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Days of Defeat and Victory

Yegor Gaidar
Reviewed by By Robert Legvold
March/April 2000
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Yegor Gaidar
University of Washington Press
2000
342 pp.
0295978236
$30.00

Here in English are the 1996 memoirs of one of the most intriguing figures from the critical first years of the new Russia. His account is most engaging and eye-opening when tracing his evolution into a Western-style market economist within the Soviet context; it is most revealing when telling how the economic reform came to be and what happened thereafter. This book is doubly valuable: first, for the inside information it provides; second, for the insight into the character of a man both talented and politically naive, candidly self-critical and utterly unquestioning in his economic convictions and low regard for the intellectual capacities of those who disagree with him.

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