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A member of the Communist Party 195991 and of its Central Committee 198191, Silayev emerged as a reformer in 1990, founding the Democratic Reform Movement (with former foreign minister Shevardnadze).
An engineer, Silayev worked 195474 in the military-industrial complex in Gorky (now Nizhniy-Novgorod) and then in the central aviation and machine-tools industries, becoming Soviet deputy prime minister 1985. Chosen to become prime minister of the Russian republic by its new radical president Boris Yeltsin, Silayev formulated an ambitious plan of market-centred reform. After the failure of the August 1991 anti-Gorbachev attempted coup, he was appointed Soviet prime minister and given charge of the economy.