The book «Myths of the ' 90s: the Anatomy of a lie» was published
The book aims to dispel some of the myths associated with the name of Yegor Gaidar, whose actions were severely criticised in the past 20 years. The authors reveal the garble of the facts, the manipulation with figures, ignoration of the historical context, on which the majority of charges of Е. Gaidar were built.
Introduction to the book:
In our country it has become ubiquitous to scold what happened in Russia in the 1990s. The phrase "cursed (as a variant - dashing) 90s" is now firmly entrenched into the political language. Moreover, criticism of the 90's springs up from everywhere: from the government, from the general public and even from some liberal economists. When listening to them, one cannot help recalling the phrase teacher from the film "We'll live till Monday" says commenting on such hasty judgments: "And again and again I hear: Zhores did not consider, Herzen did not manage, Tolstoy misunderstood. Just if there was a band of losers creating the history ". In our opinion, it is extremely important to find out the motives for such a rejection of the 90s, and understand how justified such views are.
It happened so that criticism of the 90s is generally concentrated on the figure of Yegor Gaidar, whose government began liberal transformations in Russia. Though it might seem strange enough, the most succeeded person in this field of criticism is not some left politician or a writer, but Andrei N. Illarionov, who considers himself a liberal (in the classic understanding of this word) economist. He accuses Gaidar with all the mortal sins: being a poor economist, being an ineffective political activist and being just a dishonest man. We work at the Institute, which was created by Egor Gaidar and which is presently bearing his name. We had the opportunity to discuss issues of reforms of the 90s personally with him and with his close colleagues and to discover f the documents of that era. We saw how painfully it was for him to live through all the vicissitudes of modern Russian history. That became one of the major reasons of his premature death. Therefore we consider it our duty to dispel some myths created around his name and to show that most of the charges were built on ignoration of the historical context, falsified facts and manipulation with figures. For us this is a modest tribute to what was made for Russia by Yegor Gaidar.