CONOR O'CLEARYrecently recalled with Yegor Gaidar life in the rapidly changing Russia of the early 1990s
IN AN interview in Moscow eight weeks ago, Yegor Gaidar recalled for me the dreadful conditions in Russia in 1991 when he was given the task of freeing prices and introducing privatisation as communism collapsed.
“The food situation was really terrible,” said the former Russian prime minister. “The shops were absolutely free of any products. When something emerged there were lines for a few hours.”
Things were so bad, he explained, that when his wife Maria and 10-year-old son joined a long line for bread in a shop on Nikitskaya Street within sight of the Kremlin, and when the boy got the last bulka, “a woman tried to snatch this piece of bread, not realising my wife was standing behind her.”
We met in his spacious office in the Institute for the Economy in Transition, an independent research organisation, founded in 1990, of which he was director. I was interviewing Gaidar for a book on the fall of the Soviet Union.
The last time I encountered him was in rather dramatic circumstances, in Maynooth University on November 28th, 2006. He was giving a talk at a Russian-Irish conference about his new publication, Lasting Time, Russia in the World, when he became ill and rushed from the room.
He lay semi-conscious in the corridor, vomiting blood, before being taken to hospital where doctors said he was not dangerously ill.
The incident made headlines around the world as it came the day following the death in London of Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko, apparently after being contaminated by a radioactive isotope, which led to suspicions that elements of the Russian security services were responsible.
A week later, in Moscow, Gaidar claimed he had been poisoned by adversaries of the Russian government of president Vladimir Putin.
The 53-year-old architect of Russia’s market economy was not an evident target of any organisation, though he made himself unpopular with many Russians in the early 1990s as the leader of the group of young economists entrusted by Russian president Boris Yeltsin with introducing “shock therapy”.
This economic reform impoverished millions as prices rose steeply, and enabled a new class of oligarchs to enrich themselves.
He said he had no regrets about the measures he had taken.
They were necessary, he said. People were awaiting “food catastrophe” and there was a danger of a breakdown in energy supply. Only by freeing prices did food return to the shops.
He admitted to some “tactical mistakes” in the transition from a command economy to a free market, “but strategically I think we made the right decision to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe in a nuclear country.”
When I asked if, with hindsight, he might have done anything differently, he replied, referring to the European Union, “If I had the experience of 28 countries which during 20 years have been trying to deal with the problems of social transitions, of course, technically I would do a lot of things differently. But if you ask me would Russia be an absolutely different country – my answer is absolutely not.”
Conor O’Clery is a former Moscow correspondent of The Irish Times