The time and place of Yegor Gaidar

Time and place of Yegor Gaidar
In 1999, the plane with Yegor Gaidar, Boris Nemtsov and Boris Fedorov went to Serbia, where at that time, delicately speaking, it was restless. Among the accompanying persons was an adviser to Anatoly Chubais, Leonid Gozman. Chubais called Gozman aside: “Do whatever you want, but Yegor must return from there alive. You understand what it means for Russia.”

The significance of Gaidar for Russia is enormous. He upended a gigantic breathless country, all covered in scraps of barbed wire and unrecoverable fragments of special rations. Gave his name to reforms that could not be popular. And this despite the fact that it was not Gaidar who was responsible for the long decades of Soviet power, the indecisiveness of Mikhail Gorbachev, Nikolai Ryzhkov, Valentin Pavlov. His behavior became a unique example of moral politics: having enormous influence after the loss of all official posts, he never turned his opportunities to benefit his own interests. At the beginning of the era of reforms, one of Gaidar's colleagues, who worked in the government, received a call from his wife, acting. the premier asked what was "given" in the buffet on Staraya Square in the former building of the Central Committee: "Yegor is saving Russia, but we have nothing to eat here." "Gave" cakes and meat bones. It was not even like the menu of the Central Committee of the times of war communism ...

The then reformers were kamikaze and disinterested. Not everyone managed to save the second property, among those who preserved was Yegor Timurovich.

Gaidar was the measure. measure of honesty. A measure of political courage. measure of political will. But also a measure of intelligence. Many considered him a genius - this is just a combination of amazing intuition and the broadest professional horizons. The late head of the reform government apparatus, Aleksey Golovkov, spoke of Yegor Timurovich's intellectual leadership: "We are all peasant children on Gaidar's manor." He was one of the few people in the late USSR who knew Western economic theory, but this knowledge alone is not enough to pursue a policy that is adequate to the circumstances of the time and place - this requires flair. They say that Gaidar was a bad politician who did not take into account the nuances of public sentiment. But, firstly, at the turn of 1992, there was no time for nuances: the country entered the state of 1917, which he managed to describe with scientific and journalistic brilliance in his last work, Troubles and Institutions. Secondly, he was a great politician, because he made the only decisions necessary for the country.

A conversation with Gaidar has always been a conversation with a guru. If you want to get the most accurate conclusion, go to Gaidar. He has rarely spoken publicly lately, but every time there was nowhere for the apple to fall. There was a feeling that now they would tell the whole truth, with the last directness and a bit of sad irony.

Yegor Gaidar entered the history of Russia along with two other personalities - Boris Yeltsin and Anatoly Chubais. The first provided the reformers with a political "roof". The second was responsible for one of the two most important tasks in the transition from socialism to capitalism - privatization (along with price liberalization). The reforms are called so: Yeltsin's, Gaidar's, Gaidar-Chubais's. Gaidar was not "native" of the new government, which, if it mentions the 90s, then with the same epithet "dashing". Moreover, from him they received a ready-made country - with a market economy and the constitutional institutions of a modern democratic state. It was necessary to try very hard to trivialize and dismantle all the best in the Russia that Gaidar was building. But they almost succeeded. The early death of the great reformer is proof of this.

When a significant historical figure dies, it is customary to say: "An era is gone." In the case of Gaidar, this is not an exaggeration. Hopes for a great and free Russia were connected with his work and life. Now we know exactly where the watershed lies. They need Stalin. We are Gaidar.