Alexander Yakovlev

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Alexander Yakovlev
Александр Яковлев
Aleksei A. Rodionov
Personal details
Born	(1923-12-02)2 December 1923 Korolyovo, Yaroslavl Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union (now Russia)
Died	18 October 2005(2005-10-18) (aged 81) Moscow, Russia
Political party	Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1944–1991) Russian Party of Social Democracy (1995–2002)
Signature
Military service
Allegiance	Soviet Union
Branch/service	Soviet Navy
Years of service	1941–1943
Battles/wars	World War II Eastern Front Siege of Leningrad

Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev (

Born into a rural family, Yakovlev served as a platoon commander of a marine brigade during World War II, and became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union following the war. During the rule of Nikita Khrushchev, he became a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU, before resigning to study abroad as part of the Fulbright Programme, returning in 1960. Under Leonid Brezhnev, he became Deputy Head of Agitprop and was placed in charge of a group on creating the 1977 Constitution of the Soviet Union. He was later demoted to ambassador to Canada, in response to his public opposition to ethnic nationalism within the Soviet Union.

In the early 1980s, Yakovlev returned to the Soviet Union, and became a prominent supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev's proposed reforms. In response to his perceived importance in the reforms, he came under attack from hardliners such as

In September 1945, he resumed education at the Yaroslavl Pedagogical Institute [ru] to study history. On September 8, 1945, he married Nina Ivanovna Smirnova. He graduated the same year and went to Moscow to attend the Higher Party School. In November 1946, he was appointed the instructor of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation in Yaroslavl, a post he held for a year and a half. Shortly after this, he had his first doubts about the regime, when he was shocked to see train after train carrying Soviet ex-prisoners-of-war being sent to labour camps. At the Vspolye train station, he saw weeping women and was dismayed at how they were treated. This memory troubled him deeply and never left him.

In March 1953, shortly after Stalin's death, he was assigned to the party's Central Committee as an instructor in the department of schools. On 25 February 1956,

Beginning in 1958, he was chosen as a exchange student at Columbia University in the United States for one year, as part of the Fulbright Programme.^[4] Of the seventeen Soviet students, fourteen were selected by the KGB. Yakovlev and three others, including Oleg Kalugin, went to Columbia. All other students besides Yakovlev were members of the KGB. He intensively studied the English language, Roosevelt and the New Deal, drawing connections between the United States at that time and the Soviet Union. At the end, in May 1959, the Soviet visitors were taken on a thirty-day tour of the United States, during which he stayed with families from Vermont, Chicago and Iowa. However, his year in America did little to assuage his anti-Americanism because of the greed, racism, and other things that he witnessed. Yakovlev returned to the Central Committee to work on ideology and propaganda, and published several anti-American books. He defended a dissertation dealing with the historiography of US foreign policy, and received the degree of kandidat nauk, the equivalent of a doctorate, in July 1960.

Early political career and exile

In July 1965, he was appointed the first deputy head of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU by Leonid Brezhnev. In August 1968, Yakovlev was sent to Prague as the representative of Central Committee, and witnessed the entry of tanks into the city. He later spoke out against removing Alexander Dubček. That same year, he was placed in command of a group charged with drafting a new constitution.^[5] Yakovlev served as editor of several party publications and rose to the key position of head of the CPSU's Department of Ideology and Propaganda from 1969 to 1973. In January 1970, he visited the United States again, meeting then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan, diplomat Henry Kissinger, and actress Jane Fonda, who warned him that Moscow "did not appreciate the full danger of American militarism". This trip, again, failed to change his unfavourable impression of the United States.

Exile to Canada

In 1972, he took a bold stand by publishing the article entitled "Against Antihistoricism"^[6] in Literaturnaya Gazeta, critical of Russian nationalism, and nationalism in the Soviet Union in general. As a result, he was removed from his position. Given the choice of a diplomatic post as a form of exile, he chose to be the ambassador to Canada, remaining at that post for a decade.^[4] He arrived in Canada in July 1973. During this time, he and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau became close friends. Trudeau's second son, Alexandre Trudeau, was named after Yakovlev.^[7]

From 16 to 23 May 1983, Yakovlev accompanied Mikhail Gorbachev, who at the time was the Soviet official in charge of agriculture, on his tour of Canada. The purpose of the visit was to tour Canadian farms and agricultural institutions, in the hopes of taking lessons that could be applied in the Soviet Union. However, the two also renewed their earlier friendship and, tentatively at first, began to discuss the prospect of liberalisation in the Soviet Union.

In an interview years later, Yakovlev recalled:

At first we kind of sniffed around each other and our conversations didn't touch on serious issues. And then, verily, history plays tricks on one, we had a lot of time together as guests of then Liberal Minister of Agriculture

SS-20 missiles that were being stationed in Europe and a lot of other things. And he did the same thing. We were completely frank. He frankly talked about the problems in the internal situation in Russia. He was saying that under these conditions, the conditions of dictatorship and absence of freedom, the country would simply perish. So it was at that time, during our three-hour conversation, almost as if our heads were knocked together, that we poured it all out and during that three-hour conversation we actually came to agreement on all our main points.^[8]

Two weeks after the visit, as a result of Gorbachev's interventions, Yakovlev was recalled from Canada by Yuri Andropov and became Director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in Moscow on 16 August 1983; he was succeeded by his friend Yevgeny Primakov (himself later Prime Minister of Russia) in 1985. Although he was impressed with Canada's free, competitive economy—especially in agriculture, a weak part of the Soviet economy—and the benefits of rule of law, Yakovlev published a booklet called Poor Santa Claus, or the Police Eye of Democracy allegedly exposing Canadian totalitarian practices under the pseudonym N. Agashin. It claimed, among other things, that capitalism created "its sanitary serve - a system of repression, intimidation and terror", that the Canadian government "brainwashed its citizens", that the United States "tyrannised its neighbour", and that Canada was a totalitarian police state.

Perestroika

When Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, Yakovlev became a senior advisor, helping to shape Soviet foreign policy by advocating Soviet non-intervention in Eastern Europe, and accompanying Gorbachev on his five summit meetings with President of the United States Ronald Reagan. In the summer of 1985, Yakovlev became head of the propaganda department of the CPSU Central Committee. Domestically, he argued in favour of the reform programmes that became known as glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) and played a key role in executing those policies.

After the

Social Democracy

- at Lenin, and then – with liberalism and "moral socialism" - at revolutionarism in general... The Soviet totalitarian regime could be destroyed only through glasnost and totalitarian party discipline, while hiding behind the interests of improving socialism. [...] Looking back, I can proudly say that a clever, but very simple tactic - the mechanisms of totalitarianism against the system of totalitarianism – has worked.

Black Book of Communism

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