Prime Minister
Kirienko was appointed Prime Minister after the dismissal of Viktor Chernomyrdin's second cabinet. The State Duma, dominated by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, twice refused to confirm his appointment but president Boris Yeltsin nominated him a third time and Kiriyenko was confirmed.
Along with Deputy Prime minister Boris Nemtsov and Anatoly Chubays, Kirienko became known as one of "young reformists". They tried to improve the Russia's economy using International Monetary Fund credits, and it elevated the national debt to the level of $22.6 billion.
Kirienko's cabinet defaulted the GKO-OFZ government bond coupons which led to devaluation of the Russian ruble and 1998 Russian financial crisis. Responsible for the crisis, the prime minister resigned on 23 August.
Read more about this topic: Sergey Kiriyenko
Famous quotes related to prime minister:
“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life. What do you do after you are world-famous and nineteen or twenty and you have sat with prime ministers, kings and queens, the Pope? What do you do after that? Do you go back home and take a job? What do you do to keep your sanity? You come back to the real world.”
—Wilma Rudolph (1940–1994)