Thousands of people stood in line on a chilly Saturday morning to pay their last respects to former acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar at a funeral at the Central Clinical Hospital.
Gaidar, whose “shock therapy” reforms in the early 1990s turned the Soviet economy into a free market, died of a blood clot Wednesday at the age of 53.
“We wouldn’t have managed, we wouldn’t have pulled through without him,” said Rusnano chief Anatoly Chubais, who served with Gaidar in President Boris Yeltsin’s government, Interfax reported.
Chubais was among about 10,000 people who walked by Gaidar’s coffin during the four-hour funeral, braving lingering public anger over his reforms that decimated the savings of ordinary Russians as well as outside temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celsius.
Among the dignitaries were Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov, Kremlin economics aide Arkady Dvorkovich and Yeltsin’s widow, Naina.
President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who largely ignored Gaidar during his lifetime and lavished praise on him when he died, did not attend.
Gaidar, who served as acting prime minister for just six months in 1992 before public anger forced Yeltsin to fire him, had maintained that his bold policies saved Russia from civil war, and many liberal economists and politicians agree with him.
But the State Duma rejected a motion Friday to hold a moment of silence to honor Gaidar. A Just Russia Deputy Vera Lekareva made the motion, noting that Gaidar had served as both acting prime minister and a Duma deputy.
But Duma Deputy Speaker Oleg Morozov of United Russia said Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov had already sent condolences to Gaidar’s family on behalf of the Duma, Interfax reported.
In his blog, Morozov explained that two factions had warned him on Wednesday that any attempt to hold a moment of silence would result in a scandal.
“It seems to me that Yegor Timurovich [Gaidar] would be on my side. He was a modest person and didn’t like public attention,” Morozov wrote.
Gaidar’s body was to be cremated after the funeral ahead of a private burial at Moscow’s Novodevichye Cemetery. The burial, which initially was to be held Saturday and made open to the public, was postponed to an unannounced date and closed to the public at the wishes of his family.