Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev (Russian: Александр Николаевич Яковлев) (2 December 1923, Korolyovo, Yaroslavl Oblast – 18 October 2005) was a Soviet politician and historian who was a Soviet governmental official in the 1980s and a member of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The chief of party ideology, the same position as that previously held by Mikhail Suslov, he was called the "godfather of glasnost" as he is considered to be the intellectual force behind Mikhail Gorbachev's reform program of glasnost and perestroika.
Yakovlev was the first Soviet politician to acknowledge the existence of the secret protocols of the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact with Nazi Germany in 1989.
Read more about Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev: Early Career, Perestroika and Its Aftermath, Honours and Awards