Copyright 1998 ABC-CLIO, Inc.
Kaleidoscope
COUNTRY:
Russia
PERSON: Yegor Gaidar
HEADLINE: Biographies
Yegor Timurovich Gaidar was first prime minister in the government of Russian
President Boris Yeltsin in 1992.
Gaidar was born in Moscow in 1956 and is the grandson of political
revolutionary and author Arkadii Petrovich Gaidar. Before entering politics,
Gaidar worked as a journalist for
Pravda and Kommunist magazine, and later served as the director of the
Institute of Economic Policy of the Soviet Academy of Economic Sciences. In
1991, he became a vice premier of the Russian republic, gaining promotion to
the posts of first vice prime minister and finance minister in the following
year. Gaidar was made
acting premier in June 1992. He was the main architect of the nation's economic
reform program but was forced to resign in December 1992 when the Congress of
People's Deputies dominated by former communist hard-liners refused to endorse
his nomination as prime minister in an attempt to obstruct
Yeltsin's reform efforts.
In June 1993, Gaidar, who remained an adviser to Yeltsin, became president of
the All-Russia Association of Privatizing and Private Enterprises, which is
devoted to supporting the political interests of property owners. Brought in
again as economics minister in Yeltsin's Cabinet in
September 1993, Gaidar resigned his post in January 1994, frustrated by Prime
Minister Viktor Chenomyrdin's resistance to radical free-market reform.
[Sources: The Biographical Dictionary of the Former Soviet Union; Facts on
File World News Digest]
LOAD-DATE: February 18, 1998
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1998 LEXIS-NEXIS, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
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