News: Gaidar dies.

"He began his career in a branch of the Soviet planning bureaucracy examining ways to revitalize the country’s creaking command economy.

But as finance minister he abandoned the idea of instituting gradual reforms of the type he had been studying. Instead, in charge of one of the great blank slates of economic history after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he decided to move quickly to liberalize prices and begin privatizing state industry."

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