Grigory Alekseyevich Yavlinsky (; born 10 April 1952) is a Russian economist and politician. He has held numerous positions in the Soviet and Russian governments across different levels, including in the State Duma.
Yavlinsky was one of authors of the 500 Days Program, a plan for the transition of the Soviet regime to a free-market economy, and is the former leader of the opposition Yabloko party. He has run three times for Russia's presidency. In 1996 he ran against Boris Yeltsin, finishing fourth with 7.3% of the vote. In 2000 Yavlinsky ran against Vladimir Putin, finishing third with 5.8%. In the 2012 presidential election he was prevented from running for president by Russian authorities, despite collecting the necessary 2 million signatures of Russian citizens for his candidacy. Yavlinsky was Yabloko's candidate for Russian President in the 2018 presidential election, when he ran against Putin and got 1.05% of the vote, according to the results. Many of the election results were not recognised by his party due to corroborated allegations of irregularities.
Yavlinsky holds a PhD in economics from the Central Economic Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences; his doctoral dissertation was entitled "The socio-economic system of Russia and the problem of its modernisation". He is a professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.
Early life and career Yavlinsky was born in Lviv, Ukrainian SSR. His father, Aleksei Yavlinsky, was an officer, and his mother, Vera Naumovna, a chemistry teacher at an institute. Both his parents are buried in Lviv, while his brother Mikhail still lives there. He is related to Natan Yavlinsky, the nuclear physicist who invented the tokamak.
In 1967 and 1968, he was the champion of the Ukrainian SSR in junior boxing. He decided to become an economist during his school years. From 1967 to 1976, he studied at the Plekhanov Institute of the National Economy in Moscow as a labour economist and took a post-graduate course there. While a candidate of economics, he worked in the coal sector. After finishing his postgraduate studies he was employed by the All-Soviet Union Coal Mines Department Research Institute. His job was to draft new unified work instructions for the coal industry. He was the first person in the USSR to complete this assignment. To perform his duties, he had to go down the mines. One of his shifts nearly ended tragically for him when the mine collapsed. Together with four workers, he spent ten hours waist-deep in ice-cold water, waiting for help. Three of his fellow sufferers died in hospital after their rescue. Yavlinsky spent four years at this job. He saw it as an opportunity to see the world hidden behind the propaganda posters. He reported about the horrible conditions in which the coal miners lived and worked, but his reports had no impact.
In 1980, Yavlinsky was assigned to the USSR State Committee for Labour and Social Affairs in charge of the heavy industry sector. In this position he began to develop a project aimed at improving the USSR labour system. He identified two different ways to enhance the efficiency of the system: either establish total control over every move of every worker in the country or alternatively give enterprises more independence. His report on the project did not prove popular with the head of the State Committee for Labour, Yury Batalin. The KGB confiscated 600 draft copies of Yavlinsky's report and interrogated him several times. When Brezhnev died in 1982, the KGB finally left Yavlinsky alone. However, he had to stop working as he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a closed medical facility for nine months. The drafts of his report were burned together with his other personal belongings as contagious.
From 1984, he held a management position at the Labour Ministry and then at the Council of Ministers of the USSR. In this capacity, he had to join Communist Party of the Soviet Union, of which he was a member in 1985–1991. He was head of the Joint Economic Department of the Government of the USSR. In 1989, he was made department head of the Statement Commission for Economic Reforms run by Academician Leonid Abalkin.
Deputy Premiership and economic reforms (1990–1992) Yavlinsky's commitment to a market economy was established in 1990 when he wrote 500 Days – a programme for the Soviet Union in which he proposed the rapid transition from a centrally planned economy to a free market economy in less than two years. To implement the programme, Yavlinsky was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR and Deputy Chairman of the State Commission for Economic Reform. President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev decided to combine Yavlinsky's programme with another one which had been developed simultaneously. The other programme, "The Main Directives for Development", had been created by the Chairman of the Council of Ministers Nikolai Ryzhkov, who threatened to resign if his project was rejected. In October 1990, when it became clear that his programme would not be implemented, Yavlinsky resigned from the government. He then established his own think tank, EPICenter, which brought together many members of his 500 Days team who were to become his future associates in Yabloko (Sergei Ivanenko, Aleksei Melnikov, Aleksei Mikhailov, etc.).
