Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev

Alexander Yakovlev was born in 1923 in a village near Yaroslavl. At eighteen he went to the front as a marine infantry platoon leader and was gravely wounded on the Leningrad front in 1943, limping for the rest of his life. Building a postwar career in the party's propaganda apparatus, he spent a year at Columbia University in 1958 in the first Soviet-American student exchange. That year in the heart of the adversary later served conservatives as proof he was an American agent; to him it gave a measure of the outside world.

In 1972, as acting deputy head of the propaganda department, he published a long article, Against Anti-Historicism, frontally attacking the rise of Russian nationalism and chauvinism. It displeased the Brezhnev leadership, and he was exiled, in effect, as ambassador to Canada. The exile lasted ten years.

In May 1983 Politburo member Gorbachev, visiting Canada to inspect agriculture, walked with ambassador Yakovlev between Alberta farms, and the two spoke without reserve; both later recalled it as the moment they said everything. That year Yakovlev returned to Moscow after a decade, as director of IMEMO, and with Gorbachev's accession re-entered the heart of the apparatus.

In 1985 Yakovlev became head of the propaganda department, in 1986 a Central Committee secretary, in 1987 a full Politburo member: past sixty, he rose to the party's summit in two years, a speed that shows how much Gorbachev needed him. Through the appointment of editors he built the strongholds of glasnost, polished the documents of the New Thinking, and led the commission rehabilitating victims of the Stalin-era repressions.

Within the Politburo he stood opposite Ligachev: against the socialism of discipline, a socialism of freedom. In the Nina Andreyeva affair of 1988 it was he who wrote the Pravda rebuttal that held the reform line. To conservatives he was the demon of perestroika, and Kryuchkov's KGB went so far as to draft reports casting him as a man under Western intelligence influence.

In his last years he became that rare former Politburo member who declared he had parted with Marxism itself. Whether his journey was an evolution of conviction or an apostasy is still argued; that the openness of 1985 to 1988 was institutionalised through his hands is not.

Alexander Yakovlev belonged to the war generation. A marine brigade platoon commander at eighteen in 1941, he was gravely wounded on the Volkhov front and limped for the rest of his life. He built a postwar career in the party's propaganda apparatus, but a 1972 article criticizing Russian nationalism earned him the conservatives' wrath and effective exile as ambassador to Canada. During ten years of honorable banishment he observed Western society, and in three days of conversation with Gorbachev during the latter's 1983 visit to Canada he found a fellow reformer.

Gorbachev brought him back to Moscow and promoted him at extraordinary speed: head of the party's propaganda department in 1985, Politburo member in 1987. Yakovlev was the working architect of glasnost. He installed reformist editors at Ogonyok and Moscow News, had banned films released, and led the Politburo commission reviewing the rehabilitation of victims of Stalin-era repression. In 1989 he directed the work of officially acknowledging the existence of the secret protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

To conservatives he was the evil spirit of perestroika; to reformers, the father of glasnost. Neither side disputed that few individuals did more to transform the Soviet Union's mental landscape in the late 1980s.

From October 1988 Yakovlev chaired the Politburo commission investigating the repressions of the 1930s and 1940s, and in 1989 he was elected a people's deputy. In December 1989, at the Second Congress of People's Deputies, he delivered the report on the consequences of the 1939 non-aggression treaty and its secret protocols.

From March 1990 to January 1991 he was a member of the USSR Presidential Council. The day after his appointment to that body he submitted a request to leave the Politburo and to give up the duties of CC secretary (he remained a Politburo member until 13 July 1990). At the XXVIII Party Congress in 1990 he declined nomination for the post of general secretary. After the Presidential Council was dissolved he was appointed senior adviser to the president of the USSR.

He resigned the post of senior adviser on 29 July 1991, having parted ways with Gorbachev over the vision of the USSR's future; Yakovlev advocated a confederation. That same month, together with Eduard Shevardnadze, he created the Movement of Democratic Reforms as an alternative to the CPSU.

Records differ on his exit from the party: one account has him expelled from the CPSU on 15 August 1991, while another has him leaving the party himself on 17 August of that year. During the August putsch he supported the Russian government and Boris Yeltsin against the State Emergency Committee. At the end of September 1991 he was appointed state adviser for special assignments and a member of the Political Consultative Council under the USSR president.

English-language accounts add a different timeline: they record that he resigned from the Politburo the day after the XXVIII Congress concluded, that after a fierce attack by his former protege Gennady Zyuganov in May 1991 he resigned from the CPSU two days before the August coup and joined the democratic opposition, and that after the failed coup he blamed Gorbachev for naivety in bringing the plotters into his inner circle.

The Lithuania episode of 1991 sits alongside this turn. When Lithuanian crowds demonstrated for independence and Gorbachev consulted Yakovlev about armed repression, asking "Should we shoot?", Yakovlev answered that if a single Soviet soldier fired a single bullet on the unarmed crowds, Soviet power would be over, as related by Jonathan Brent in Inside the Stalin Archives (2008).

After the Soviet collapse, Yakovlev's intellectual journey ended in a total break with Marxism. In his late writings he defined the Soviet system as criminal and beyond reform, and claimed that he had long worked to undermine it from within by the roundabout tactic of striking at Stalin in order to hit Lenin. Scholars such as Archie Brown treat these retrospective claims with caution: the Yakovlev of the contemporary record looks less like a saboteur than a reform communist who sincerely believed in the democratic renewal of socialism.

The most contested legacy of his last years was ideological; the most valuable was documentary. Under Yeltsin he chaired the commission for the rehabilitation of victims of political repression, and through his International Democracy Foundation he published vast runs of classified party and state documents in the Rossiya XX vek series. That historians today can test Soviet history against documents owes something to him.

He died in Moscow on 18 October 2005. The arc of a young man who shed his blood in war under the banner of socialism and ended as that system's most thorough negator remains a portrait of the depth of disillusionment lived by the perestroika generation.