Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin

Chernomyrdin at the G8 summit in July 2006

Viktor Stepanowitsch Tschernomyrdin ( Russian Виктор Степанович Черномырдин , scientific transliteration Viktor Stepanovič Černomyrdin ; born April 9, 1938 in Chorny Otrog , Chkalov Oblast ; † November 3, 2010 in Moscow ) was a Russian politician .

education

After finishing school, the son of a chauffeur worked in the Orsk oil refinery as a locksmith until 1962 . He then passed the entrance examination to the Technical University of Applied Sciences in Kuibyshev (today Samara ) and studied there until 1966. In 1972, Tschernomyrdin obtained an additional degree in industrial engineering at the All-Soviet Technical University .

Political career

In 1961, Chernomyrdin joined the CPSU and served as a party official from 1967 to 1973. He then moved to the post of deputy chief engineer of the natural gas processing Orenburg combine , where he soon rose to director.

From 1985 to 1989 he was Minister for the Gas Industry of the USSR and from 1989 to 1992 Chairman of the state gas company Gazprom .

In 1992, Chernomyrdin was appointed Prime Minister of the Russian Federation by President Boris Yeltsin . He held this post until March 1998, when Yeltsin unexpectedly dismissed the government and appointed Sergei Kiriyenko as prime minister.

After the Kiriyenko government failed in August of the same year, Yeltsin tried to reinstall Chernomyrdin as prime minister. Chernomyrdin's return failed due to the refusal of parliament to confirm him.

On April 14, 1999, Yeltsin appointed Chernomyrdin special envoy for Yugoslavia. Together with the former Finnish President and UN diplomat Matti Ahtisaari, he led the peace talks with Slobodan Milošević during the Kosovo war .

In June 1999, Chernomyrdin was appointed chairman of the supervisory board of the Gazprom concern, which has since been converted into a joint stock company. However, he gave up this post a year later, in June 2000; he was succeeded by Dmitry Medvedev . In the parliamentary elections in December 1999 , Chernomyrdin's party Our House Russia failed due to the five percent hurdle, but Chernomyrdin himself was able to maintain his parliamentary seat by winning a direct mandate.

From May 2001 to June 2009, Chernomyrdin was Russia's ambassador to Ukraine . After he was recalled by President Medvedev, he was appointed his advisor.

Quotes

Chernomyrdin's sentence “We wanted the best, but it came as always” became a popular word in Russia (Russian “ Хотели как лучше, а получилось как всегда ”) - colloquially, the best was also reinterpreted: “They wanted the best, too ". The standing phrase "хотеть как лучше" means "mean it well" and denotes good intentions, good will and diligence. In Chernomyrdin's answer to a press conference on August 6, 1993 in preparation for the currency reform, the sentence ended in: "... but it came out, as always, [this and that]." But since he made a longer break after "as always", the concrete, factual content of the sentence was reinterpreted as a sarcastic commentary on the situation in Russia or the behavior of its politicians.

The same phrase appears in the diaries of the anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin from the 19th century, where he may have quoted the satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin , but only became known through Chernomyrdin's rather accidental use.

literature

In the bibliographical Internet database RussGUS (freely accessible) there are currently around 30 references to literature on "Tschernomyrdin": to be found there under search form Subject notations: 16.2.2 / Cernomyrdin *.

Web links

Commons : Viktor Stepanowitsch Tschernomyrdin  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Черномырдин Виктор Степанович. In: panorama.ru. Edited by the Russian Government(Russian). 
• Черномырдин Виктор Степанович. In: Biografija.ru. (Russian). 
• Russian ex-head of government has died. In: Tages-Anzeiger . November 3, 2010. 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Günter Joetze: The last war in Europe? Kosovo and German politics. Stuttgart / Munich 2001, p. 138.
2. ↑ Медведев уволил Черномырдина с должности посла на Украине. In: NEWSru.com . June 11, 2009, Retrieved September 16, 2018 (Russian).