formal office; Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin and former Finance Minister Mikhail Zadornov later testified that Gaidar was involved in government economic policy-making until the day he died.

Gaidar's writing marks a transition from reformer to historian. In State and Evolution (1994) he dissected the Soviet system's collapse through the prism of power and property, arguing that the nomenklatura's acquisition of ownership in exchange for relinquishing political power was the only peaceful path of systemic change. Anomalies of Economic Growth (1997) traced how socialist economies prolonged artificial growth through oil exports before crashing. Long Time (2005) was a magisterial survey of Russian economic history in global context; Collapse of an Empire (2006), an international bestseller, offered a dispassionate fiscal and structural anatomy of the Soviet fall. Gaidar's core argument remained consistent: the Soviet Union had to sell oil to import grain, and when the oil price collapsed, so did the empire. He warned that contemporary Russia was falling into the same resource-dependence trap.

Even after leaving parliament in 2003, he remained a public critic. He condemned the Yukos affair as "the most powerful move to stop Russian economic growth in a very long time," and in 2008 openly opposed the government's decision to tap the Stabilization Fund. In November 2006, while presenting his book in Dublin, he collapsed with symptoms of acute poisoning and his health declined rapidly thereafter; he died in December 2009 at fifty-three. The Institute he founded and nurtured remains one of Russia's leading economic-policy research centres, and his books remain standard reference points for Russia's liberal reformers.