- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/16/AR200... Yegor Gaidar, 53 Yegor Gaidar, 53; leader in Russian shift to market economy By David E. Hoffman December 17, 2009 Yegor Gaidar, a leading architect of Russia's leap to a market economy who championed free prices, private property and unfettered trade in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and decades of state control, died Dec. 16 [2009] at his home outside of Moscow. He was 53. An aide said Dr. Gaidar, an economist, died of a blood clot early in the morning while working on a book, the Associated Press reported. Dr. Gaidar was at the forefront of the young reformers who followed President Boris Yeltsin into power in 1991 and helped carry out one of the most ambitious economic transformations ever attempted, liberating prices all at once, permitting free trade and privatizing the immense stock of state property. Although the reforms, known as shock therapy, led to an improvement in living conditions, they also unleashed hyperinflation that wiped out the life savings of millions of people. Dr. Gaidar was a child of the Soviet elite, grandson of a Red Army officer who later became an author of beloved children's stories and son of a Pravda journalist. In 1983, Dr. Gaidar was working in Moscow at the All Union Institute for Systems Research under the tutelage of a famous Soviet mathematical economist, Stanislav Shatalin. Through a mutual friend, Dr. Gaidar met another young economics specialist from Leningrad, Anatoly Chubais. Dr. Gaidar and the others were driven by the evidence all around them of the failures of Soviet central planning, including shortages of consumer goods, a hyper-militarized state and dysfunctional industry. In the years that followed, they and others began dreaming and discussing, often quietly, a radical transformation of the Soviet economy, although they did not have a chance to implement it as living standards deteriorated in the final years under President Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1991, Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian republic, and he passed over more senior economists in favor of a group he called arrogant young upstarts to carry out radical change that Gorbachev had not attempted. Dr. Gaidar was chief among the upstarts. Yeltsin liked Dr. Gaidar's idea of a big bang modeled on Poland's experience, and shared Dr. Gaidar's enthusiasm for shock therapy. I couldn't force people to wait once again, Yeltsin recalled, to drag out the main events and processes for years. If our minds were made up, we had to get going! Dr. Gaidar headed a working group that met at a dacha outside of Moscow and hammered out Yeltsin's landmark economic program, announced Oct. 28, 1991. After accepting Dr. Gaidar's assignment to work on mass privatization, Chubais once recalled that they spoke late in the evening. Yegor, Chubais said, do you understand that regardless of what the result will be, I will be hated for the rest of my life because I was the person who sold off Russia? Dr. Gaidar replied that they would all have to drink from that poisoned chalice, Chubais recalled. After the Soviet collapse Dr. Gaidar served as prime minister under Yeltsin until December 1992. Dr. Gaidar, however, had not anticipated the hyperinflation and the political disillusionment that swelled up that year and afterward. Also, the mass privatization, which followed over the next few years, gave rise to a generation of super-wealthy businessmen known as oligarchs, deepening the distrust of market reforms. Dr. Gaidar, a portly man with a moon-shaped face who spoke like a professor, was deeply devoted to market principles, yet he sometimes seemed tone deaf to the social impact and political fallout. In the midst of the hyperinflation that wiped out savings in 1992, a journalist suggested to Dr. Gaidar that he simply promise people that they would get their savings back someday