He was born in 1924 into a peasant family in a village near the ancient city of Yaroslavl’. In his appearance and in the broad vowels of his Volga-region accent, he retained the features of the Russian peasantry – its wiliness, dignity and respect for toil. Six years older than Gorbachev, he belonged to a different generation; he was already six when Stalin’s collectivization began. He remembered the arrest of a village groom for harming socialist property (he had tied up horses too tightly at night) and of his school teacher for displaying a disrespectful attitude to the party leaders (in fact, it was the opposite: the teacher had torn a photograph of Stalin out of a newspaper that was to be used for toilet paper and out of respect pinned it to the wall in an outhouse).
Yakovlev’s own father nearly disappeared into Stalin’s grinder but was saved by a man called Novikov, with whom he had served in the Red Army and who by chance was appointed the village’s district military commissar.
Yakovlev finished school in the spring of 1941, a few weeks before Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and was conscripted on 6 August. An eighteen-year-old lieutenant in the Baltic Marines 6th Brigade, he led an attack on a battlefield outside Leningrad. He remembered the bodies of young soldiers left in the frozen snow-covered swamps and resurfacing in the thaw. ‘They were dead but did not know this.’56 He nearly ended up as one such body himself with three bullets in the leg and one near the heart. Four of his comrades carried him from the field – three of them were shot dead. Yakovlev was taken by horse-drawn cart – the broken bones of his legs rubbing against each other and rendering him unconscious – into a field hospital, then by plane to another one. A doctor from Armenia saved his leg, though Yakovlev had a limp to the end of his life.
After the war, Yakovlev studied history and steadily climbed the career ladder as a party official. He spent a year at Columbia University in 1959 as one of the first Fulbright scholars sent by the Soviet Union to America to study American propaganda. He was supervised by David Truman, Columbia’s political science professor, and attended lectures by George Kennan, the master of Cold War diplomacy. One impression Yakovlev brought back was the gap between propaganda and real life – be it Russian or American. His personal experience and his own mind proved stronger than the Soviet ideology that he was put in charge of; he never lost his peasant sensibility, just as he never lost his vowel-singing accent.
The fact that Yakovlev’s first serious political battle was over Tvardovsky and Novy Mir was not accidental. In many ways, Yakovlev was Tvardovsky’s character. A positive variant of a national type if ever there was one, a man who had nearly lost his life in the war, he hated nationalism and anti-Semitism with every fibre of his soul. The Stalinists recognized Yakovlev’s article in 1972 for what it was – a declaration of war. Sofronov, the editor of Ogonyok, got Mikhail Sholokhov, a celebrated Soviet writer and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, to write a letter to the Central Committee attacking Yakovlev.
Brezhnev did not like the article either – not because he shared the ideas of the opposite camp, but because he resented confrontation within the party. He was neither a nationalist nor a liberal and so he decided to rid himself of both groups in order to rule in peace. Shelepin’s henchmen, who constituted the informal ‘Russian Party’ and attacked Tvardovsky, lost their administrative positions, but so did Yakovlev who was dispatched overseas, as ambassador to Canada.
Yakovlev picked Canada himself and this choice was not, perhaps, completely accidental, even if it was not fully conscious either. Canada was where Russian Dukhobors or ‘Spirit Wrestlers’ – a religious pacifist sect – had settled at the turn of the twentieth century with Tolstoy’s help. While in Canada, Yakovlev went to stay in one of their settlements. ‘Incredible people – hardworking, open, caring,’ Yakovlev recalled.57 He was struck by the fact that Russian people who had settled on the other side of the globe at the end of the previous century had kept the language and traditions of the country they had left behind. It would be fanciful to suggest that Yakovlev was impregnated with their ideas, but he could hardly help drawing parallels between them and his own plight as someone who had split off from the main church.
In his concise memoirs, several pages are dedicated to the Dukhobors’ ethics, their dignity, their aspiration towards perfection, their belief in the superiority of human beings, their humility. This passage in his memoirs is immediately followed by one in which Yakovlev describes the sense of deep, burning shame he felt for Soviet policy which he had to represent and defend. ‘Almost every year I had to explain about those who had been thrown out of the country for “anti-Soviet” propaganda. And lowering my eyes I had to lie or change the subject. It was shameful to explain the reasons for our invasion of Afghanistan and to read and distribute the material sent from Moscow about Solzhenitsyn, Shcharansky, Rostropovich…’58
The same year as Alexander Yakovlev was ‘exiled’ to Canada, Yegor Yakovlev and Latsis were packed off to Prague to a journal called Problemy mira i sotsializma (Problems of Peace and Socialism) – an heir to the Third International, also known as Comintern, which was an international communist organization that existed from 1919 until 1943. The most important result of the years spent in comfortable exile was that it offered time for thinking.
Time for Reflection
‘Dear compatriots, dear comrades, friends! The last minutes of 1970 are passing by. The Soviet people see it off with a feeling of completed duty and in good mood… It was an unforgettable year of new victories and achievement… Everywhere on Soviet land – from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean, from the Northern Sea to the Caucasus Mountains, the passing year has left a kind mark.’ With this speech, Leonid Brezhnev, the general secretary of the Communist Party, the Soviet commander-in-chief, greeted the country on New Year’s Eve 1970.
His speech ushered in a decade of ‘developed socialism’, otherwise known as zastoi (stagnation), a period in which the volume of empty words and slogans about economic achievements was matched only by the number of jokes about them. As one of the jokes went, it was a period when ‘the difficulty of growth turned into the growth of difficulties’. Every New Year’s Eve from 1970 until 1982, when Brezhnev died, Soviet citizens would hear him address the nation, hailing its achievements and victories. Void of meaning, these addresses were merely a prompt for popping the corks from bottles of oxymoronic ‘Soviet Champagne’. With time, the words got more slurred and the meat in Russian salads got more sparse.
Political seasons moved against the laws of nature. Khrushchev’s Thaw was followed not by spring but by winter. News and current affairs were replaced by the celebration of historic jubilees. The frosts were not nearly as severe as they had been, but they were substantial enough to grip the surface. The people and words which had populated the pages of Novy Mir were forced underground, into samizdat.
The regime, guarded by Mikhail Suslov, the ideology secretary, preserved a bleakly cynical system of reward and punishment: reward, often in the form of foreign trips; punishment in the form of the withdrawal of publication or performance rights. For those who strayed far – often defined as trafficking with the West in the form of interviews with foreign journalists or publication there – there was exile or, in the worst cases, a psychiatric ward or jail. The strayers included Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavsky, Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Bukovsky. The stayers, including Yegor Yakovlev, Latsis and Bovin, worked the system – stretching it here, being cramped by it there.