Yakovlev, Alexander 1923–2005

(Alexandr Nikolayevich Yakovlev)

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born December 2, 1923, in Korolyevo, Russia; died October 18, 2005, in Moscow, Russia. Diplomat, government official, and author. A formerly ardent Communist Party member, Yakovlev became a democratizing voice in the USSR and an important ally to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during the age of glasnost. Growing up under Josef Stalin's oppressive rule, he nevertheless became a staunch idealist, especially after his role as a soldier fighting against the Germans at the Battle of Leningrad, where he was severely wounded. After World War II, he joined the Communist Party and earned a history degree from the Academy of Social Sciences. Yakovlev worked as a member of his local Yaroslavl district committee of the Party until 1953, when he was promoted to head of the department of science and culture. He became involved primarily in propaganda and the media and was so trusted by Party officials that in 1958 he was allowed to study for a year at Columbia University. Yakovlev was all the more contemptuous of America after having lived there a year, and was highly critical of U.S. foreign and economic policies. Returning to the USSR, he wrote histories that painted America in an ugly light. During the 1960s, Yakovlev served in several governmental posts, including in the department of propaganda and agitation (agitprop), as head of radio and television from 1964 to 1965, and as first deputy head and then acting head of agitprop from 1965 to 1973. By the early 1970s, however, his attitudes were beginning to change, and in 1972 he went so far as to criticize nationalistic and anti-Semitic policies in his country. As a kind of punishment, he was removed from his propaganda post and made ambassador to Canada, where he remained for the next decade. From 1983 to 1985 he also worked as the director of the Institute for World Economy and International Relations. It was while in Canada that Yakovlev first met the young rising star, Gorbachev. The two became friends, and when Gorbachev was elected general secretary of the Communist Party, Yakovlev was invited to return to the Soviet Union. He was put back in charge of propaganda for a year, and from 1986 to 1991 was a member of the powerful central committee. The 1980s brought many changes to the Soviet Union; with pressur from U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Gorbachev, along with Yakovlev, started to institute new policies that provided greater freedoms to Soviet citizens. These policies became collectively known as glasnost and "perestroika." After a few years of progress, however, Gorbachev started to fear that the shift toward democracy was coming too swiftly and was threatening national stability; Yakovlev, however, took the opposite position and founded the Democratic Reform Movement, leaving the Communist Party altogether in 1991. Gorbachev's hesitance proved to be the wrong move politically; he started to surround himself with hardliners who, in 1991, betrayed him with a coup attempt. Though the coup failed, Gorbachev was removed from office. The Soviet Union by then had already lost influence in Eastern Europe; now the country itself fell apart as former republics sought independence. Yakovlev allied himself with the new president, Boris Yeltsin, and headed the state's television network, Russian Public TV, Ltd., until 1995, when he could no longer tolerate the government's influence in limiting media freedoms. He spent his last years focusing on his writing and working for the Presidential Committee on Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression. Among Yakov-lev's books available in English are Realism as the Land of Perestroika (1990), What We Were Going to Do in the Soviet Union (1991), and Striving for Law in a Lawless Land: Memoirs of a Russian Reformer (1996).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Yakovlev, Alexander, Striving for Law in a Lawless Land: Memoirs of a Russian Reformer, M.E. Sharpe, 1996.

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, October 19, 2005, p. B10.

New York Times, October 19, 2005, p. A20.

Washington Post, October 20, 2005, p. B8.