Gaidar's daughter Maria said her 50-year-old father and former acting prime minister started vomiting and fainted at a conference in Dublin Friday, and remained unconscious for three hours. Gaidar was found to be in a grave condition, and doctors have not yet identified the cause of the illness.
Valery Natarov said the condition of the champion of 1990s economic reforms was "stable and noticeably improving." Gaidar, who has been transferred from Dublin to a Moscow hospital, is already able to talk to his family over the phone, he said.
Doctors are considering various scenarios of what could have caused the sickness, one of which is poisoning, the spokesman said.
"Nobody has ruled out the poisoning version. It is being considered, and doctors are studying all the symptoms and consequences to cure Yegor, and diagnose the causes," Natarov said, adding that it was unclear when he would be discharged.
Gaidar's fellow reformer of the early 1990s, Anatoly Chubais, who is now chief executive of Russia's electricity monopoly, drew a parallel between the illness and the recent killings of an investigative journalist and a former security officer.
"Yegor Gaidar was on the verge of death on November 24," said Chubais, who was first deputy prime minister under former president Boris Yeltsin. He quoted "professionals who know the situation" as saying that it did not look like natural sickness.
However, the CEO of Unified Energy System said Russian authorities were not involved in the incident.
"If this was true, Moscow would have been a far better place for it than Dublin," Chubais said.
The Kremlin's reputation has been overshadowed by two recent high-profile killings. Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist and Kremlin critic, was gunned down in Moscow in October in an apparent contract killing. Alexander Litvinenko, a security service defector who allegedly investigated the murder, died in London last week from suspected radioactive poisoning.
Following his death, Western media circulated a statement in which he blamed the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin for his alleged poisoning. The Kremlin denied involvement.
Both Politkovskaya and Litvinenko were linked to Russia's fugitive oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who had vast clout under Yeltsin, but is now living in London with a British passport. Berezovsky is wanted in Russia on fraud charges and attempts to organize a coup.
"The deadly triangle - Politkovskaya, Litvinenko and Gaidar - would have been very desirable for some people who are seeking an unconstitutional and forceful change of power in Russia," Chubais said.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, deputy speaker of the lower house of parliament and leader of the ultra-nationalist LDPR party, also blamed people outside the country for the incident, and said it was a way to create a nervous atmosphere in Russia ahead of the 2007 parliamentary elections.
"External forces based in London and other European capitals are behind this, as they try to create a nervous environment in the country, destabilize the situation, or make people suspect it is being orchestrated from Russia," Zhirinovsky said.
Along with Chubais, Gaidar was a pioneer of Russia's privatization campaign following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Both politicians have been criticized for the rapid pace of reforms, termed "shock therapy", which deprived many people of their long-time savings.
In the early 1990s, Gaidar was deputy prime minister, and economics and finance minister. In 1992, he became the de facto head of government.
In the mid-1990s, he was a member of parliament and now heads the Institute for the Economy in Transition.
