Alexander Yakovlev (Russian politician)


Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev was a Soviet politician and historian. During the 1980s he was a member of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was called the "godfather of glasnost" as he is considered to be the intellectual force behind Mikhail Gorbachev's reform program of glasnost and perestroika.
Yakovlev was the first Soviet politician to acknowledge the existence of the secret protocols of the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact with Nazi Germany.

Early career

As the first child of five, Yakovlev was born to a peasant family in a tiny village Korolevo on the Volga River near Yaroslavl. He had four sisters, two of whom died in infancy. His father Nikolai Alekseevich only attended school for four years and his mother, a nursemaid, Agafiia Mikhailovna three months. Yakovlev was sickly in childhood and suffered from scrofula. His father served in the Red Cavalry during the Civil War and was fully committed to Communist regime. He became the first chairman of local collective farm. Their house was set ablaze while he was seven and the family move to Krasnye Tkachi.
Yakovlev graduated from secondary school days before Germans invaded Soviet union. He was drafted in the Red Army in November 1941, after brief training, was promoted lieutenant in a rifle platoon during World War II. He served as a platoon commander in Volkhov Front. On August 6, 1942, he was leading 30 Chuvash peasants and was ordered to charge Germans positions in Vinyagolovo near Leningrad. He was badly wounded, and became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1944. Then he regarded Communist Party as "life's truth" and affirmed he was one-hundred percent loyal and faithful to Soviet Union while he was an ardent admirer of Stalin. He was hospitalized until March 1943, during which he was almost amputated but saved at last moment.
In September 1945, he resumed education in 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 he had his first doubt about the regime when he was shocked to see train after train carrying ex-Soviet prisoners of war sent to labor 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.
He was assigned to the party's Central Committee as an instructor in the department of schools in March 1953 shortly after Stalin's death. In 1956, Khrushchev's Secret Speech stood as the most traumatic event in Yakovlev's early Moscow life. He listened to the speaker from the balcony in the Large Kremlin Palace on February 25, 1956. After the 20th Party Congress, Yakovlev lost his previous enthusiasm for Communism and led a double life. He wanted to turn to the original sources - Marx, Engels, Lenin, German philosophers, French socialists and British economists. He asked to leave the Central Committee to enroll in the Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee. Twice refused, he was allowed to study there for two years and became aware of the hollowness and impracticability of Marxism–Leninism, its inhumanity and prognostic fraud, which also healed his wounds inflicted by the 20th Party Congress. He began to agree with Khrushchev.
Beginning in 1958, he was chosen as a Fulbright exchange student at Columbia University in the United States for one year. Of the seventeen Soviet students, fourteen were selected by KGB. Yakovlev and three others, all KGB personnel, including Oleg Kalugin, went to Columbia. He intensively studied English language, Roosevelt and the New Deal, drawing relevance between then US and USSR. At the end in May 1959, the Soviet visitors were taken on a thirty-day tour of the US, during which he stayed with US family from Vermont, Chicago, Iowa. Since then, he began to view perestroika as a USSR-version of New Deal to save Communism, as Roosevelt had save capitalism. However, his year in America did little to assuage his anti-Americanism because of the mammonism, racism and etc.
Yakovlev returned to the Central Committee to work on ideology and propaganda, published several anti-American books. He defended a dissertation dealing with historiography of US foreign policy and received the degree of kandidat nauk, the equivalent of doctorate in July 1960. In July 1965, he was appointed the first deputy head of Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU by Brezhnev. In August 1968, Yakovlev was sent to Prague as the representative of CPSU Central Committee, witnessed the entry of tanks into Prague. He later spoke out against removing Dubcek. Also in 1968, he was placed in command of a group drafting the new constitution. 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 US again and met Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, and Jane Fonda, who warned him that Moscow "did not appreciate the full danger of American militarism". The trip did not change his unfavorable impression with US.
In 1972 he took a bold stand by publishing the article entitled "Against Antihistoricism" 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 post as exile, he chose to be the ambassador to Canada, remaining at that post for a decade. 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 given the Russian nickname "Sacha" after Yakovlev's.
From May 16 to 23, 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 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 Eugene Whelan in Canada who, himself, was too late for the reception because he was stuck with some striking farmers somewhere. So we took a long walk on that Minister's farm and, as it often happens, both of us suddenly were just kind of flooded and let go. I somehow, for some reason, threw caution to the wind and started telling him about what I considered to be utter stupidities in the area of foreign affairs, especially about those 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.

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 USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow on August 16, 1983. Although impressed with Canada's free, competitive economy, especially in agriculture, the weakest part for USSR, 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 described how capitalism created "its sanitary serve - a system of repression, intimidation and terror", how it "brainwashed its citizens", how the United States "tyrannized its neighbor" Canada was really a totalitarian police state with a democratic façade.

Perestroika and its aftermath

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 programs that became known as glasnost and perestroika and played a key role in executing those policies.
In 1987, the Russian nationalist organization Pamyat sent a letter entitled "Stop Yakovlev!" to the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, labelling Yakovlev as the main instigator of a course of action that would lead to the 'capitulation before the imperialists'.
For decades, it was the official policy of the Soviet Union to deny the existence of the secret protocol to the Nazi–Soviet Pact. At the behest of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yakovlev headed a commission investigating the existence of such a protocol. In December 1989 Yakovlev concluded that the protocol had existed and revealed his findings to the Soviet Parliament. As a result, the first multi-party elected Congress of Soviets since 1918 "passed the declaration admitting the existence of the secret protocols, condemning and denouncing them".
He was promoted to the Politburo in 1987, but by 1990 he had become the focus of attacks by hardliner communists in the party opposed to liberalisation. At the 28th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in July 1990, a cynical Alexander Lebed caused uproar when he asked Yakovlev: "Alexander Nikolaevich... How many faces have you got?" An embarrassed Yakovlev consulted his colleagues and continued on with the proceedings, but resigned from the Politburo the day after the congress concluded. As the communists opposed to liberalization gained strength, his position became more tenuous; fiercely attacked by his former protégé Gennady Zyuganov in May 1991, he resigned from the Party two days before the August Coup in 1991. During the coup Yakovlev joined the democratic opposition against it. Following the failed coup attempt, Yakovlev blamed Gorbachev for having been naïve in bringing the plotters into his inner circle saying Gorbachev was "guilty of forming a team of traitors. Why did he surround himself with people capable of treason?"
In his book Inside the Stalin Archives, Jonathan Brent tells that in 1991, when there were Lithuanian crowds demonstrating for independence from the Soviet Union, Gorbachev consulted Yakovlev about the wisdom of an armed repression against them. Gorbachev asked, "Should we shoot?" Yakovlev answered that, "if a single Soviet soldier fired a single bullet on the unarmed crowds, Soviet power would be over." There were bullets, however, and the USSR collapsed seven months later.
In the years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yakovlev wrote and lectured extensively on history, politics and economics. He acted as the leader of the Russian Party of Social Democracy, which in the mid-1990s fused into United Democrats. In 2002, acting as head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, he was present at the announcement of the release of a CD detailing names and short biographies of the victims of Soviet purges. In his later life, he founded and led the International Democracy Foundation. He advocated taking responsibility for the past crimes of communism and was critical of President Vladimir Putin's restrictions on democracy.
In 2000, he publicly alleged that Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who became famous for his role in saving thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust, was shot and killed in Soviet secret police headquarters in 1947. He was called "God's commie" in a 2002 article for investigating crimes of the Soviet state.

Honours and awards