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Russia said goodbye to Viktor Chernomyrdin
In 2010, the Day of Unity and Harmony will be remembered by the fact that during the “November holidays,” which included both a new Russian holiday and an old Soviet one - the 93rd anniversary of the October Revolution, Russia saw off Viktor Chernomyrdin on his last journey. A man who headed the Russian government for more than five very difficult years for the country. The man about whom his predecessor in the prime minister’s post, “executed” in the 90s of the last century, also the late Yegor Gaidar, once said: although Viktor Stepanovich had to be taught the basics of a market economy for several years, he turned out to be a talented student. A man who served as President of Russia for two days (November 5-6, 1996), during Boris Yeltsin’s heart surgery. A man who brilliantly fulfilled a unique role in our politics: speaking on behalf of the authorities, but in the language of the people.He died on the night of November 3 at the 73rd year of his life from a heart attack - his heart could not withstand two other fatal diseases, oncology and acute renal failure. In his fate, everything happened as it very often happens with two loving people who live together almost their entire adult lives. The husband simply could not survive his beloved wife for long.
At the age of 23, Viktor Chernomyrdin married his fellow countryman and contemporary Valya Shepeleva. They didn't live to see their golden wedding for a little over a year. On March 12, 2010, Valentina Fedorovna died, and Viktor Stepanovich, according to the reviews of those who could see him after this loss, began to rapidly fade away. Although his health problems began earlier.
He had a completely classic Soviet biography - the embodiment of the dream of a simple guy “from the bench”, capable of rising to state heights. Born in the Orenburg region in 1938, in the village of Cherny Ostrog. After school, he worked as a machinist at an oil refinery. He received his first higher education late - at the age of 28 he graduated from the Kuibyshev Polytechnic Institute named after. V.V. Kuibysheva. Then six years of grassroots party work, until he received the first high production post of deputy chief engineer of the Orenburg gas processing plant. At the age of 40, already from the post of director of this enterprise, he was appointed instructor in the heavy industry department of the CPSU Central Committee.
In 1982, Chernomyrdin became Deputy Minister of the Gas Industry of the USSR and at the same time (such a combination was atypical at that time) since 1983 he headed the all-Union industrial association Tyumengazprom. From there in 1985 he moved to the post of Minister of the Gas Industry. In 1989, he became the first chairman of the board of the state gas concern Gazprom. The largest Russian company to this day, which calls itself a “national treasure” in advertising videos, was created largely on his initiative.
But Chernomyrdin is destined to go down in history not only as the founding father of Gazprom. In May 1992, he was appointed deputy prime minister. And in December of the same year, desperate to get Yegor Gaidar through the opposition Supreme Council to become prime minister, the first President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, proposed to the deputies a candidate that was much more understandable to them. For more than five years, until March 1998, Viktor Chernomyrdin headed the Russian government.
In 1995, he headed the first party in power that the Kremlin tried to create - the “Our Home is Russia” movement. People immediately nicknamed this movement “Our home is Gazprom.” However, at that time it was still very far from the current vertical of power, and the Chernomyrdin movement could not become the dominant political force in society. He never even had a simple majority in the State Duma, let alone a qualified one, like United Russia now has.
In the same 1995, Viktor Chernomyrdin entered his name into the history of Russia during the seizure of a hospital in the city of Budennovsk, Stavropol Territory, by a group of militants led by Shamil Basayev. Yeltsin was not in the country at that moment, and Chernomyrdin personally negotiated with Basayev by telephone (his phrase “Shamil Basayev, I can’t hear you, speak louder” spread all over the world). Negotiations were unsuccessful, and Chernomyrdin gave the order to storm the hospital. 146 people died.
On March 26, 1998, Boris Yeltsin decided to replace Viktor Chernomyrdin in the prime minister's chair with the young and completely unknown Sergei Kiriyenko. Less than six months later, after the August default and the resignation of the government, Yeltsin tried to return Chernomyrdin to the post of prime minister, but the State Duma twice refused to support this appointment. As a result, the cabinet of ministers was briefly headed by Yevgeny Primakov.
Viktor Chernomyrdin was brought out of political oblivion by the second president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. He unexpectedly invited Viktor Stepanovich to go as ambassador to Ukraine. Chernomyrdin spent eight extremely difficult years in this position for relations between the two countries - from May 2001 to June 11, 2009. And at the same time, thanks to his personal charm, he managed not to quarrel with any of the leading Ukrainian politicians who fiercely fought with each other.
The last official position that Viktor Stepanovich held until the end of his life was the post of Advisor to the President of Russia, Special Representative of the President on economic cooperation with the CIS countries.
“A man who did not betray Yeltsin in any situation and silently accepted his resignation in March 1998, which, as it later became clear, marked the beginning of a radical turn in the history of our country... He was the Prime Minister of Russia longer than anyone “different, and more than anyone else, he understood what a swamp he had to pull her out of,” this is what former First Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank Sergei Aleksashenko wrote about Chernomyrdin in his LiveJournal. Such an assessment from the lips of a person who is hardly close to Viktor Stepanovich in political and economic views is especially revealing.
However, our life is so structured that the main memory even of people of action and deed (and Chernomyrdin, undoubtedly, was such a person) can be their words. His natural, uninvented aphorisms, called “Chernomyrdinki,” became a guide to Russian political wanderings in the first two decades after the collapse of the USSR. Decades from now, the authorship of the age-old formula of any Russian restructuring, “they wanted the best, but it turned out as always,” will probably be forgotten. And then these Chernomyrdin words will become popular. Who else could say about the government, about the country in such a popular way, and not in an bureaucratic way: “No matter what we do, it turns out to be the CPSU or a Kalashnikov assault rifle,” “We’ll stand on our own two feet, and we’ll lie down on something else.”
He simply remained a very sincere and lively person. The authorities did not turn it into a function, into an automaton for delivering memorized and stereotyped speeches to the masses in an invariable desire to please any audience.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, a man of a different generation who did not know Chernomyrdin personally, ordered a state funeral for him. No one in Russia has been seen off with such official honors since Boris Yeltsin.
On November 5, 2010, Viktor Chernomyrdin was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery next to the grave of his beloved wife. Medvedev and Putin were at the civil memorial service together and tried to say non-official, human words, corresponding to the essence of Viktor Stepanovich’s character.
Viktor Stepanovich and Valentina Fedorovna are survived by two sons - Vitaly and Andrey, four grandchildren - Maria, Andrey, Anastasia, Victor, and great-grandson Dmitry. Chernomyrdin’s first book is due out soon: he didn’t write it, but spoke it, and this promises readers a new portion of unique “Chernomyrdin books.” Residents of Cherny Ostrog want to name a local school and a new street in his home village after Viktor Chernomyrdin.
And all that remains for us is the memory of this bright and lively man, who managed to rise above the fate of an ordinary Soviet worker, a standard party worker and a strong economic leader, playing, together with Boris Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar, a key role in the formation of post-Soviet Russia.