Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev
| Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev Александр Яковлев |
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| "Chief Ideologue" and Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union | |
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In office 25 January 1982 – 14 July 1990 |
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| Preceded by | Mikhail Suslov |
| Succeeded by | no successor |
| Head of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU | |
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In office 5 July 1985 – March 1986 |
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| Succeeded by | Yuri Sklyarov |
| Full member of the 27th Politburo | |
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In office 26 June 1987 – 14 July 1990 |
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| Member of the 27th Secretariat | |
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In office 6 March 1986 – 14 July 1990 |
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| Soviet Union Ambassador to Canada | |
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In office 1 June 1973 – 29 October 1983 |
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| Premier |
Alexei Kosygin Nikolai Tikhonov |
| Preceded by | Boris Miroshnichenko |
| Succeeded by | Alexey Rodionov |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
2 December 1923 Korolyovo, Yaroslavl Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
| Died | 18 October 2005 (aged 81) Moscow, Russian Federation |
| Nationality | Soviet and Russian |
| Political party |
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1944-1991) Russian Party of Social Democracy(1995—2002) |
| Signature |  |
Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Я́ковлев; 2 December 1923 – 18 October 2005) was a Soviet politician and historian. During the 1980s he was 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.
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 the article entitled Against Antihistoricism critical of Russian nationalism and nationalism in the USSR in general. As a result, he was removed from his position and appointed as ambassador to Canada remaining at that post for a decade.
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