Early Career
Yakovlev was born to a peasant family in a tiny village (Красные Ткачи) on the Volga near Yaroslavl. He served in the Red Army during World War II, being badly wounded in the Nazi siege of Leningrad, and became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1944. Beginning in 1958, he was an exchange student at Columbia University for one year.
Yakovlev served as editor of several party publications and rose to the key position of head of the CPSU's Department of Ideology and Propaganda from 1969 to 1973. In 1972 he took a bold stand by publishing an article critical of Russian chauvinism and Soviet anti-Semitism. As a result he was removed from his position and appointed as ambassador to Canada remaining at that post for a decade.
During this time, he and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau became close friends. Trudeau's second son, Alexandre Trudeau, was given the Russian nickname "Sacha" after Yakovlev's.
In 1983, Yakovlev accompanied Mikhail Gorbachev, who at the time was the Soviet official in charge of agriculture, on his tour of Canada. The purpose of the visit was to tour Canadian farms and agricultural institutions in the hopes of taking lessons that could be applied in the Soviet Union; however, the two renewed their earlier friendship and, tentatively at first, began to discuss the prospect of liberalisation in the Soviet Union.
In an interview years later, Yakovlev recalled:
At first we kind of sniffed around each other and our conversations didn't touch on serious issues. And then, verily, history plays tricks on one, we had a lot of time together as guests of then Liberal Minister of Agriculture Eugene Whelan in Canada who, himself, was too late for the reception because he was stuck with some striking farmers somewhere. So we took a long walk on that Minister's farm and, as it often happens, both of us suddenly were just kind of flooded and let go. I somehow, for some reason, threw caution to the wind and started telling him about what I considered to be utter stupidities in the area of foreign affairs, especially about those SS-20 missiles that were being stationed in Europe and a lot of other things. And he did the same thing. We were completely frank. He frankly talked about the problems in the internal situation in Russia. He was saying that under these conditions, the conditions of dictatorship and absence of freedom, the country would simply perish. So it was at that time, during our three-hour conversation, almost as if our heads were knocked together, that we poured it all out and during that three-hour conversation we actually came to agreement on all our main points.
Two weeks after the visit, as a result of Gorbachev's interventions, Yakovlev was recalled from Canada by Yuri Andropov and became Director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He was succeeded by his friend Yevgeny Primakov in 1985.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev
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