‘Godfather of glasnost’ dies in Moscow
ALEXANDER YAKOVLEV 1923- 2005 Reformer sought to open Russia Gorbachev’s top lieutenant in ’80s
MOSCOW— Alexander Yakovlev, a former Soviet ambassador to Canada and close friend of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau who nicknamed one of his sons after him, died yesterday at age 81.
Yakovlev became known as the “ godfather of glasnost” for spearheading the liberal reforms that triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union. He and Communist party leader Mikhail Gorbachev laid the foundations for perestroika ( restructuring) and glasnost ( openness) during a fateful meeting in an Ontario wheat field in 1983. As Gorbachev’s top lieutenant in the 1980s, Yakovlev went on to promote reforms to end the Communist party’s monopoly on ideology.
Yakovlev died at his home in Moscow after a long illness, Russian state television reported.
“ Yakovlev’s death is a huge loss for all of those who linked their lives with the struggle for freedom and democracy,” Interfax news agency quoted Gorbachev as saying.
In a letter to Yakovlev’s wife, Nina, President Vladimir Putin praised him for doing “ a great deal for the democratic renewal of our country, the development of civil society, and the construction of a state . . . in which the freedom and dignity of the individual are supreme values.” Born in a small village near the Volga River, Yakovlev fought in the Red Army during World War II before becoming a Communist party apparatchik. By the 1960s, he had earned a senior post in the ideology department of the Central Committee. Areformer from his early days, Yakovlev sought ways to open Russia to the West and in 1972 helped organize the CanadaRussia Summit Series, despite a skeptical Politburo that feared the Soviet hockey team would be routed.
Later that year, he went a step too far by publishing an article condemning Russian nationalism and anti- Semitism. He was banished to Canada, where he served as Soviet ambassador from 1973 to 1983.
It was in Canada, Yakovlev wrote in his book Maelstrom of Memory, that he began to profoundly question Soviet ideas.
“ I gave 10 years of my life to Canada,” he wrote. “ I carefully studied Canadian life. It was a simple, pragmatic life, based on common sense. I wondered why we in the Soviet Union refused to give up our dogmas. My instructions from Moscow — to criticize Canada and to promote our propaganda — seemed silly to me.” He developed a close friendship with Trudeau and when the prime minister’s second son, Alexandre, was born in December 1973, the family nicknamed him Sacha, the Russian diminutive of Yakovlev’s name.
In 1983, as his decade- long assignment in Canada was coming to an end, Yakovlev invited Gorbachev, then the Soviet agriculture boss and a rising young star in the Kremlin, for a 10- day tour of Canadian cities and farms.
During a visit to then- agriculture minister Eugene Whelan’s farm near Windsor, the two men asked to be alone and took awalk in a nearby wheat field.
“ We were alone in the field. Security people, both Canadian and ours, were away on the side, and something just snapped,” Yakovlev said in a 2003 interview with the CBC. “(Gorbachev) talked about the situation inside our country, about how everything had to change, and so, choking on our words and having completely lost control of ourselves, we agreed that if things continued as they were, it would end up badly. So this was avery serious discussion. Eighty per cent of it later became real during the perestroika years.”
After Gorbachev became Soviet leader in 1985, he named Yakovlev to a number of key posts and had him draft the first Kremlin policy on perestroika and glasnost. Two years later, Yakovlev became a full member of the Politburo and led the battle for political freedoms against the orthodox wing of the Communist party. He encouraged and protected journalists, writers, artists and filmmakers who challenged decades of Soviet dogma. He also supported political reforms that ended the party’s stranglehold on power and exposed the secrets of the Gulag and the mass executions under dictator Joseph Stalin. Denounced by hardliners, he quit the party in August 1991 and warned of an impending coup. Three days later, the hardliners launched their botched attempt to seize power. By December, the Soviet Union was dead.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Yakovlev became head of a Kremlin commission for rehabilitating victims of Soviet political repression. By the time of his death, the commission had cleared the names of more than 4 million people.
Yakovlev is survived by his wife, daughter, son, seven grandchildren and two greatgrandchildren.