Russian economist Yegor Gaidar, the architect of the "shock therapy" economic reform that aimed to swiftly transform Russia into a market economy, died yesterday aged 53, his spokesman said.
He was a leading reformer in the government of president Boris Yeltsin but Mr Gaidar's policies were largely reviled by the Russian public who blamed him for the economic hardship they caused.
In a sign Mr Gaidar remains a hugely divisive figure, tributes poured in from his former allies for the boldness of the reforms but critics did not shy away from castigating the haste of the changes and hardship they caused.
Mr Gaidar died at around 3 a.m. local time while at work on a book, spokesman Valery Natarov said, giving the cause of death as complications arising from a blood clot.
Mr Gaidar was the mastermind of the economic reform aimed at transforming Russia from a command economy into a market economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
His boldest move was the decision in 1992 to introduce free market prices for most goods in Russia's shops, meaning the government no longer had the right to fix prices.
Along with Anatoly Chubais, he oversaw the start of privatisation of Russia's state-owned assets that would prove equally controversial when the biggest prizes were snapped up by a small elite.
The reforms were known as "shock therapy" after Mr Gaidar decided to implement the massive changes within a very short period of time rather than progressively.
Conservatives bristled at the radical reforms and the youth of Mr Gaidar and his team - most of whom were in their 30s at the time - famously dubbing them as the "boys in pink pants".
The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, told the ITAR-TASS news agency that Mr Gaidar was wrong to have embraced reform with such speed.
Mr Chubais, now head of the Russian Nanotechnologies state corporation and still one of Gaidar's closest allies, described him as a "great scientist, a great statesman".
"It was a huge luck for Russia that it had Yegor Gaidar during one of the most difficult moments in its history. In the early 90s he saved the country from hunger, civil war and collapse," he wrote in his weblog.
"I will feel this loss all my life".
Gaidar was born in Moscow to a well-known family, the grandson of the Soviet writer Arkady Gaidar and the son of the military journalist Timur Gaidar.
He started his career as an economic journalist, including for the Soviet daily Pravda, but was rapidly promoted into Yeltsin's economic team as Communism collapsed.
Mr Gaidar served as deputy Prime Minister and also briefly as Prime Minister under Yeltsin but departed frontline politics after his liberal Russia Choice party failed to win seats in parliamentary elections.