Yegor Gaidar Dies
Yegor Gaidar, former acting prime minister and the architect of market reforms in the early 1990s, died on Wednesday morning of complications relating to a blood clot. In his last interview with RFE/RL on March 25, 2009, Gaidar reflected on the current political situation and said, "When you build a vertical of administrative power... and you start appointing governors, it's necessary to understand that thereafter you are responsible for trash collection in Uriupinsk... In my view we have committed a range of errors."
RFE/RL also speaks with Ekaterina Geniyeva, Mikhail Khodkovsky, Yuri Ryzhkov and Stanislav Shushkevich about their memories of Gaidar.
NATO Lacks A Strategic Concept For Russia
Following the visit to Moscow of NATO Secretary-General Anders Rasmussen, Fedor Lukyanov, chief editor of the journal "Russia in Global Politics," says that though relations have significantly improved, prospects for more wide-reaching cooperation between the alliance and Russia are remote.
He tells RFE/RL, "So far the quite long history of mutual contacts has led exclusively to attempts to create decorative structures in order to imitate cooperation...But in the end it has all come up against the same [issue]... in my opinion... NATO doesn't have a defined strategic concept... following the end of the Cold War, NATO has not formulated its mission."
Sakharov's Ideas Today
On the 20th anniversary of the death of scientist, human rights advocate and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov, his widow, Yelena Bonner, speaks to RFE/RL about her husband's legacy.
Asked whether Sakharov's ideas have been forgotten, Bonner says, "Forgotten, forgotten....an idea is an ideal, then there is the word and action. People remember Sakharov and speak about him mainly on certain dates. This doesn't change anything."
Reflecting on the relevance of his ideas today, she says, "'Peace, progress and human rights...These three basic concepts cannot be implemented separately from each other."