By 1956, Yakovlev was living in Moscow and working at the Central Committee headquarters. As a young instructor—in fact, the youngest in the building—he received an “observer” invitation to attend the Twentieth Party Congress in the Kremlin. He sat in the balcony and listened to Khrushchev deliver his breakthrough report on Stalin’s personality cult. As Khrushchev described the purges of the Party and military ranks, the delegates sank into a state of shock. The complicit were humiliated, the ignorant stunned. “There was a deathly silence,” Yakovlev recalled. “People did not look at one another. I remember sitting in the balcony and from up there you could hear just one word spoken, the same word, one after the other: ‘Yes.’ You could hear only that: ‘Yes.’ There were no conversations. People went around shaking their heads. What we had heard did not quite penetrate right away. It was very hard, very hard. It was especially hard for those of us who had not become hardened by cynicism, who still had ideals and yet did not know the truth.”
Khrushchev committed a heroic deed at that Twentieth Congress, Yakovlev told me. But the tragedy was that “he never could take the next step toward democratization.… Instinctively, he understood it was necessary to move forward, but he was thigh-deep in the muck of the past and he couldn’t break free. When he grew older in his memoirs he regretted that he had not gone forward. But memoirs do not make up for a man’s life.”
By his early thirties, Yakovlev was the deputy head of the Central Committee’s Department of Science and Culture, and there he began to learn about “that cruel force” the Party apparat. He arrived an ideological romantic, a believer in Leninism and the new thaw. But he found himself inside the most Orwellian world of all, one of whispered threats, hermetic codes of behavior and privilege, black comedy. He was at one meeting at which a department chief accused someone of “Trotskyism” as it related to his supervision of animal husbandry. Yakovlev, too, was subject to the “petty brutalizations” of a life in the apparat. “For example, I once received a prize for a review of a film I never saw,” he said, recalling an incident in the Yaroslavl Party organization. “There came an order from ‘the center’ to publish in all the papers a review of the movie The Battle of Stalingrad. They called the editor and said the review had to be in the next day’s paper. The film hadn’t come to our region and no one had seen it. We called the local film purveyor and it turned out that he had a list of the actors and the plot of the film. I wrote off of that. I knew some of the actors from other films, and I could say how they had ‘profoundly revealed their characters’ or some such. It goes without saying that the review was positive.”
Yakovlev’s career before 1985 was a mix of the academic and the apparatchik. After he won an advanced degree in history and philosophy, the Party thought him reliable enough to send to New York for a year of study at Columbia University. Yakovlev’s classmates in New York remember him as doctrinaire and defensive, but intellectually curious. He traveled around the northeast and midwest and wrote a thesis on the politics of the New Deal, a program that he would later take as a kind of inspiration for perestroika. Yakovlev enjoyed the experience, but he was also haunted for years by the ignorance of Americans about the Soviet Union. For many years to come he would tell people a story about a New Yorker who asked him if all Russians had horns.
As Brezhnev took power, Yakovlev’s work back in Moscow took a curious turn. He was highly valued in the propaganda department of the Party—the department that ran television and the press—but he was increasingly thought of as not quite reliable. In 1966, when the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested, Brezhnev’s “gray cardinal,” Mikhail Suslov, asked Yakovlev to handle the “propaganda side” of the trial. The Sinyavsky and Daniel affair was one of the first major dissident trials, and Yakovlev, repulsed by the incident, found a way to keep his distance. He did not have rebellion in mind. He valued his career and comforts too much for that. But Yakovlev did tell Suslov that the trial should be handled by the some other department. “I said that I was not sufficiently ‘in the know’ to take part,” Yakovlev told me. “I wouldn’t exactly call that bravery of the highest order.” After that and similarly subtle “defenses” of dissidents such as Sakharov and Lev Kopelev, Yakovlev said, “the Brezhnev leadership treated me with the utmost distrust” and refused to make him head of the department instead of acting head.
In the 1970s, Yakovlev even helped protect a young Party leader in southern Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was carrying out experiments by hiring student brigades during harvest time. “He was organizing these brigades and paying them, and this was thought to be ideologically unsound,” Yakovlev said. “He was obviously an impressive man and I did what I could for him.”
