Soviet and Russian politician and businessman who was the second-longest-serving Prime Minister of Russia (1992–1998) based on consecutive years.
His father was a labourer and Victor had five siblings. After school education he worked as a mechanic in an oil refinery in Orsk. In 1961 he became a member of the CPSU. From 1985-1989 he was the minister of gas industries, which in August 1989 was transformed into Gazprom. Boris Yeltsin appointed him (in the meantime he was chairman of Gazprom) as his Deputy Prime Minister. When Yeltsin was undergoing a heart operation on 6 November 1996, Chernomyrdin served as Acting President for 23 hours.
Chernomyrdin remained Prime Minister until his sudden dismissal on 23 March 1998. Following the 1998 Russian financial crisis in August, Yeltsin re-appointed him as Prime Minister, and attempted to groom him as his successor. However, the Duma twice refused to confirm Chernomyrdin as the head of the government. Rather than risking a third rejection and thus forcing the dissolution of the State Duma and political crisis, Chernomyrdin withdrew his nomination and the President asked the more popular Yevgeny Primakov to form a new cabinet. During the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 he was a special representative of Russia in Yugoslavia. In May 2001, Vladimir Putin appointed him as Ambassador of Russia to Ukraine. This action was interpreted by some Russian media agencies as a move to distance Chernomyrdin from the centre of Russian politics. In 2003, he dismissed talk of an apology for the Holodomor Famine made by the Soviet Union.
In Russian-speaking countries, he is known for his numerous malapropisms and syntactically incorrect speech. His idioms received the name Chernomyrdinki, and are somewhat comparable to Bushisms in style and effect. One of his expressions “We wanted it as good as possible, but it turned out as always” about the economic reforms in Russia was widely quoted.The phrase was uttered after a highly unsuccessful monetary exchange performed by the Russian Central Bank.
He died in Moscow on the morning of 3 November 2010 at age 72 after a long illness. He was buried beside his wife in Novodevichy Cemetery two days later.
Link to Wikipedia biography