Yegor Gaidar 叶戈尔•盖达尔

Yegor Gaidar
叶戈尔•盖达尔

Dec 17th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Yegor Timurovich Gaidar, a Russian reformer, died on December 16th, aged 53
俄国革命家叶戈尔•盖达尔于12月16日辞世，享年53岁

“IN RUSSIA you have to live long,” a Russian poet said once. Yegor Gaidar did not. But in his short life he did not just see historic changes, he brought them about. Journalists liked to call him the architect of Russian market reforms. As justifiably, he could be called the man who saved his country from civil war.

一位俄国诗人曾说“在俄国，你想不长寿都不行。”可叶戈尔•盖达尔却没有。但在他短暂的一生中，他不仅仅是历史性变革的见证者，而且还是它们的创造者。新闻工作们喜欢称他为俄国市场改革设计师。人们认为是他将俄国从内战中拯救出来，这一点无可非议。

In the autumn of 1991, at the age of 35, he had to deal with the collapse of the Soviet economy and the disintegration of a nuclear empire into 15 states. Boris Yeltsin asked him to serve first as deputy prime minister, then as finance minister and then as acting head of government. Mr Gaidar was an economics graduate from Moscow State University and economics editor of an academic journal, the Communist. With his big shiny forehead and podgy face, he looked like the class swot, rather than a revolutionary. Yet his impact was no less significant: he helped to avert another revolution of the violent Bolshevik kind. Unusually, Mr Gaidar had both an academic’s close eye for facts and figures, and a sense of the weight of his own decisions in the turbulent sweep of Russian history.

1991年秋，核帝国苏维埃经济瓦解并分裂成15个国家，35岁的盖达尔不得不采取应对措施。伯瑞斯•叶尔钦（俄国第一位民选总统）先后任命其为副总理、财政大臣和政府首脑。盖达尔毕业于莫斯科国立大学经济学专业，曾担任过学术期刊《共产党》的经济类编辑。他的前额锃亮，脸胖乎乎的，看上去就像个教室里的书呆子，而不是革命家。但他的影响却不可小觑：他曾帮助俄国避免了另一场布尔什维克式的暴力革命。与众不同的是，盖达尔不但能用学术的眼光洞察事实与数字，还能在俄国的历史激流中权衡自己的决策。

He was born in March 1956, a few weeks after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party at which Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s cult of personality. His father was a war correspondent; his grandfather was a famous children’s writer, Arkady Gaidar, who fought on the Bolshevik side in the civil war of 1918-22. In the autumn of 1991 the parallels with that civil war, and the famine that accompanied it, were self-evident. Mr Gaidar threw himself into the midst of the crisis as bravely as his grandfather had done. The task was urgent: to prevent starvation and make the economy work, or risk the consequences.

他出生于1956年3月——第二十届共产党代表大会召开的几周之后。会上，尼基塔•赫鲁晓夫谴责斯大林对个性的狂热推崇。盖达尔的父亲是一名战地记者，他的祖父阿尔卡季•盖达尔是位著名的儿童文学作家，曾在1918-22年内战期间为布尔什维克而战。1991年秋，一场类似于内战的战争即将爆发，饥荒也将随之而来，这在当时不言自明。盖达尔像他的祖父一样，勇敢地投身于这次危机之中。当时的任务很紧急：阻止饥荒蔓延、复苏经济，或承担危机所带后果的风险。

By the winter of that year Russia had two months’ worth of grain left, and producers were refusing to sell their crops to the state at regulated prices. Shops were empty. There was no money to import food, either: foreign-exchange reserves stood at $27m and the country’s foreign debt, inherited from the Soviet Union, was $72 billion. The only option for Mr Gaidar and his team was to abolish price regulation and allow free trade.

到那年冬天，俄国剩下的财物只够买两个月的粮食，而且当时生产商们拒绝以管制价格将粮食卖给俄国。商店里空空如也。也没有钱进口食物：俄国的外汇储备为270万美元，从苏维埃联合国那儿借的外债为720亿美元。废除价格管制体系，允许自由贸易，是盖达尔等人唯一的选择。

Price liberalisation made the erosion of Russians’ savings visible, and was hugely painful. But it also re-established the market economy for the first time since the 1920s. The reformers’ other task was to break the communist grip on assets as quickly and peacefully as possible. The mass privatisations of the 1990s were far from just or clean. Mr Gaidar was not to blame for the worst abuses, but he took responsibility nonetheless. He knew that reforms should preferably not be carried out without democratic institutions and public support. But he also knew that the alternative was far worse.

