"We aspired for better, but it turned out as it always does."
Viktor Chernomyrdin served as Russian Prime Minister from 1993 to 1998, during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. He gained a reputation for his trademark pronouncements, and this is the best-known of the lot.
Chernomyrdin said this on Aug. 6, 1993, at a press conference to explain the doomed reform that was designed to stop the circulation of Soviet-era bank notes, that
It was already clear in
But why didn’t the government improve the reform there and then? The new government was building a new monetary system and didn’t want people who had a lot of Soviet cash stashed at home to exchange it all for the new money – this would have fueled inflation and drowned the market. So Chernomyrdin and his colleagues had to take these unpopular measures, saving the state at the expense of its people.
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