Yegor Gaidar, who died yesterday aged 53, was the grandson of a civil war hero and son of a Communist journalist, who broke decisively with the theory and practice of state socialism. He led the small group of Russian reformers who, in the period immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, slashed public expenditure and the ballooning budget deficit, abolished price regulation and initiated a rapid privatisation programme.
Gaidar's programme was dubbed “shock therapy”: and though it was indeed a shock which plunged half of Russia into real poverty, it established the skeleton of a market economy and an ownership class which acted as a bulwark against those forces that strove to return to Communist rule – always seen by him and his group as the first reason of the reforms.
As he attempted to tell his fellow Russians (unavailingly, in the main), the shock was administered not by him but by the implosion of a wholly unsustainable system of planning long since decayed past saving, and subsidies long since worthless or misallocated.