As a polemicist for the Central Committee. Yakovlev wrote his share of agitprop monographs and books, wooden diatribes mainly about the American “empire” and “imperial ideology.” He even edited a volume of the Pentagon Papers. These labors were all greatly appreciated by the Central Committee. But Yakovlev ended his career as a Party propagandist by writing a long, and unusually pointed, article directed against Russian nationalism. In November 1972, the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta splashed the article, “Against Anti-Historicism,” across two full pages. Yakovlev lashed out at the hard-line nationalists for making a “cult of the patriarchal peasantry,” for romanticizing the prerevolutionary past. The article was directed especially at writers for the journal Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”), who saw the rise of Western intelligentsia both inside and outside the Party as a grave threat to Russia’s “national spirit.” Yakovlev couched his argument in the ritualistic language of Leninism, attacking the writers for their “extra-class and extra-social approach,” but he also made a veiled defense of “intellectualism,” a term understood as thinking outside the boundaries of official dogma.
Brezhnev and his ideological guard dogs did not like the article at all. Yakovlev knew now for sure that he no longer had a place in the Central Committee apparatus. As if to head off the punishment from above, he invented his own. He asked about diplomatic work, perhaps in an English-speaking country. Within hours, it was done. Yakovlev was sent to Canada, and there he stayed for ten years, an ambassador and an exile.
At the embassy in Ottawa, Yakovlev improved his English and marinated in the books, articles, and pop culture around him. He met regularly with Canadian officials, diplomats, and intellectuals. And he continued to write. “Canada was wonderful for me. It was a way out,” Yakovlev told me. It was in Canada that Yakovlev also forged his relationship with Gorbachev. In May 1983, Gorbachev was a leading member of the Politburo. He came to Canada and traveled with Yakovlev across the country, from Niagara Falls to Calgary, in an old Convair prop plane. They visited farmers and businessmen, but the most important talks they held were with each other. According to both men, they spent hours talking about the disasters awaiting the Soviet Union, the rot at the core of the economic system, the self-crippling lack of openness in the press, the cultural and scientific worlds. “The most important common understanding,” Yakovlev told me, “was the idea that we could not live this way anymore.… We talked about absolutely everything, openly, and it was clear to me that this was a new kind of leader. It was a thrilling experience politically and intellectually.”
Yakovlev wanted to return to Moscow, and Gorbachev had the power to give him his wish. Within a month, Yakovlev became the director of one of the most prestigious and liberal-minded think tanks in Moscow, the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO).
For Western Sovietologists trying to figure out the thinking of the team forming around Gorbachev both before and after he took power in March 1985, Yakovlev was a beguiling figure. Cold warriors took one look at Yakovlev’s book of the early Reagan era, On the Edge of an Abyss, and decided he was a hard-liner, a figure who would do nothing at all to ease Soviet-American relations in the near future. Scholars searching for flexibility in the nascent Gorbachev team found none in Yakovle
v’s opus. On the Edge of an Abyss reads like the sort of tract the Young Spartacus League might have been passing out on college campuses twenty years ago. In a voice of rage inherited from What Is to Be Done? Yakovlev lit into the United States as a smug, soft, and warped country sporting a “messianic ideology” and the urge to police and “dominate the world.” John Wayne, TV evangelists, the “bourgeois press,” and Norman Podhoretz all made him sick. For Yakovlev, the United States was “a miserable sight. A miserable democracy. Unfortunately, many Americans still harbor illusions. They are used to believing that they elect law-givers, benefactors and defenders and are shocked to discover that some of them sold themselves out long ago. This is an indisputable fact. However, the bourgeois propaganda media go out of their way to prove the contrary.… The romanticizing of brutality, approval of violence, the relishing of sex exploits and the portrayal of murder as an ordinary and normal phenomenon are characteristic features of the mass media and culture.… The main hero Americans see everywhere—in the movies, on television, in books, magazines and newspapers—is a gangster, sleuth, or sadist.”
