What is the former head of the Central Bank remembered

On May 11, 2025, at the 88th year of his life, Viktor Gerashchenko, a man who was twice headed by the State Bank of the USSR and twice a Bank of Russia in the most difficult periods, was gone. As well as the last head of the board of directors of the oil company Yukos.

He was those who were simultaneously suspected of relations with the Chekists (due to career growth in the Council of People’s Commissars of the Council of People’s Commissars, which determined its take-off in the State Bank of the USSR), and in an effort to ensure excessive independence of the Central Bank from the Russian authorities in the late 1990s, when the current design of the Russian banking system was determined-without admitting to the Board of Directors of the Bank of Russia the representative of the main legal administration of the Kremlin (Much is kept on this independence today).

He was the one who scolded the abuse ofOThe most Russian politicians of the liberal wing – but also appreciated for the directness that he could afford, speaking about the actions of the Russian state and his individual representatives, and which now cannot afford to reproduce even in the necrologist, who wants to maintain a license. Thank God, the Internet still remembers something, and a curious reader who did not find the turbulent 2000s will easily find out for what purpose Viktor Vladimirovich wanted to acquire several shares of the Benophification of this bankruptcy company at the end of Yukos’s bankruptcy, what exactly he had to tell these shareholders at a meeting of its shareholders and what he thought about all this (see, for example, for example, for example, (see, for example, for example, for example. « Kommersant » of June 2, 2010).

People who were familiar with Gerashchenko personally recall him in different words, but the “block” and “Hercules” (as they called him by the eyes in the banking and financial environment) repeat almost everything – the effect of scale, to find Heracles in Gerashchenko in simple consonance. A person who announced the « Pavlovsk » monetary reform of 1991. The person, the first appointment of which was called the head of the Central Bank then the head of the government, Yegor Gaidar and who was removed from this post for the first Black Tuesday in the history of market Russia (the collapse of the ruble). And the same person in the default of 1998 led the bank, which led from the crisis of state short -term obligations with a fair profit, and then was again appointed the head of the Central Bank so that the consequences of this default were already at the state level (see, for example, « Kommersant » of November 17, 1998), combining this post with the position of managing director from Russia in the IMF and EBRD.

Reading the archival publications – they are about Gerashchenko in the “Kommersant” of those years – from the present time you understand: a large man was a large. I was mistaken, studied. He was mistaken and studied again. He changed his position and views, expressing them quite openly, but did not throw what he did and considered it necessary to do. And when he completely retired, in the 2010s he grumbled in an interview that he was no longer interested in the economy or the Russian policy, but it sounded intonationally as “he did everything he could, and the devil with you.”

Oleg Sapozhkov