ABSTRACT
In November 1991 despite opposition from the Russian parliament (see Chapter 3), Yeltsin appointed the leading members of Gaidar’s gang to key economic positions within the government. Gaidar was appointed finance minister and a deputy prime minister, Alexander Shokhin a deputy prime minister with responsibility for social affairs, Vladimir Lopukhin became energy minister (a post he lost to Chernomyrdin in 1992), Pyotr Aven became foreign trade minister and Anatoly Chubais became the head of the State Property Committee (GKI), which was established in October 1992 to supervise privatisation. In April 1992 Gaidar also brought in Andrei Illarionov as the first deputy director of the government’s Working Centre for Economic Reforms. Then in June 1992 Gaidar became acting prime minister with responsibility for economic affairs and Chubais was promoted to one of the deputy prime minister posts. Yeltsin also acquired a growing number of western economic advisers including: Jeffrey Sachs on behalf of the IMF; Anders Åslund, who is now a senior fellow of the Peterson Institute in Washington; and the British economist Professor Richard Layard of the London School of Economics, who had advised the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher took a decade
to privatise just 5 per cent of the UK economy – a country that already had wellestablished capitalist institutions and behaviour. Shock therapy had more ambitious aims in a country largely lacking in capitalist institutions and in which capitalist behaviour had been illegal until perestroika.
