Alexander Yakovlev

The Man Whose Ideas Delivered Russia from Communism

Richard Pipes

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781609091859
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Biografías políticas

A significant political figure in twentieth-century Russia, Alexander Yakovlev was the intellectual force behind the processes of perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness) that liberated the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from Communist rule between 1989 and 1991. Yet, until now, not a single full-scale biography has been devoted to him.

In his study of the unsung hero, Richard Pipes seeks to rectify this lacuna and give Yakovlev his historical due. Yakovlev's life provides a unique instance of a leading figure in the Soviet government who evolved from a dedicated Communist and Stalinist into an equally ardent foe of everything the Leninist-Stalinist regime stood for. He quit government service in 1991 and lived until 2005, becoming toward the end of his life a classical western liberal who shared none of the traditional Russian values. Pipes's illuminating study consists of two parts: a biography of Yakovlev and Pipes's translation of two important articles by Yakovlev. It will appeal to specialists and students of Soviet and post-Soviet studies, government officials involved with foreign policy, and general readers interested in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union.

Chapter One

Youth*

Yakovlev was born on December 2, 1923, in the small village of Korolevo near Iaroslavl, a provincial town some 150 miles northeast of Moscow. He was the first child of five, the other four being girls, two of whom died in infancy. His father, Nikolai Alekseevich, had four years of school. His mother, Agafiia Mikhailovna, attended school for a mere three months, following which, at the age of eight and a half, she went to work as a nursemaid; she remained illiterate for the rest of her life. Alexander was sickly in childhood, suffering from scrofula, and was not expected to live. He was taught to read at age five by his grandfather, and then attended local schools, the last of which was four kilometers away from his village; he had to walk this distance back and forth daily through a forest.

The family, poor as it was (it had but one cow),1 was fully committed to the Communist regime: despite never joining the party, his father was, according to Yakovlev, one hundred percent loyal.2 For this reason he became the first chairman of the local collective farm.3 Yakovlev’s mother was a staunch admirer of Stalin.4 His father served in the Red Cavalry during the Civil War. Neither his war record nor his work as collective farm chairman protected him from nearly being arrested in the terrible year of 1937, when victims were chosen not because they had done anything wrong but because they were needed to help satisfy purge quotas. As Yakovlev recalled:

It so happened that [father’s] one-time commander of the platoon, Novikov, became military commissar in our Iaroslavl region. He often dropped in on...