The Soviet Ambassador

Canadian journalist Christopher Shulgan’s biography, The Soviet Ambassador: The Making of the Radical Behind Perestroika (2008), narrates the career of Soviet politician Alexander Yakovlev, who played a crucial role in Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost reforms to the Soviet Union. Shulgan focuses on Yakovlev’s stint as the Soviet Ambassador to Canada, where he became friends with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and formulated the ideas that would shape his future role in Soviet politics.

Yakovlev was born in 1923, in the northwestern Yaroslav region. His parents, raised in pre-Revolution Russia, were illiterate agricultural workers, but Yakovlev, benefiting from the Soviet system’s schooling, excelled academically.

When Yakovlev was 17, World War II broke out, and he was drafted. Less than a year later, he was ordered to charge a German defensive position. Seriously wounded in the leg, he was sent home. Upon his release from the hospital, he joined the Communist Party and applied to study history at the Yaroslav Pedagogical Institute.



A fervent communist and an admirer of Stalin, Yakovlev was appointed upon graduation to the local Department of Propaganda. From there, he began a steady rise through the party’s ranks, eventually earning an assignment to the Central Committee.

However, during this time, Yakovlev witnessed things that troubled him, including trainloads of men being sent to labor camps. He eventually asked to be allowed to leave the Central Committee to pursue further academic study. He was permitted two years’ research, during which time he became thoroughly disillusioned with Marxism-Leninism, although he remained devoutly socialist.

In 1958, Yakovlev was chosen as a Fulbright exchange student and spent a year in New York. Appalled by American consumerism and racism, the visit confirmed his anti-capitalist beliefs.



Returning to the Central Committee, Yakovlev was appointed to deputy head of the Propaganda Department in 1965. In this role, Yakovlev provided media cover for repressive maneuvers. His department strategized the staged trial of the dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, both of whom were sent to the Gulag. He was present in Prague as the Committee’s representative during the Soviet invasion. Shulgan portrays Yakolev as divided on these issues, but loyal to socialism and willing to sacrifice his personal feelings to the good of the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, in 1972, Yakovlev did take a public stand, when he published an article criticizing Russian nationalism within the Soviet establishment. General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and his advisers took exception to the article and decided to exile the troublemaker. Yakovlev was offered his choice of diplomatic postings, and he opted for Canada, arriving in the summer of 1973.

Yakovlev already had doubts about the Soviet system, and in Canada, he found an alternative that seemed more palatable than the American system which had appalled him as an exchange student. He began seriously to study the Canadian electoral and justice systems, and the workings of the market economy.



In September 1973, Yakovlev met the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. The two men hit it off. Both were intellectually curious and open to the possibility of hybrid socialist-capitalist systems. Both were eager to learn about the political system of the other. Yakovlev had brought his granddaughter Natasha, who was a similar age to Trudeau’s son. Soon Yakovlev and Trudeau were meeting for informal chats and seeking each other out at diplomatic events.

Some Canadian officials were concerned that the Soviet ambassador might be brainwashing their leader, but in fact, both men were learning, and it was Yakovlev whose views shifted.

Shulgan argues that it was in Canada that Yakovlev came to the conclusion that only radical economic reform could save the Soviet Union. Not only that, he also set in motion the strategy which would bring that reform about. In the early 1980s, Yakovlev began to hear about the ambitious and talented agricultural secretary of the Central Committee, Mikhail Gorbachev. He asked Trudeau’s agriculture minister Eugene Whelan to invite Gorbachev to Canada.



The trip took place in 1983. At a dinner hosted by Whelan at his Ontario home, Yakovlev took Gorbachev aside. The two men went outside, and as they walked through the cornfields, Yakovlev unfolded his vision for the reforms that would become glasnost. He used the Canadian system as an example of what could be achieved.

Just three days later, Yakovlev learned that he was to be recalled to the Soviet Union to take up a prestigious position. Trudeau threw him a farewell dinner.

Shulgan argues that Yakovlev played a role in every democratic reform instituted by Gorbachev and attempted to prevent Gorbachev from taking repressive measures. In 1988, Yakovlev was appointed to chair the Commission to Rehabilitate Victims of Political Repression. He was instrumental in exposing the crimes committed under Lenin and Stalin, although he stopped short of investigating the oppressive activities of their successors, perhaps, in part, because he himself was implicated in many of them.



Yakovlev was the only person invited to take part in Gorbachev’s discussions about how to hand over power to the new Russian President Boris Yeltsin. After the end of the Soviet Union, he continued his work with the Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, becoming a leading advocate for the position that Russians should acknowledge the crimes of the Soviet era.