Yeltsin asked Gaidar to figure out how the country was going to survive. Gaidar was the thirty-five-year-old scion of a privileged Soviet family, grandson of two of the country’s most venerated writers and husband of the daughter of a third.* Save for a short stint as an editor, he had worked only at research institutions. He assembled a team of like-minded economists, starting with half a dozen and later adding a few more. All of them were roughly the same age and came from academia. They had no experience in government or administration of any sort, and with the exception of a few recent
...more
Sounds like a recipe for success. 😶
