Completely embroidered

The problem is that Yegor Gaidar in the late 1980s-early 1990s was not "the heir to Hayek, Ruuff and von Mizes," as Valery Ilyinichna writes . He came to understanding the fundamental foundations of capitalism in the process of working at his Institute of Economics of the Transition period. The proof of this is his work “Power and Property” and dying interviews, in which he not only identified the main problem of modern Russia - the need to separate power and property, but also clearly presented the alternative to the future development of the country. Tighten the regime or its gradual liberalization. And then, almost 20 years ago, he was a Soviet economist, who had stepped from "capital" to capital in a Bolshevik.

What did Gaidar do in early 1992, for which he deserved such fierce posthumous reviews? At first glance, he just released prices and thus opened the road to the market and free pricing. However, in this expression “releasing prices” was the fundamental economic difference between the Soviet state economy and a market economy. In the USSR, the market was not a market, money with money, and labor ceased to be labor. And the “vacation” of prices really meant a cardinal transformation of the system. Firstly, the money immediately became money essentially, albeit "wooden". Secondly, the products became a product, although a product is largely of low-quality and uncompetitive. Many material and spiritual values ​​instantly turned into goods. Thirdly, the market immediately appeared. Which market is another question. And finally, automatically, that is, spontaneously, and not consciously, all spheres of production and leisure were transformed. They were transformed because they turned out to be plunged into other, actually economic relations and conditions of existence.

And here lies the main problem. Relations - whom? People. Conditions of existence - whom? People! Namely, people were beyond the scope of the then professional understanding of Gaidar. Ignoring the social consequences of liberalization is the root cause of criticism of his reforms, the best example of which is still an article by the philosopher Yuri Davydov "On the role of revolutionary violence in the liberal economy" (magazine "Moscow", 1996, No. 10). In my opinion, the comparison of Yegor Gaidar with Vladimir Lenin is legitimate. Someone had already noticed that Gaidar lived exactly as much as Lenin-53 years and 9 months.

Whether Gaidar’s actions in 1992 were an absolutely accurate and only possible solution, ”as Kirill Rogov writes , whether the dying economic organism really could be launched by“ only this electric category ”, and these questions have yet to be answered. At least the explanation of Gaidar himself in the "death of the empire" is not enough, they are too subjective.

Today, in a mitigating circumstance, when evaluating his reform, it can be that it was carried out after August 1991, that is, when the system of Soviet socialism crashed. It turns out that the reform had the character of a rescue campaign. However, a completely different matter is when and then the necessary actions to correct its consequences were not carried out (and even proposed!). Anyone who says that the reform gave “the opportunity to society to at least to some extent to dispose of its fate” is clearly cunning, because this possibility of the former nomenclature, people close to the new government, and the broad masses were completely different. As a result, gigantic social stratification occurred in the country, many extremely poor people appeared. And the legal disadvantage of the conditions for the existence of private property led to the approval of criminal capitalism, which is regulated not by laws, but by concepts and corruption. And although everyone uses the fruits of the market in one way or another, the shock from the reform was deposited in the memory of the Russians, causing rejection from the so -called liberals to the generation forward.

If the liberal economists did not occur the necessary correction of the Gaidar reform and the subsequent privatization, then from the part of the former Soviet economists-traditionalists, on the contrary, since the mid-1990s, voices with proposals to correct the situation through the revival of a strong state, which understood the power of the Stalinist type. Further - more. In recent years, representatives of the young generation have joined this choir. So, one of them, Mikhail Delyagin, is already openly calling for non -stop .

At the same time, they somehow forget that the people in such a system turn out to be a hostage to the ambitious goals of the ruling elite, not to mention the fact that in economic terms, the Stalinist system has proved their historical failure. The trouble is that, as in the early 1990s, in modern Russia there is no critical mass of economists who would not only adequately explain the nature of the socio-economic system that has developed in the country, distorted manifestations of the laws of the market, but would also propose ways to change the situation, first of all, to build normal relations between power and property. The economist who thinks about the fate of the country would not call for the monopolization and centralization of the economy, but to the formation of clearly spelled out legal grounds for the free economic activity of each person, would contribute to the creation of a legal state in which society could finally become a full -fledged economic entity.

We must pay tribute to Yegor Gaidar - in recent years, he intensely reflected on the laws of the historical development of Russia and was looking for ways to save it.