And yet, read in retrospect, On the Edge of an Abyss showed Yakovlev was a consumer of rigorous books and articles about the United States. He read everything from Foreign Affairs and International Security to the memoirs of Henry Kissinger. He also had a better sense of humor than most ideological warriors: “Some say, for example, that of all the superficial roles Reagan played while a film actor, the most successful one was as the sidekick to a chimpanzee named Bonzo. This film has not been forgotten by the public.
Demonstrators in Toronto, Canada, who came out to protest Reagan’s militarist policies, carried placards admonishing Americans for having chosen the wrong chimpanzee.”
Years later, when I asked him about his pre-perestroika books, Yakovlev said that they, like their author, were “prisoners of the time.” “Had I not been in the U.S.A. and Canada, I would never have written such books about America,” he said. “But being an impulsive man, when I read newspapers and books criticizing my country, well, this hurt me deeply. For example, I know that I am crippled. But when every day people tell me, ‘You are crippled, you are crippled,’ I get furious! And then I answer back: ‘You are the cripple! You yourself are the fool!’ ”
From the moment Gorbachev took power, Yakovlev was an essential, if not lead, player in every progressive idea, policy, or gesture coming from the Kremlin. Yakovlev was a peculiar animal in the Communist Party leadership. Unlike most of the men in the Politburo, he never ran a republic or a region or even an industrial plant; he was never at the head of one of the major institutions like the army or the KGB. “The truth was he didn’t know anything about ordinary life or practical politics,” Yegor Ligachev, Yakovlev’s nemesis in the Politburo, told me.
Yakovlev was simply the man at the leader’s side, the homely intellectual with twitchy brows and goggly glasses whispering into the ear of the general secretary. “Seneca to Gorbachev’s Nero,” a Russian friend said. “Or maybe Aristotle to Alexander the Great?” In any case, it turned out that the obligatory language and fury of On the Edge of an Abyss masked a unique intelligence and a powerful urge to remake the Soviet Union. Yakovlev explored the New Deal, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the early socialists, and far less exalted texts for answers. One afternoon, Vitaly Korotich came to the Kremlin to see Yakovlev about an issue of Ogonyok and was amused to discover that the Communist Party’s chief ideologist had his team of aides spend the afternoon “studying” a video of Raiders of the Lost Ark—presumably to understand the peculiarities of American media and self-image. It is not known whether Yakovlev’s antipathy toward John Wayne extended to the more politically correct adventures of Harrison Ford.
Between 1985 and 1990, Yakovlev’s accomplishments were legion. He helped draft the foreign-policy principles of “the new thinking.” Because it dispensed with the classic Leninist approach of a class-based approach to foreign affairs, “the new thinking” gave an ideological rationale for everything from the withdrawal from Afghanistan to the rapprochement with the United States to the policy of noninterference in Eastern Europe.
Yakovlev engineered the cultural revolution known as glasnost by using his power to appoint liberal editors to publications like Ogonyok and Moscow News. Republican leaders from Armenia to the Baltic states found in Yakovlev a sympathetic ear. At one Politburo meeting in 1988, the KGB chief, Viktor Chebrikov, said that the Baltic national fronts were conspiring to create a counterrevolution, while Yakovlev, just returned from the region, said that there was no threat, “only the manifestations of perestroika and democratization.” As the Politburo’s house historian, he headed the commissions which rehabilitated political exiles and prisoners, investigated the Kirov murder of 1934, and “discovered” the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
As an ideologist, Yakovlev’s predecessors had been men like Mikhail Suslov, dogmatists, enforcers of the faith. Yakovlev was charged with changing that faith. He and Gorbachev began with the idea of “cleansing” socialism and the Party, but they had precious little idea of how they would do it and where it would all lead. The truth is that Yakovlev, Gorbachev, and Shevardnadze—the lead reformers in the Politburo after Yeltsin resigned in 1987—were flying almost blind, and against a terrific conservative headwind, from the start.
