The unexpected death of Yegor Gaidar has already managed to stir up passions in those places in today’s Russia allocated by him as boiling points. The blogs were filled with various entries – sincere regrets, outright malice, and often, satisfaction with what had happened. To a large extent, this applies to materials devoted to Gaidar in the media, especially the electronic media. While the necessary formalities and the laws of the genre have generally been met, one can notice that the authors have personal opinions on Gaidar, as well as on the issue of how he will go down in history. And these opinions are usually quite oppositional.
Perhaps the assessments themselves and the inner conviction with which they are expressed is reminiscent of the Russia that existed in the early 1990s – an era when debates about politics were almost like an occupation that gave a peculiar zest to everyone. Behind these disputes was a real choice of possibilities as to how the country would develop – or so it seemed to the disputants. “Brings to mind” is really an appropriate expression in this case, as the intensity of emotions were the remembrances of something that had taken place long ago, in a different geological era. It seems that the passions are aroused by calling the spirits of the past, which are necessary for the appropriate entourage. People remember that they had very strong feelings about Gaidar, but they cannot quite explain why. Specifically, their explanations that “Gaidar devalued people’s savings” or that “Gaidar ruined the country” or anything else along those lines seem to bear no relation to current views on market economics and state-building. However, in their assessments many of those expressing their condolences on the passing of Gaidar turn to the difficult and confused era of the early 1990s and to the choices they made. In other words, the soldiers recall bygone days and the guards revel at the shore.
Yegor Gaidar touched upon the most important decisions in the fate of the new Russian state, if only for a very small interval of time. Perhaps, though, that interval was the most critical. He implemented a plan to put Russia on the path to market development, and he established the very first “guides” that would move Russia's economy. After late 1993, Gaidar did not hold any official posts. Instead, he headed the Institute for the Economy in Transition, whose recommendations were occasionally listened to – and occasionally disregarded – by the state’s leaders. The political trends, represented by Gaidar and those supporters who put him on their banners (in a figurative sense, of course), were also gradually buried under the weight of time. If they have not dried up completely, at the very least they have dissolved somewhere in the capillaries of Russia's sociopolitical system.
In recent years, his work can be measured not so much by political standards as by academic ones. He published books and scholarly articles, spoke out and offered his assessments and projections. The reflection of history lying on him comes, most likely, from memory. Yegor Gaidar passed away in the frosty days of December – days which, perhaps, give the most reason to remember what we inherited from the Prime Minister – if we extract from our memories an image of Russia in December 1991 or, more precisely, the general feeling of impending disaster and darkness looming from somewhere – an image where the empty store shelves are far from playing the most important role. Many people at that time remembered the lessons of the revolution and tried to imagine December 1917; they found a lot in common. And the fact that in January came not 1918 but 1992, a year filled with enormous difficulties and many dramas but nevertheless causing now completely self-sufficient associations that are scarcely related to the experience of revolutionary turmoil is to a great extent a credit to Gaidar. We are forced, among other things, to think that the economy is not only the movement of goods.
In one way or another Gaidar was at the forefront of the world in which we now live. Our ideas about money, society, the state – about what might happen to all of us – are based on the experience of Gaidar's reforms. And the fact that among the collection of possible sorrows and afflictions there are no thoughts about how we are “falling into civil war” is a credit to Gaidar insofar as the collection of possibilities for different social forces at that time, the mechanisms of defending political and economic interests, were defined by his leadership.
In this way Gaidar was very far from being the image of the demiurge or evil genius, which, for example, coaxed the ambitions of Anatoly Chubais. Gaidar bore no resemblance to an
