RUSSIA:Yegor Gaidar, who is speaking at a conference in Maynooth today, talks to Conor Sweeneyabout today's challenges
The greatest threat to Russia's future political stability will come from the extreme right, not a slide back towards a Soviet-style empire, predicts Dr Yegor Gaidar.
The former Russian prime minister, who led the country through some of the most turbulent moments of the Yeltsin era, will be speaking about his country in NUI Maynooth later today, where he's participating in a two-day conference on relations between Russia and Ireland.
These days, he's no longer an active politician but is running an economics think-tank close to the Kremlin. However, he declines to elaborate on his current relationship with the Putin administration. "When you want to have the influence, you don't have to make it public," he replies enigmatically.
Raised in a family with immaculate Bolshevik credentials, he embraced capitalism with the zeal of a Thatcherite in the early 1990s, believing it to be the only solution to a collapsing society. Although still in his 30s when appointed prime minister, he led a band of "young reformers" who battled with traditional hardliners to convince then president Boris Yeltsin of the merits of unfettered capitalism. In fact, the then communist-dominated Duma never formally ratified Dr Gaidar as Russia's prime minister, eventually forcing him from office.
When asked if would defend many of his controversial decisions, he explained that hindsight is a luxury he couldn't afford at the time.
"I was able to prevent a catastrophe, the danger was very real," he says, arguing that his recent research proved the desperate food shortages that were imminent in the big cities. Since then, much of the country's economy has been transformed and is now growing strongly, though a handful of oligarchs with enormous personal wealth have proved major beneficiaries of many privatisation schemes.
Nevertheless, Dr Gaidar says the price of their support in a crucial 1996 election to re-elect Boris Yeltsin was a justifiable pact when the alternative was a return to power of the communists. More than anything, he argues, it would have been wrong to let them get their hands on the country's nuclear arsenal.
In recent weeks, with suspicions of a KGB role in a London poisoning and a Kremlin hand in the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, it seems to many in the West as if his country's political system appears to be sliding back towards the bad old days - a notion Dr Gaidar firmly rejected this week at his offices in the New Economic Institute.
"I lived part of my life in the Soviet Union and now some in the West say it's a return, but it's not. It's true there may be some dangers, but some are even more dangerous", he argues, than the former communist regime.
"Radical nationalism is the most important danger, while the post-imperial syndrome is also important."
At the moment Russia has also been swept by a wave of racial attacks, with black students and other visible ethnic minorities facing assaults and stabbings. A recent march by far right supporters in Moscow was also banned, amid fears of violent clashes.
When it comes to foreign policy, he also feels President Vladimir Putin has been generally pragmatic, except when it comes to relations with former satellite states such as Georgia, Moldova or Ukraine, a symptom of the post-imperial hankerings of his country, which he warns against. But in general Dr Gaidar believes the current climate in Russia is badly misunderstood. He says most western journalists don't grasp some of the subtleties of the complex country - both the positive and negative influences. Ahead of his visit to Ireland, he says that while there are many reasons to be critical of the direction of his country under President Putin, economically, its is moving in a positive way. At the moment, Russia is running a large surplus, he points out, and has paid off the legacy of foreign debt it inherited from the Soviet Union.
Although he praises Ireland's economic success, he suggests policymakers may have at least one lesson to learn from Russia - the introduction of a flat-tax regime which has regularised the country's once chaotic system.
But throughout the interview, Dr Gaidar identifies Norway, which has to deal with both the benefits and headaches of oil revenues, as a closer model for Russia's future development than anywhere else.
In terms of the growing state domination of the domestic media, he also identifies one crucial difference between the current tightening of ownership through Kremlin-friendly businesses - the Soviet Union sought to control all comment, whereas now it's just the truly mass media which are closely chaperoned.
Dr Gaidar will be addressing the conference at NUI Maynooth at 3pm today. Other participants include the former Irish Times Moscow correspondents Conor O'Clery and Séamus Martin. Further information can be found at the NUI Maynooth home page, www.nuim.ie