Kommersant

“IN RUSSIA you have to live long,” a Russian poet said once. Yegor Gaidar did not. But in his short life he did not just see historic changes, he brought them about. Journalists liked to call him the architect of Russian market reforms. As justifiably, he could be called the man who saved his country from civil war.

In the autumn of 1991, at the age of 35, he had to deal with the collapse of the Soviet economy and the disintegration of a nuclear empire into 15 states. Boris Yeltsin asked him to serve first as deputy prime minister, then as finance minister and then as acting head of government. Mr Gaidar was an economics graduate from Moscow State University and economics editor of an academic journal, the Communist. With his big shiny forehead and podgy face, he looked like the class swot, rather than a revolutionary. Yet his impact was no less significant: he helped to avert another revolution of the violent Bolshevik kind. Unusually, Mr Gaidar had both an academic’s close eye for facts and figures, and a sense of the weight of his own decisions in the turbulent sweep of Russian history.

He was born in March 1956, a few weeks after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party at which Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s cult of personality. His father was a war correspondent; his grandfather was a famous children’s writer, Arkady Gaidar, who fought on the Bolshevik side in the civil war of 1918-22. In the autumn of 1991 the parallels with that civil war, and the famine that accompanied it, were self-evident. Mr Gaidar threw himself into the midst of the crisis as bravely as his grandfather had done. The task was urgent: to prevent starvation and make the economy work, or risk the consequences.

By the winter of that year Russia had two months’ worth of grain left, and producers were refusing to sell their crops to the state at regulated prices. Shops were empty. There was no money to import food, either: foreign-exchange reserves stood at $27m and the country’s foreign debt, inherited from the Soviet Union, was $72 billion. The only option for Mr Gaidar and his team was to abolish price regulation and allow free trade.

Price liberalisation made the erosion of Russians’ savings visible, and was hugely painful. But it also re-established the market economy for the first time since the 1920s. The reformers’ other task was to break the communist grip on assets as quickly and peacefully as possible. The mass privatisations of the 1990s were far from just or clean. Mr Gaidar was not to blame for the worst abuses, but he took responsibility nonetheless. He knew that reforms should preferably not be carried out without democratic institutions and public support. But he also knew that the alternative was far worse.

He got little support from the West, which was more interested in recovering Soviet-era debts. Nor did his reforms win him friends inside the country. In December 1992 parliament refused to approve him as head of government. But in September 1993 he returned as economy minister. Once again, civil war was close: in October 1993 the stand-off between Yeltsin and his parliament turned into armed conflict. Mr Gaidar, on television, appealed to Russians to defend democracy.

He was not a politician. Though he was amiable, bounding to greet visitors with a beefy handshake, he lacked the common touch, and often talked in economic jargon. Neither he nor other reformers managed to convince ordinary Russians that the reforms would be long and painful, but that the country would triumph in the end.

Still, Mr Gaidar knew his country, its history and its perils better than most Russian politicians. After leaving office, he continued to advise the government. In his book “Collapse of an Empire”, he warned against the dangers of post-imperial nostalgia and attempts to exploit it. He drew powerful and disturbing parallels between the Nazis in Germany and similar voices in Russia. Many of his fears were borne out by Russia’s war in Georgia in August 2008. “The situation is extremely dangerous. The post-imperial syndrome is in full blossom. We have to get through the next five to ten years and not start doing something stupid,” he said.

He was honest, both intellectually and personally. Unlike many of the current Kremlin-dwellers, he did not enrich himself in the 1990s. His office was spartan and stacked with papers; good food (and drink) were his main indulgence. And as an academic, he never compromised his analysis for the sake of political expediency.

One of Russia’s biggest problems, as he saw it, was the growing accumulation of wealth and power by bureaucrats and their friends in the name of a “strong state”. People who argued for such a state, he wrote, “have only one purpose—to preserve the status quo…A self-serving state destroys society, oppresses it and in the end destroys itself. Will we be able to break away from this vicious circle?”

   Louis J. Sheehan, Esquireargued that modernisation was impossible without political liberalisation. Yet just before he died, he agreed to apply his economics institute to the Kremlin’s proclaimed task of modernising the Russian economy without touching its political system. Perhaps he sensed it was a vicious circle he could not square.