In the summer of 1991, while working in Harvard, he co-authored a new reform programme jointly with Graham Allison, which offered a platform for Gorbachev's negotiations with the G7 over financial aid in support of a transition to a market economy. After the defeat of the hardline August 1991 coup against Gorbachev and Yeltsin, he was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Committee for Management of the National Economy which operated in place of Soviet government.Постановление Верховного Совета СССР от 28 августа 1991 г. N 2367-I «О недоверии Кабинету Министров СССР» Holding the rank of Deputy Prime Minister, he was responsible for organizing the work to prepare the country's economic reform program. President of the RSFSR Boris Yeltsin asked Yavlinsky to return to the government of the republic and even considered making him Prime Minister. In this role Yavlinsky successfully negotiated an economic union among Soviet republics. The agreement was signed by representatives of twelve republics in Alma-Ata on 18 October 1991. However, when Yeltsin signed the Belavezh Accords, which led to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the rupture of all political and economic connections between the former Soviet republics, Yavlinsky left again as a sign of protest against Yeltsin's actions. A year later, Yavlinsky started his own political career.
When the "shock therapy" reforms were launched by Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar in January 1992, Yavlinsky became an outspoken critic of these policies, emphasising the differences between his programme and Gaidar's reform programme (such as the sequencing of privatisation versus the liberalisation of prices and the applicability of his program to the entire Soviet Union):"Certainly, they have no program. They have some elements of policy . . . and they are very contradictory".In 1992, Yavlinsky served as advisor to Boris Nemtsov who was at the time the Governor of Nizhny Novgorod Region. Yavlinsky developed a regional economic reform programme for Nemtsov. Later, however, their paths diverged, as Nemtsov sided with Yeltsin's government on most issues, eventually becoming deputy prime minister and one of the founders and leaders of the Union of Right Forces, while Yavlinsky became the leader of the liberal opposition to Yeltsin.
Activities during the Yeltsin administration (1993–2000) In 1993, as the conflict intensified between Yeltsin and the parliament over the shock therapy programme, Yavlinsky had high ratings in the polls as a potential presidential candidate and the image of an independent, centrist politician, untainted by corruption. In September–October 1993, he joined a group of senior politicians who tried to mediate between Yeltsin and the parliament. However, after the outbreak of hostilities on the streets of Moscow on 3 October, he unequivocally called on Yeltsin to use force against militants on the streets and other armed supporters of the parliament.
When Yeltsin set the date for the elections to the new parliament and a constitutional referendum for 12 December 1993, Yavlinsky had to cobble together an electoral bloc in haste, as he had no party of his own, and had to recruit existing parties as co-founders. His bloc was co-founded by three of them, the Republican Party of the Russian Federation, Social Democratic Party of Russia and Christian Democratic Party of Russia, all three tilting on most issues toward the Yeltsin camp.
The top three names on the slate – Yavlinsky, Yury Boldyrev (former State Controller and disaffected democrat) and Vladimir Lukin (at the time Russia's ambassador to the US) – gave the bloc its initial name, "Yavlinsky-Boldyrev-Lukin" with the initials Я, Б, Л (Ya, B, L), abbreviated as YABLOKO, which is also the Russian word for apple, hence the party logo. With no prior electoral experience, Yabloko succeeded in winning 7.9% of the vote in December 1993 and forming the fifth largest faction in the Duma. After Boldyrev clashed with Yavlinsky over a draft law on production-sharing agreements and left the bloc in 1995, the name was retained, but now reinterpreted as the "Yavlinsky Bloc". In 1995, the Yabloko caucus in the Duma set up its own political association which was reincorporated as a political party in 2001.
One of the features distinguishing the party from other liberal parties was its critique of Yeltsin's policies, from the economic "shock therapy" and the handling of the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis to the First Chechen War and Russia's relations with the West. Yavlinsky established himself as a leader of the democratic opposition. In this capacity, he was a principled opponent of Gaidar's Russia's Choice and its successors in parliament, such as the Union of Right Forces. In turn, they accused him of being too inflexible and blamed his personality for the failure to merge with other democrats in order to mount a concentrated electoral challenge to the hardline forces. Others, however, admitted that there were philosophical differences between Yavlinsky's unspoken social democratic bent and the neoliberal orientation of his democratic opponents.
In September 1998, after the 1998 Russian financial crisis brought down Sergei Kirienko's government, Yavlinsky proposed the candidacy of Yevgeny Primakov who was elected Prime Minister in spite of resistance from Yeltsin, his family and entourage. This helped resolve the political stalemate and many credit Primakov with rescuing the economy from chaos and with the start of the recovery of the industrial production that continued under Vladimir Putin. However, Yavlinsky declined Primakov's offer to join his Communist-dominated government as deputy prime minister for social policies and soon joined the ranks of his critics on the liberal side. Later in 1999 Yavlinsky criticised Primakov as a throwback to the stagnation days of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Interfax quoted him saying on one occasion: "This Brezhnev style of government absolutely does not suit us". Yavlinsky said Primakov relied too much on communists and other leftists who do not understand modern economics. However, Yavlinsky warned Yeltsin against sacking the entire government, as he believed that this would have set up a showdown with the State Duma of the kind that had led Primakov to be appointed Prime Minister in the first place.