He changed the face--and fate--of
Soviet communism

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Alexander Yakovlev died some days ago in Moscow. He was 81 and headed a commission engaged in vindicating the memory of the victims of Stalinism. Even inside Russia it's probable that very few people know that the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the end of communism in Europe were due in large measure to a fortuitous combination of chance and Yakovlev's (fortunately) wrong ideas about how to reinvigorate and tidy up Marxism. He lost a leg during World War II.

I met Yakovlev in Moscow in the early 1990s. I came to his presence accompanied by Yuri Kariakin, an essayist who was an expert on Goya and Dostoyevsky. Both Yakovlev and Kariakin were advisors to Gorbachev and knew better than anyone the secret history of the implosion of the Soviet empire, perhaps the most important event of the 20th century.

The long conversation was held in patriotically mispronounced but structurally correct English. Yakovlev smoked a pipe and emptied it by tapping it against his hefty wooden leg, generating with that sound a strange sensation of authority. His amazing story has three acts and a denouement, all perfectly defined.

Act One. In 1972, Yakovlev, who presided over no less than the agitation and propaganda section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, published a harsh article about the Soviet Union's ultranationalist and authoritarian tradition, defending the theory that the problems of Marxism derived from the impossibility of examining reality and correcting errors amid the brutal climate of intolerance at the time.

That was his first move toward glasnost. That critical vision of his country probably took root a few years earlier, when the party sent him to Columbia University to learn how the enemy functioned.

Act Two. Leonid Brezhnev, then Soviet prime minister, decides to remove from the Kremlin such a troublesome comrade and in 1973 transfers him to Canada as ambassador so that he won't contaminate other members of the nomenklatura with his dangerous theories.

In Canada, Yakovlev discovers a country that is huge and cold, like his, but efficient and prosperous, blessed with a compassionate capitalism. His convictions are reaffirmed. If the Soviet regime -- which has neither the contradictions of the market nor the greed of businessmen -- were to introduce freedom of opinion and allow criticism, the great motherland of socialism would be at the head of the planet in a few years.

Act Three. A decade goes by, and Yakovlev is still in his golden exile, ruminating theories. But in 1983 something apparently innocent happens: Making a stopover in Canada is a 50-some-year-old comrade who is an expert in agrarian affairs, a rising star in the Politburo and a protégé of Yuri Andropov, the sophisticated former head of the KGB who, a few months earlier, after Brezhnev's death, had risen to the post of Secretary General of the Communist Party.

The visitor is Mikhail Gorbachev, a practical man without much ideological density. He expects to spend only a few hours in Canada. But the Aeroflot plane has mechanical problems, and Gorbachev is forced to delay his departure a couple of days. During that time, Yakovlev's powerful mind expounds all his convincing arguments: It is possible to transform the Soviet Union into a great country. You can achieve that with freedom.

The outcome is a chain of unforeseen events. Andropov dies in 1984; a few months later, so does his successor, Konstantin Chernenko. The nomenklatura wants a young leader, and in 1985 Gorbachev is elected party chief. One of his first appointees is Yakovlev. Gorbachev wants him in the Kremlin, in the office next to his. The two of them will demonstrate to the world the superiority of communism. They're going to reform the system from top to bottom (that's perestroika), and they'll do it in a climate of freedom (that's glasnost).

What happened? A few years later, the empire collapsed. Why? The two men were dreamers: Communism can exist only through repression. Marxism is an intellectual mistake that leads not to paradise but to the gulag. It's inevitable.

My conversation with Yakovlev ended with a question from me and a succinct reply from him. ''Why doesn't Marxism work?'' I asked. He fixed his eyes on me, tapped his wooden leg with his pipe and said, with a certain melancholy: ``It does not adapt to human nature.''

October 31, 2005

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