Finance adviser to Putin resigns

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

MOSCOW (AP) -- An outspoken economic adviser to President Vladimir Putin said yesterday he had offered his resignation, saying he could no longer work in a government that had eliminated political freedoms.

Andrei Illarionov, the lone dissenter in a Kremlin dominated by Mr. Putin's fellow KGB veterans, was stripped of his duties as envoy to the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations earlier this year. However, he had remained Mr. Putin's economic adviser.

Mr. Illarionov made the move after criticizing the Kremlin's course last week, when he said that political freedom in Russia has declined and that government-controlled corporations have stifled competition and ignored public interests.

"It is one thing to work in a partly free country, which Russia was six years ago. It is quite another when the country has ceased to be politically free," he said yesterday, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.

Mr. Illarionov, who also has criticized what he says is a return to inefficient state control of the economy, complained that he was no longer able to speak his mind.

"I considered it important to remain here at this post as long as I had the possibility to do something, including speaking out," he said, according to ITAR-Tass. "Until recently, no one put any restrictions on me expressing my point of view. Now the situation has changed."

Mr. Illarionov, 44, a liberal economist, had worked in the Russian government in the 1990s and became Mr. Putin's adviser in 2000.

Viktor Chernomyrdin, a longtime Russian prime minister who is now ambassador to Ukraine, said Mr. Illarionov's criticism of the government was unfounded.

"There was so much malice in him; he was being overly negative," Mr. Chernomyrdin said, according to the Interfax news agency. "It was a mistake to keep him in the Kremlin for so long."

But Yevgeny Ikhlov, who leads the group For Human Rights, described Mr. Illarionov as "the last liberal in the government" who dared to expose the authorities' crackdown on political freedoms.