Gaidar's spokesman says doctors can't explain the illness, and suspect some form of toxic poisoning.
Yet a similar mood of alarm attended the departure of Yegor Gaidar from high political office.
Still, Mr Gaidar knew his country, its history and its perils better than most Russian politicians.
But Yegor Gaidar, an architect of Mr Yeltsin's economic reforms, this week proposed an alternative: Weimar Germany.
Doctors in Ireland said Gaidar's health had suffered radical changes, but they concluded he wasn't exposed to radiation.
By December 1992 Mr Gaidar had lost his job at the hands of the Duma, Russia's Soviet-era parliament.
And Mr Chubais, far more so than Mr Gaidar before him, has placed good people strategically throughout the administration.
Mr Gaidar is an ally of Anatoly Chubais, Mr Yeltsin's chief of staff.
Yegor Gaidar is described as the main architect of Russia's post-Soviet reforms.
The new ideas, about reforming pensions and household subsidies, betrayed the hand of Yegor Gaidar, a pioneering Russian reformer who has been quietly regaining influence.
But all the information available to Mr Gaidar and the handful of others who knew the real situation in 1992 pointed in the other direction.
Some of its leading lights, like a former privatisation chief, Anatoly Chubais, and Yegor Gaidar, a free-market former prime minister, are keen supporters of Mr Putin's.
Unfazed, Mr Gaidar seized the moment, first as deputy prime minister in charge of economic reform, then, briefly, as finance minister, and finally as acting prime minister.
In the first week of January, Mr Gaidar and his tiny team of reformers watched with increasing exuberance as impromptu street markets multiplied in Russia's towns and cities.
She was in close contact with Yegor Gaidar and the other young reformers who saved the Russian economy from total meltdown and laid the foundations, albeit shaky ones, for a market economy.
Western friends of reform in Russia should be under no illusion: The rationale for such an arrangement is not that it will ultimately produce the transformation of political and economic affairs in the former Soviet Union -- only on a more gradual, less tumultuous pace than originally envisioned by Yeltsin and his first administration led by Yegor Gaidar.
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