Is it any coincidence that the party that Yegor Timurovich Gaidar joined, the "Union of Right Forces" is now considered to be the Liberal and Democratic alternative to Putin. Gaidar was, as he said, on a Kamakaze mission to establish a market economy in Russia at any cost in the first year of Yeltsin's government. This is where state support is withdrawn and prices are set by demand with the people paying the cost. This is the kind of shock therapy that the IMF was promoting in the 80s. You remember. The kind of market theology that said that the way to right a balance of payments was to "reduce domestic demand": this was a euphemism for cutting back state support and poverty programmes and depressing wages to put everyone into poverty. And yet these people still talk about the lost opportunities to totally transform Russia. Wasn't the damage they did enough? Wasn't the damage that Yeltsin and his accomplices, Gaidar amongst them, enough? What more could
Left wing commentary from the heart and the head