“Speaking generally,” Yakovlev said, “our baseline principle was that some things could be improved: more democracy, elections, more in the newspapers—limited, but slightly more open—the management system should be improved, centralization should be less strict, power should be redistributed somewhat, maybe the functions of the Party and the government should be divided. But you can find all of these democratic axioms since 1917, even under Stalin. ‘Socialist democracy’ was talked about as an ideal even then. But speeches are speeches. In 1985, for the first time, we started implementing things so that our words were matched by deeds. But as soon as these words became reality, a logic of development began to develop, and that dictated the next steps. Perestroika acquired its own logic of development, which dictated what to do. This logic of development led us to the ‘conclusion’ that the concept of improvement will not do us any good. One can fix up a car, add some oil, tighten some bolts, and you can drive on. But with a social organism you cannot always do this. It is not enough. It turned out that everything had to be made over.
“The ideological disputes began right away, in 1985. We clashed openly on questions of glasnost. The reformist wing had their own understanding of perestroika from the start. The conservative wing thought only that something needed to be changed. They thought we had to change a little bit, but always relying on the Party apparat. It was then that the tributes to the conservative spirit appeared: state factory inspections, the anti-alcohol campaign. They were all administrative methods and had nothing to do with a real economy. For example, we tried that—what did we call it?—khozrashchet … regional, or local, cost-accounting … whatever! It was rubbish!
“After losing two and a half years we began searching for new types of society, radical restructuring on entirely new principles, and we realized that it was a more formidable task than we had anticipated.… It was not the Party, it had nothing to do with the concept of perestroika. It was a limited group of people who started that.”
By 1989, Ligachev and the orthodox wing of the Communist Party came to blame Yakovlev, Gorbachev, and Shevardnadze for radicalizing perestroika to the point of creating a “bourgeois” state, for abandoning the “class approach” to politics, for failing to provide a blueprint for the future. “Some of our conservatives now say that a group of adventurists began to restructure things without a concept,” Yakovlev replied. “But imagine what would have happened if we’d just gone into an office and created an entire scheme. Marx did that and look what it led to! One should take things from life, and adjust them every day. Our whole trouble is that we are inert, we think in dogmas. Even if reality tells us to c
hange things, we always check first in a book.
“Let’s imagine if Ligachev had come to power. Would he have started perestroika? Yes. But it would have been of the Andropov sort: restore law and order in the economy, but only with administrative methods. But he would have done it. The result might even have been better. There might have been better conditions, more bread, more grain. But the old system of fear would have remained, the same lack of democracy and antihuman relations.”
In the first years of perestroika, Yakovlev was careful about his terminology. As a political loyalist, he did not want to go too far beyond Gorbachev’s own public expressions. But still, there were times when Yakovlev played the role of stalking horse and outraged the Party apparat. “I was under constant attack beginning with those first careful speeches,” he said. “It was enough for me just to mention the word ‘market’ [in 1988] and there was an attack. Now everyone talks about the market. But back then you had to put your words in a special sort of wrapping paper.”
Yakovlev’s most radical proposal in the early days of power was to dismantle the one-party system. In his secret memo to Gorbachev dated December 1985, Yakovlev suggested as a first step toward the creation of a democratic, multiparty system that the Communist Party be divided into progressives and conservatives. Such a split would acknowledge the obvious: the Party was unified by nothing but its pretenses and camouflage. Yakovlev hoped that such a move would either eliminate or silence the most hidebound elements in the Party. In the time-honored Russian tradition, it would show who was who. But Gorbachev knew the Party at least as well as Yakovlev, and he rejected the idea as out of the question, too dangerous. We could lose everything, he told Yakovlev. You’ll see, he said. The Party can be reformed. But slowly.
By July 1989, the Party was proving unchangeable. The leading reformers still in the Party talked about quitting; hundreds of thousands of members did just that. Komsomol chapters were closing or dying out. Yakovlev, for his part, was under constant attack in Pravda, Sovetskaya Rossiya, and the rest of the Party press. So he finally decided that it was time to dispense with the wrapping paper. It was time to deal with the Party’s dismal history and its dubious future. Yakovlev chose an extraordinary occasion for his “coming out”: a July 1989 speech given in honor of the bicentennial of the French Revolution.
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