价格自由化使人们看见了腐败的俄国储蓄体制，给人们带来的巨大的痛苦。但它也重建了市场经济，这是自20世纪20年代以来的第一次。改革者们的另一项任务是以最和平的方式尽快夺取共产党对资产的控制权。20世纪90年代的私有制远没有彻底清除干净。尽管人们对政府的漫天骂声并非由盖达尔引起，但盖达尔却负起了相应的责任。他知道唯拥有民主的制度和公众的支持才能完美地实施变革。但他也知道这一选择更加艰难。

He got little support from the West, which was more interested in recovering Soviet-era debts. Nor did his reforms win him friends inside the country. In December 1992 parliament refused to approve him as head of government. But in September 1993 he returned as economy minister. Once again, civil war was close: in October 1993 the stand-off between Yeltsin and his parliament turned into armed conflict. Mr Gaidar, on television, appealed to Russians to defend democracy.

西方国家几乎没有给予盖达尔任何支持，它们对追回苏维埃时期的债务更为感兴趣。盖达尔国内的朋友们也不支持他的改革。1992年12月，盖达尔政府首脑的职位遭到了国会否认。但在1993年9月，他又以经济部部长的身份重回国会。内战双方的实力再次势均力敌：1993年10月叶利钦与国会之间的对峙演变成武装冲突。盖达尔在电视上呼吁俄国人们捍卫民主。

An honest man
一个诚实的人

He was not a politician. Though he was amiable, bounding to greet visitors with a beefy handshake, he lacked the common touch, and often talked in economic jargon. Neither he nor other reformers managed to convince ordinary Russians that the reforms would be long and painful, but that the country would triumph in the end.

他并非政客。虽然他和蔼可亲，总是奔到来客面前与之热情地握手打招呼，但他缺乏平易近人的美德，经常使用经济类术语交谈。他和其他革命家没能成功使俄国平民相信虽然革命的道路充满艰难与痛苦，但它们国家终将获得胜利。

Still, Mr Gaidar knew his country, its history and its perils better than most Russian politicians. After leaving office, he continued to advise the government. In his book “Collapse of an Empire”, he warned against the dangers of post-imperial nostalgia and attempts to exploit it. He drew powerful and disturbing parallels between the Nazis in Germany and similar voices in Russia. Many of his fears were borne out by Russia’s war in Georgia in August 2008. “The situation is extremely dangerous. The post-imperial syndrome is in full blossom. We have to get through the next five to ten years and not start doing something stupid,” he said.

但是，盖达尔比大多数俄国政客更为了解俄国、俄国的历史以及俄国的危险。他在卸任之后，仍继续为政府出谋划策。在盖达尔的著作《帝国的坍塌》中，他警告俄国提防留恋后帝国主义的危险，防止这种留恋情绪被人利用。他提出，德国的纳粹和俄国相似的呼声有着强有力的相同点，令人极其不安。他的担心主要来自于2008年8月在几内亚爆发的俄国战争。他表示，“形势极其危险。后帝国症状全部都显现出来了。未来5至10年，我们不得不小心翼翼，不能做任何蠢事。”

He was honest, both intellectually and personally. Unlike many of the current Kremlin-dwellers, he did not enrich himself in the 1990s. His office was spartan and stacked with papers; good food (and drink) were his main indulgence. And as an academic, he never compromised his analysis for the sake of political expediency.

他诚实、聪明，有个性。与很多现居住于克里姆林宫的人不同的是，他直到20世纪90年代才富有起来。他的办公室简洁朴素，堆满了各种各样的文件；食用优质的食物（及饮品）就是他主要的享受方式。作为一名专业学者，他从未为政治利益而妥协自己的分析结果。

One of Russia’s biggest problems, as he saw it, was the growing accumulation of wealth and power by bureaucrats and their friends in the name of a “strong state”. People who argued for such a state, he wrote, “have only one purpose—to preserve the status quo…A self-serving state destroys society, oppresses it and in the end destroys itself. Will we be able to break away from this vicious circle?”

他认为，俄国最大的一个问题是官僚及他们的朋友们正以一个“强大的政治集团“之名不断积聚财富和力量。他写道，为这样一个政治集团辩解的人“只有一个目的——维持现状…一个自私的政治集团会破坏和镇压社会，最终导致自我毁灭。我们能够脱离这个这个恶性循环吗？”

Mr Gaidar argued that modernisation was impossible without political liberalisation. Yet just before he died, he agreed to apply his economics institute to the Kremlin’s proclaimed task of modernising the Russian economy without touching its political system. Perhaps he sensed it was a vicious circle he could not square.

盖达尔坚持认为，只有在政治自由的条件下才能实现现代化。就在他辞世之前，他同意了在不改变政治体系的前提下，将他的经济体制运用于克里姆林宫宣布的实现俄国经济现代化的任务。或许他感到这是一个他无力结束的恶性循环。