MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Vladimir Simonov.) Without the major contribution of Alexander Yakovlev to Russia's development, the country may never have reached the present level of democracy and civil society.
A former high-ranking Communist functionary, Yakovlev managed to revise his ideological beliefs and became the mastermind of the Gorbachev perestroika. The moral authority he commanded among Russian democrats was as great as the hatred he inspired in proponents of the Soviet totalitarian regime. Last Tuesday, he was remembered by both camps: he died of a stroke in his Moscow apartment at the age of 81.
At the turn of the 1980s-1990s, Yakovlev was Mikhail Gorbachev's closest ally. As the former Soviet president recalls, they did not always agree and argued a great deal, but the bond that united them was "the common vision of democratic reforms in Russia." It is easy to guess the subject of their disputes: Yakovlev went much further than the president in denouncing the Soviet Communist system. Gorbachev believed and still does that the system needed only to be fine-tuned, to be grafted with sprouts of democracy, freedom and human dignity. Yakovlev, however, had long before come to the conclusion that the Soviet system should be buried totally and for good.
He began to put his plan into practice in the Communist Party's Central Committee, a place that seems highly unsuitable. During World War II, Yakovlev was seriously wounded, transferred to non-combat duties, and made a career as a party functionary. In 1965, he became deputy head of the omnipotent Agitprop, the Central Committee's propaganda department. Later he worked as the acting head of the body, notorious for tough censoring of mass media, for four years.
Paradoxically, in this position Yakovlev managed to achieve the opposite: he tried to loosen the state control of the mass media and to liberate the country from the Soviet ideology.
For Western Sovietologists he was a strange phenomenon that baffled any rational explanation. A liberal and a human rights advocate, he worked in the den of Communist censorship. Committed adherents of the regime viewed him as "an agent of Western influence," hinting that his contacts with foreign special services had been established in 1957-1958, when he studied at Columbia University in the U.S.
In 1972, Yakovlev defiantly moved ahead of time, publishing an extensive article titled "Against Anti-historism" in a popular daily. He lashed out against anti-Semites and Russian nationalists, who were particularly active at the time. His punishment was swift. He was appointed ambassador to Canada, where he spent the following ten years. For a Central Committee member of his rank this was equal to Siberian exile.
Perestroika allowed Mikhail Gorbachev to bring his ally back to Russia. In the 1980s, Yakovlev did a great deal to realize glasnost ideals, such as relative freedom of national mass media from state control and party officials. He became Gorbachev's right hand, his vizier and the mastermind of the launched reforms. Incidentally, Yakovlev was among the first people to warn Gorbachev of the August 1991 putsch.
During the last ten years, Yakovlev headed the commission for rehabilitation of victims of political repressions and worked in archives, publishing high-profile documents on crimes committed by the totalitarian regime. He observed the path Russia had chosen with alarm and bewilderment. "Bureaucrats and apparatchiks have seized power in this country. Stalin's gigantic statue has split into a thousand small dictators," he lamented in an interview with The Financial Times.
The most striking feature of the extraordinary personality of the architect of Russian democracy is that he never tried to pose as a secret dissident, who had regained his sight in the dark of a dictatorship inspired by a vision. His views were transformed gradually and publicly, keeping pace with the country, sincerely and openly. This, I believe, is the secret of his indisputable authority as the national keeper of morals, which he enjoyed all until the end.
