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Soviet reformer broke the chains of ideology

FT.com / World / Europe - Soviet reformer broke the chains of ideology

By Arkady Ostrovsky
Published: October 19 2005 03:00 | Last updated: October 19 2005 03:00

Alexander Yakovlev, one of Russia's most respected statesmen and the ideologist of Mikhail Gorbachev's sweeping reforms of the late 1980s, died in Moscow yesterday at the age of 81.

Yakovlev, a member of the last Soviet Politburo, was one of the authors of glasnost, or openness, and perestroika, the economic and political restructuring of the Soviet Union that led to its collapse.

He was responsible for freeing the Russian media from state control, for the rethinking of foreign policy, and more generally for trying to release the country from Soviet ideology.

For generations of western Sovietologists, Yakovlev was a paradoxical figure: one of the most senior apparatchiks in the Soviet system in charge of propaganda, he was - even before Mr Gorbachev's time - one of the most liberal and accessible Soviet politicians, regularly defied the hard-line rules and ultimately put an end to Communist party ideology.

After the disintegration of the Soviet empire, Yakovlev dedicated himself to documenting and exposing the crimes of Stalinism. A historian by background, he helped make public the secret segments of the 1939 treaty between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany which divided Poland and allowed Stalin to annex three Baltic states. More importantly, he led a commission for the rehabilitation of millions of victims of political repression.

In a country which never formally repented for the crimes against its own citizens, Yakovlev embarked on his own personal and public journey of repentance.

Ethnically Russian, he hated any form of nationalism and anti-Semitism. He was born in 1923 into a peasant family in the heart of Russia near the ancient Russian town of Yaroslavl.

He was one of the "young lieutenants" - a generation of brave and romantic young men who voluntarily joined the Red Army in 1941 to fight the German invasion of the Soviet Union. He was badly wounded in 1942 and decommissioned from the army, and started climbing the political ladder. While working in the propaganda department of the Communist party he managed to distance himself from the show-trials of Soviet dissidents.

In 1972 he published an article attacking hard-line nationalists and was "exiled" to Canada, where he worked as ambassador until 1983. Then Mr Gorbachev, a leading member of the Politburo, brought him back to Moscow. Yakovlev was one ofthe first to warn Mr Gorbachev about a looming hardline coup in August 1991.

In recent years he was depressed by the direction in which Russia was moving. In an interview with the Financial Times two years ago, he said: "Bureaucrats and apparatchiks have seized power in our country. It turns out that the giant statue of Stalin was smashed into thousands of small dictators." He leaves a widow, Nina Ivanovna, a son and a daughter.

Arkady Ostrovsky

October 19, 2005 at 10:40 AM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home