Victor Chernomyrdin

Biography

Viktor Chernomyrdin was born in 1938 in Chernyi Otrog, Orenburg Oblast, the son of a labourer. After school he worked as a mechanic and operator at an oil refinery in Orsk, interrupted by military service, and joined the Communist Party in 1961. He studied at the Kuybyshev Industrial Institute from 1962 to 1966 and later took an economics degree by correspondence. He then worked as a party official in Orsk and as chief engineer and director of the Orenburg gas plant before moving to the party's Central Committee apparatus in Moscow in 1978.

Named deputy minister of the gas industry in 1982, he became minister in 1985. In 1989 he turned the ministry into the state concern Gazprom, the Soviet Union's first state-owned corporation, and became its chairman; after the Soviet collapse Gazprom kept a monopoly over Russia's gas.

Boris Yeltsin brought him into the government as deputy prime minister for fuel and energy in 1992, and in December 1992, when the Congress of People's Deputies rejected Yegor Gaidar, he was confirmed as prime minister. He held the post until March 1998, overseeing the difficult transition to a market economy. With US Vice President Al Gore he chaired a commission on cooperation that led to joint work on the Mir station and the International Space Station. In June 1995 he negotiated with Shamil Basayev to end the Budyonnovsk hostage crisis, and that year his new bloc Our Home - Russia came third in the Duma election. He served briefly as acting president on 5-6 November 1996.

Dismissed in March 1998, he was renominated after the August financial crisis but twice rejected by the Duma. He was Russia's envoy to Yugoslavia during the 1999 NATO bombing, ambassador to Ukraine from 2001 to 2009 and then a presidential adviser. He died in Moscow in 2010 and is remembered in Russia for his tangled turns of phrase.