Aleksandr Yakovlev

17 (2013), The Barber of Siberia (1998) and Prikazano vzyat zhivym (1984).

In his book Inside the Stalin Archives (2008), 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." Soviet troops intervened militarily in an attempt to oppress the demonstrators, and the USSR collapsed seven months later.

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.

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 (a pro-reform alliance that was later reorganized into Union of Right Forces). 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 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'.

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 (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) and played a key role in executing those policies.

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 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.

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.

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, etc.

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 and Italian 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 convinced that Marxism-Leninism was hollow, impractical, and inhumane, as well as a prognostic fraud. This also healed his wounds inflicted by the 20th Party Congress. He began to agree with Khrushchev.

Aleksandr Yakovlev was born on January 15, 1946 in Moscow, USSR as Aleksandr Anatolevich Yakovlev. He was an actor, known for Legend No.

In September 1945, he resumed education in 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 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.

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 German 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 almost had an amputation, but was saved at last moment.

Yakovlev was the first Soviet politician to acknowledge the existence of the secret protocols of the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact with Nazi Germany.

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Я́ковлев ; 2 December 1923 – 18 October 2005) was a Soviet and Russian 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.