Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism

Every revolution has its Bastille Day, the moment when the rebels finally breach the inner sanctum of the old regime. For Russia's capitalist revolutionaries, that moment came in early November 1991 when Yegor Gaidar, the new deputy prime minister and arch market reformer, walked into the offices of Gosplan, the headquarters of the Soviet central planning system. It was unseasonably cold. Already, there was snow in the pine forests outside the capital and the premature autumnal chill made the hulking grey Gosplan building in central Moscow, designed by Stalin's architects to humble its visitors, feel even more forbidding than usual. This was communism's economic fortress and Gaidar arrived like the interloper he was - with a policeman at his side and the presidential decree appointing him stuffed like a pistol in his pocket. I'm being insolent, of course, Gaidar admitted to himself, and as he later recalled in his memoirs. It was his first day on the job. His desk was still bare and his telephones had been connected only a few hours earlier. Yet here he was, already penetrating the holiest of holies, the Vatican City of the centrally planned system, and delivering the news that he, Russia's most ardent capitalist revolutionary, was now in charge of the temple. Short, round-faced and balding, with soft eyes and an impish grin, physically Gaidar may well have been the least intimidating man in Russia. But for the comrades at Gosplan he was as terrifying an apparition as Lenin had been to Russia's aristocrats, and represented a change of the same horrifying proportions. Surveying the faces in the room, Gaidar saw caution, disorientation and naked fear. Some of the apparatchiks, he thought, seemed to want to ask who the hell this young pipsqueak economist was, and how he had suddenly been given the right to take over the huge Soviet central planning machine - with the express intention of dismantling it. Sometimes, Gaidar asked himself the same question. Just the day before he had been an academic economist, someone who advised rulers but never had to take the hard decisions, or implement them, himself. All that had changed on 5 November, with a telephone call from the Kremlin appointing him Yeltsin's economic supremo. Some men would have felt elation, others a gladiator's pride at having beaten the other contenders. But Gaidar just felt shocked. Intellectually, he had known the call was coming: after weeks of dithering it had become clear that Yeltsin was in a daring mood and would appoint Gaidar and his team - the country's most radical advocates of market reform - to try to rescue Russia's economy. Even so, when the phone finally rang Gaidar felt as if he had been hit by lightning. Suddenly, he realised, his life had been sundered into a 'before' and 'after', he had been transformed from a thinker to a doer, and the full weight of Russia's future had been thrust on to his sloping professorial shoulders. Gaidar and his colleagues had long dreamed of the moment when they would march into Gosplan and begin tearing it apart. Now it had finally come, and they were terrified. Looking back on it a decade later, they would realise that probably they had not been scared enough. In one way or another, Gaidar had been preparing for that moment all his life. The man who would one day demolish the communist economy was born in 1956 into a family which was the nearest thing the Soviet Union had to royalty. His paternal grandfather, Arkady Gaidar, was one of the folk heroes of the Bolshevik revolution, a provincial schoolteacher's son who joined the revolutionary Red Army at 14 and went on to write children's stories after the communist victory. A Soviet cross between Paul Revere and Dr Seuss, Arkady left his grandson a surname to conjure with: years later, Yeltsin would admit that the 'magic' of the Gaidar name had influenced his choice of ministers. Ironically, this privileged redFreeland, Chrystia is the author of 'Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism' with ISBN 9780812932157 and ISBN 0812932153.