Towards the death of Yegor Gaidar

When a person, and a big person, has just left, lofty and pathetic words are natural. The time for detached, objective analysis has not come.

As for Yegor Timurovich Gaidar, I think this time will never come. The attitude towards him has always been, is and will be radically polar. This plump man with a quiet voice, poor diction and gentle manners left no one indifferent, evoking two feelings: admiration and anger. Blind malice, conscious and sighted admiration.

I must admit right away that I myself cannot claim objectivity, since from the very moment we met in 1991, I treated Gaidar with boundless respect, turning into tenderness. Although we could not be called friends.

It may seem strange, and to some, funny, but I have never seen a more decisive, courageous, cool person, not in a cinematic way, but in reality, than Gaidar. It was toughness, mixed not with adrenaline daring, but with courageous, conscious responsibility. A sort of aristocratic, outwardly calm, fearlessness of a naval officer cultivated from childhood. He knew what he had to do and did it.

He understood perfectly well what he was dooming himself to, what terrible wave of social hatred he would inevitably cause. And he went for it. Nobody went. And he went. Also Yeltsin and Chubais. But now we are talking about Gaidar.

He carried this cross of mass rejection for many years. It was hard and painful, and he grew old early, beyond his years, and physically collapsed under this burden. Such was the price that Fate asked for greatness, for a historical role. But I can swear that he never regretted what he had done. Perhaps he was proud. More precisely, he was calmly aware of the scale of what was perfect and his own scale, although he did not get hung up on it.

In recent years he has written books. Great books. Deep, meaningful and emotional. They read like novels.

Gaidar was not a politician in the usual sense of the word. Politicians must be cunning and pragmatic, but he was extremely, stubbornly decent. And calling him an economist, even though he was a world-class analyst, is not enough.

Perhaps he was a man of the Mission, and turned out to be a match for it.

Let me finish this way: today the great son of Russia passed away.

Photo by RIA Novosti