MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Vasily Kononenko.)
Alexander Yakovlev, the architect and ideologist of perestroika and glasnost, has died. In the 1980s, few people believed that glasnost alone would topple the totalitarian regime. Yakovlev was the main support and adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and last Soviet president, in that period of bloody struggle against the orthodox Communists.
Gorbachev said Yakovlev "was committed to the principles of democracy to his dying days."
Alexander Yakovlev was born on December 2, 1923, in the village of Korolevo outside Yaroslavl. During World War II he commanded a platoon on the Volkhov Front and was demobilized after receiving a grave wound. In 1943, he joined the Communist Party and trained as an historian. In 1963, he was offered a job of deputy head of the propaganda department in the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee.
His "dissenting views" became public knowledge in November 1972, when he published an article "Against Anti-Historicism" in Literaturnaya Gazeta. It contained unheard-of criticism of great-power chauvinism, local nationalism and anti-Semitism. The Politburo discussed the article and decided to send Yakovlev into an "honorable exile." He spent ten years in Canada as the Soviet Ambassador, returning to his native country's politics at the request of Gorbachev.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yakovlev abandoned politics and spent his time writing two dozen deep historical-philosophical books that have been translated into many different languages. He also chaired a commission on the rehabilitation of victims of Stalin's purges. In fact, "anti-Stalinism" was his lifework.
Prominent Russian politicians, public figures, writers and human rights champions co-authored a book, Alexander Yakovlev: Freedom Is My Religion, issued for his 80th birthday. All the authors knew Yakovlev well: some when he worked in the party Central Committee and others during the Gorbachev era. Their reminiscences became a book about an honorable man and a moral giant.
Daniil Granin, a writer, said, "Alexander Nikolayevich did many things he can be proud of. The head of the propaganda sector of perestroika and the loving father of glasnost, he will have to carry the cross of glory and hatred in this and the nether worlds, and tolerate the lies of the enemies who have not forgiven him, the enemies whom every truly upright intelligent Russian should be proud to have."
Yakovlev brandished all types of conformists "political punks." His favorite phrase, "Enough of lies," had an explosive potential bigger than all of the anti-Soviet campaigns taken together, and it achieved its goal. It is for this love of the truth that the Soviet establishment hated Yakovlev. During the harsh confrontation between pro-reformists and communist revanchists in the 1990s, former KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov planted information in the Prosecutor General's Office saying that Yakovlev was "an agent of influence" of the West.
"I requested confirmation from the concerned departments of the Foreign Intelligence Service [SVR]; all of them reported that they had no such information. It was extremely important, and not only for Alexander Nikolayevich," says Yevgeny Primakov, a former Russian premier and an ex-SVR chief.
When Yakovlev was asked on a live radio show whether, as "an agent of influence," he had been instructed during his on-site training in the United States (1958-1959) to engineer the collapse of the Soviet Union, he replied good-naturedly, "Can a group of people topple an empire? Empires crumble because they rot from the inside."
In the last years before his death Yakovlev mostly lived at his dacha outside Moscow, collecting materials for a new book and worrying that the rehabilitation of the victims of Stalinist purges was taking so long. When asked why the system was working so slowly, he replied, "Probably because many people do not want it to work fast. The spiritual matrix of the people is predominantly tuned to beautiful lies rather than the bitter truth."
