Alexander Yakovlev’s relationship with Gorbachev was complex and often fractious. When Yakovlev died, Gorbachev did not attend his funeral, although Yakovlev had been by his side at one of the most difficult moments in Gorbachev’s life. Shortly before Gorbachev’s television announcement, Yakovlev had mediated an eight-hour long meeting between Gorbachev and Yeltsin at which power was transferred from the last president of the USSR to the first president of Russia. Yakovlev recalled the resolute step of Boris Yeltsin as he walked down the long Kremlin corridor ‘as if on a parade ground’ (‘It was the walk of a victor’) and the weakness of Gorbachev. When Yakovlev walked into Gorbachev’s office, he found him lying down on a sofa.
‘There were tears in his eyes. “You see, Sasha, that is how it is.” Thus spoke a man, perhaps in the hardest minutes of his life. I tried to console him. But I myself was choking… A feeling that something unfair had happened was suffocating me. A man, who had brought drastic change to the world, who only yesterday ruled the fates of billions of people on earth, today was a helpless victim of the cruelty and capriciousness of history.’3 The irony was that it was Gorbachev and Yakovlev who had set this history in motion.
Next to Alexander Yakovlev at Gorbachev’s dinner table sat his namesake, Yegor Yakovlev. Despite their common last name, the two Yakovlevs rarely got confused with one another. The elder Yakovlev was always referred to as Alexander Nikolaevich; the younger one was always Yegor, rarely with his patronymic and often without adding his surname. When he died, obituaries referred to him as Yegor. This was partly a reflection of his mythological status. He was not just the editor-in-chief of Moskovskie novosti, he was simply ‘the chief editor’. Legends were, and still are, told in Russia about Yegor’s talent for nurturing authors, his oozing of irresistible charm which affected men and women alike, his habit of falling in and out of love, his despotic and dictatorial manner, his sparkle.
The two Yakovlevs were not related but the bond between them was no less real for that. Yegor saw Alexander, ‘Uncle Sasha’, as a patron saint and a father figure who enabled him to stretch the limits of Perestroika and protected him when he crossed them. Although the difference between them in age was only six years, they belonged to different generations, separated by the experience of the Second World War. (Alexander was born in 1923 and fought in the war.) Yet the two Yakovlevs were to die within one month of each other: Yegor on 18 September 2005 and Alexander on 18 October 2005. Gorbachev spoke at Yegor’s funeral with a sincerity unusual for a politician: ‘I counted him among my closest people and friends. One could always rely on him. He was close to me in spirit, in his attitude to life and to people… We remember the role his newspaper, Moskovskie novosti has played… Yegor and everything that he did was a yardstick by which people measured themselves…’ Moskovskie novosti was a newspaper that tested Soviet ideology to destruction.
The Soviet system rested on violence and ideology. The death of Stalin in 1953 put an end to mass terror and repression. Violence, administered by the security services on behalf of the Communist Party, became more sporadic, and was now used mainly against dissidents. Nikita Khrushchev, who seized power after Stalin’s death, shifted the weight of the system from repression to ideology, promising to build communism by 1980. Writers and ideologists were to play a more important role in this than the security services. As Khrushchev told Soviet writers in 1957: ‘Just like a soldier cannot fight without ammunition, the party cannot conduct a war without print. Print is our main ideological weapon and we cannot pass it into unreliable hands. It must be kept in the most reliable, most trustworthy hands which would use this weapon to destroy the enemies of the working class.’4
By 1980 the ideology was completely rigid and lifeless. The economy was barely functioning and the grand utopia of building communism was dead. As Alexander Bovin, a speech writer for Leonid Brezhnev who replaced Khrushchev in 1964, and one of the leading Perestroika-era journalists, wrote: ‘Only the lies – the end product of ideologists – provided the effectiveness of the violence (real or potential) which the system had rested upon.’5 Once the ideology and propaganda started crumbling, the system came down, crushing those who had aimed to reform it. The Soviet collapse was determined not so much by the economic meltdown, a revolutionary uprising in the capital, or a struggle for independence on the periphery of the empire (at least, not directly), but by the dismantling of lies. Without lies, the Soviet Union would have had no legitimacy. The ruling elite no longer saw any reason to defend the system which constrained their personal enrichment and comforts. The paradox was that the dismantling of propaganda was not the result of some spontaneous and accidental process. As Otto Latsis, a prominent economics journalist of the time, a friend of Yegor Yakovlev’s and one of Moskovskie novosti’s regular authors, wrote in his memoirs, it was ‘a meticulously planned suicide’.6
The decisive blow was struck not by the dissidents – although their writing certainly undermined the system – but by the people who were in charge of this ideology and who had access to mass media. While Gorbachev carried the banners of Perestroika, it was Alexander Yakovlev and his team of like-minded journalists and editors, including Yegor and Latsis, who wrote the messages on those banners.
As Yegor himself put it, ‘This was a completely unique period in the history of the Russian, and possibly world, press. What we wrote was aimed at liquidating this state. At the same time all the newspapers were fully subsidized by the state.’7 The question is why did the men who had the most comfortable lives in the Soviet Union, commit this ‘suicide’? Alexander Yakovlev wrote in his memoirs:
I often asked myself: why did you need to do all this? You were a member of the Politburo, a secretary of the Central Committee – you had more power than you knew what to do with. Your portraits were displayed everywhere – people even carried them along the streets and squares during official holidays. What the hell else did you need? But what was eating away at me was something else. For years, I was betraying myself. I had doubts, looking for all sorts of excuses to what was happening around me only to quieten down the grumbling conscience. All of us, and particularly the nomenclatura [the class of Soviet administrators], lived a double, or even a triple, life. Step by step, such amorality became a way of life and was deemed ‘moral’, while hypocrisy became a way of thinking.8
These men were not heretics, rather many of them were faithful followers of the communist religion: they studied its sacred texts, paid tributes to its gods and participated in its rituals. Their Perestroika zeal stemmed not from a lack of faith, but from their desire to purify and cleanse communism of the orthodox bureaucracy. Alexander Yakovlev called Perestroika a reformation. This was not only its literal translation but also its historic meaning. Like the sixteenth-century Protestants in Europe, they rose up against the priests who inserted themselves between God and the people and who, they believed, had corrupted his teaching.
They fought against the corrupt nomenclatura under the slogan ‘more socialism’, holding Lenin’s teaching in their hands. They believed in the ideals of justice and equality and hoped to make the system more humane and moral. Had they wished to do anything other than that they would have most definitely shared the fate of many of the Soviet dissidents who were sidelined, exiled, jailed, or incarcerated in psychiatric wards. Stylistically, the reformers operated within the strict boundaries of Soviet language. Stepping outside the canon, breaking into a different style of writing, was a crime greater than criticizing the system within the Soviet mantra. A literary critic and writer Andrei Sinyavsky, who was tried and sentenced for anti-Soviet propaganda, said that his differences with the Soviet rule were mainly of stylistic nature. For the generation of the communist reformers, their objections to the Soviet system were ethical rather than stylistic.