Gaidar Ill With Mystery Ailment

Former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, the architect of Russia's turbulent transition to a market economy, became violently ill last week while in Ireland, prompting speculation he had been targeted for assassination.

Gaidar, 50, fell ill one day after former KGB officer and Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko died in London from apparent radiation poisoning. Gaidar was still recuperating Wednesday in a Moscow hospital.

Unified Energy Systems chief Anatoly Chubais, who presided over President Boris Yeltsin's privatization program and is a friend of Gaidar, said doctors believed Gaidar's illness might not be natural, linking the incident to Litvinenko's death and the murder last month of journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Gaidar's death, Chubais told reporters, "would have been very desirable for some people who are seeking an unconstitutional and forceful change of power in Russia."

But a spokeswoman for the Irish Foreign Ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: "There is no reason to believe there is anything suspicious or untoward about this."

The former prime minister began bleeding from his nose and vomiting before fainting Friday while in Dublin, where he was promoting his book "The Death of Empire: Lessons for Contemporary Russia," said his spokesman, Valery Natarov.

Gaidar was rushed to a Dublin hospital; he spent one night there before checking out. One day later, he checked into a hospital in Moscow. Natarov could not explain what Gaidar was doing or where he was between leaving the hospital in Dublin and entering the hospital in Moscow. He also declined to name the hospital where Gaidar was staying in Moscow.

Natarov said the cause of Gaidar's illness remained unclear and that "poisoning has not been ruled out." Natarov said that as far as he knew, Gaidar had not received any death threats.

As of Wednesday night, Gaidar's condition was stable, Natarov said. "It is still unclear when he will be able to leave the hospital, but we're hoping for a speedy recovery," he added.

Gaidar is best known for abolishing the country's price controls in early 1992. His "shock therapy," widely blamed for wiping out the life savings of millions of Russians, earned him widespread scorn.

When, in September 2003, Gaidar's party, the Union of Right Forces, announced that the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq had invited Gaidar to help craft a recovery plan, pundits joked that Washington was unleashing a weapon of mass destruction on the Iraqi people.

Chubais, who has also been roundly and repeatedly attacked for his role in the spiraling prices and crooked privatization schemes that characterized much of the Yeltsin era, survived an assassination attempt last year.

The suspected assailants are now on trial. Prosecutors have said the would-be assassins were outraged by Chubais' record, as they saw it, of handing over the crown jewels of the Soviet Union to the oligarchs who came to dominate Russia in the 1990s.

Roland Nash, chief strategist at Renaissance Capital, said he could not fathom why anyone in power would want Gaidar dead. While Gaidar consults to some officials in President Vladimir Putin's administration, he does not have much pull.

Echoing the state-controlled media's take on Litvinenko's death, State Duma Deputy and journalist Alexander Khinshtein said Gaidar might have been poisoned by those looking to discredit the Kremlin.

"I don't exclude [the possibility that there is] a systematic plan, developed in the West, to massively discredit top Russian officials, the security forces, as well as President Putin, by blatantly attempting to liquidate members and ideologues of the liberal wing of Russian politics," Khinshtein said by e-mail.

Former Federal Security Service officer Gennady Gudkov dismissed talk of a conspiracy at home or abroad. Litvinenko's death, he said, had triggered fears of "poison mania." This had led some to label prematurely Gaidar's illness an assassination attempt, he suggested.

Gudkov, who is also a member of the Duma's Security Committee, observed that there was a long list of potential Kremlin critics who were very much alive, including chess champion and liberal reformer Garry Kasparov and liberal satirist Viktor Shenderovich.