Former Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, a symbol of the nation’s tumultuous half decade after the Soviet collapse that saw war and near economic meltdown, died yesterday at age 72, the Kremlin said.
A dour ex-apparatchik, Chernomyrdin showed a steady hand at the helm over the government in contrast to his unpredictable boss, then-president Boris Yeltsin, but also amused Russians with his folksy aphorisms.
His long stint in power — from December 1992 to March 1998, with another brief premiership from August-September 1998 — included the first war over the breakaway region of Chechnya and the hyperinflation of the 1998 economic crisis.
“If it wasn’t for Viktor Chernomyrdin personally, we would not have the history we have now,” said former deputy prime minister Anatoly Chubais, who worked in his government and masterminded Russia’s privatization program.
“Without him, our people would live a different life,” he said.
Chernomyrdin died in the early hours yesterday, the Kremlin said. It did not specify the cause of his death, but he had been known to have been ill for some time.
Prior to his appointment as prime minister, he also served as the first head of Russia’s gas monopoly Gazprom, which he formed from the Soviet Union’s gas assets across the country.
Yeltsin’s appointment of Chernomyrdin as prime minister came as a complete shock to the man as everyone in the country was expecting the president to pick liberal reformist Yegor Gaidar.
However, through his term the former gas industry bureaucrat built up enough political drive to head a conservative party named “Our Home Is Russia” and hint at presidential aspirations.
“I am in support of a market but not a bazaar,” he said after his appointment, marking a diversion from Gaidar’s radical reforms and creating his reputation as a maker of catchphrases.
Other Chernomyrdin’s sayings include “we hoped for the best, but ended up with the usual” and “no matter what party you try to create the result is the Communist party” and have already become colloquial proverbs.
Chernomyrdin was “an extraordinary man of very humble upbringing who was put forward by history to one of the top posts in a very difficult moment for Russia,” former Russian economy minister Yevgeny Yasin, who now heads the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, told Echo of Moscow radio.
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