Retreating time

Our newspaper begins to publish reviews of books from the long list of the 2013 Enlightenment Prize.

The book “Gaidar’s Revolution” by Peter Aven and Albert Koch has been published. The history of the reforms of the 90s from first hand" (M., Alpina Publisher, 2013. 439 pp.). The book is based on a series of conversations between the authors and active participants in the events of the 80s and 90s. (Previously, in 2010-2012, these materials were published in Forbes magazine and on its website). As the authors write in the preface, having invited as interlocutors those who were their comrades and colleagues during the period of “great reforms,” they wanted, first of all, to cement in the memory of new generations the image of Yegor Gaidar, as they knew him in the 80s and 90s .

Each chapter is devoted to a conversation with one character - these are Chubais, Shakhrai, Shokhin, Nechaev, etc. The result is a book about the revolution of the 80-90s, as Gaidar’s comrades remember it.

We are told about dramatic events, speculated on possible solutions to numerous crises - from food to government - and we receive (i.e. read) all this first-hand. In this I see the main advantage of the book - what makes it worth reading. (True, I learned less about Gaidar himself from these stories than from his books, although even there he wrote almost nothing about himself).

For example, Andrey Kozyrev. It is interesting to know not only the history of his rise to power, but also his assessment of his own work. And since “style is a person,” you think about how, for example, interaction between such different people as (let’s say!) Grachev, who then held the post of Minister of Defense, and Kozyrev, Minister of Foreign Affairs, was possible.

People who are far from large structures - be it a ministry, a company, a large management organization - fortunately, do not encounter the activities of a special organism, which we call the apparatus . The interlocutors of Aven and Gref mention this very apparatus many times - mainly as an inevitable evil - however, it is also a necessary evil . And most importantly, from all these conversations you begin to understand that in our conditions it is often not clear where the figures end and the apparatus begins .

As the circle of interlocutors expands, not only the horizon of events covered by the narrative necessarily changes, but also the significance of certain “characters and performers.” It’s like in the theater: as soon as Vysotsky came to play the role of Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, everyone immediately forgot about Gaev and the “respected closet” - and this is an image once created by the great Kachalov.

It seems to me that this book will be of interest to those who know quite a lot about the era of 1985-1993, and now have the opportunity to consider various events and their interpretations, as if through a magnifying glass, but turned to the past.

Unfortunately, the book does not contain any reference apparatus that would provide “focusing” of the mentioned magnifying glass. There is not even a standard name index - it cannot be replaced by the list of 155 items given at the end of the volume, where references to personalities are ordered in the order of mention of the relevant persons in the main corpus - and this corpus, by the way, is not small - 438 pages.

Thus, if on p. 224 Titkin and Fadeev are mentioned, and the reader does not know these names, then he can only look for them among 155 paragraphs - I would venture to say that a more annoying activity has yet to be invented.

There is no elementary chronology of events, and meanwhile the children born in the hungry year of 1991 have already managed to graduate from university! Those who were adults and not even very young people in the 90s, just as they didn’t know much then, still don’t know it now. And not because of their stupidity or original ignorance, but because of the lack of information in a sufficiently intelligible and objective form. Therefore, the substantive side of many of the disputes and collisions mentioned in the book under discussion remains incomprehensible to the reader.

The authors present their book as a collection of conversations with members of the first post-communist government of Russia (p. 13), emphasizing that their topics very quickly went far beyond the scope of “conversations about Yegor.” At the same time, the interlocutors, nevertheless, sought to keep within the time frame when they, as “actors,” were members of Gaidar’s government.

However, not all potential readers of the work under discussion are at least familiar with Gaidar’s book “A Long Time.” And for them, the book of Aven and Koch begins in medias res (“in the middle of the matter.” - Ed .), but it also ends there. I foresee objections like: this is exactly how life works! This is true, but even a photograph does not copy life, and even less so a selection of stories according to the “Satellites of NN” scheme.

The authors are by no means newbies, so in the section that precedes the book, “A Book Written Under Threats,” they tried to offer the reader some kind of framework, anticipating questions like “Why Gaidar?”, “Why then?” and so on.

For me, who graduated from Moscow State University in 1955, i.e. simultaneously with M.S. Gorbachev, such questions are no longer relevant; after all, the book is not addressed to my generation!

I sincerely advise potential readers of “Gaidar’s Revolution” to open this book, but first read at least one of the books of Yegor Gaidar himself. I will note that he wrote wonderfully.

Cover from the site www.alpinabook.ru