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?”
Mr Gaidar argued 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.
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