ALEXANDER YAKOVLEV was a key supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev and one of the leading advocates of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1980s.

Although a Communist Party member from his youth, he was much respected by many non-Communists in Russia, and his role in the liberalisation of that country was of great importance. His part was recognised by his enemies as well as his friends, and he became a particular target of abuse from conservative Communists in the Soviet establishment.

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev was born into a peasant family in the Yaroslavl region of Russia in 1923. His father had received only four years of schooling and his mother, who was illiterate, only two months. Yakovlev placed a very high value on education and on more than one occasion said that the happiest times of his life were when he held academic posts.

He fought in the war from 1941 until 1943, when he was very seriously wounded and invalided out of the army. By the time of his demobilisation he was a company commander The following year he joined the Communist Party. Unfit for further war service, Yakovlev resumed his education and graduated from the Yaroslavl Pedagogical Institute in 1946.

He joined the professional apparatus of the Communist Party in 1948 and remained within it until 1973, apart from the years 1948-50, when he worked on a newspaper, and 1956-1960, when he took time out for full-time study. Most of that study was at the Academy of Social Sciences attached to the party Central Committee in Moscow, but he spent 1959 at Columbia University, New York, as one of the Soviet Union’s earliest exchange students with the US.

He was acting head of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee in Moscow from 1965 to 1973 and was a relative liberal within that conservative institution. As such, he made numerous enemies, and the last straw for many of them was an article he published in the Writers’ Union weekly newspaper, Literaturnaya gazeta, in 1972 which attacked all forms of nationalism and chauvinism, including Russian nationalism. Partly for this reason, Yakovlev was removed from his post in the Central Committee building and sent to Canada as Soviet Ambassador.

There he remained for ten years, but in 1983, after a visit to Canada by Mikhail Gorbachev while Yuri Andropov was still Soviet leader, he was recalled and given a position much more to his liking, the directorship of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations.

When Gorbachev succeeded Chernenko as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1985 Yakovlev received rapid promotion. He had already established excellent relations with Gorbachev and accompanied him on his visit to Britain in December 1984. In July 1985 he became head of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee, in February 1986 a full member of the Central Committee, in March of that year a member of the Central Committee secretariat, in January 1987 a candidate member of the Politburo and in June 1987 a voting member of that body.

In the late 1980s Yakovlev had supervisory responsibilities for culture and ideology. He took an unusually permissive line for a senior Communist official and went out of his way to help many of those trying to extend the boundaries of glasnost before the greater openness acquired a life of its own. Yakovlev also presided over a committee inquiring into the purges of the Soviet past and was responsible for the rehabilitation of many Soviet figures whose travesties of trials had not been exposed during the last great wave of rehabilitations in Khrushchev’s time.

His assaults on the dogmas of Marxism-Leninism were deeply resented by many in the party apparatus and there were constant tussles between Yakovlev, on the Politburo’s liberal wing, and Yegor Ligachev, on its extremely partially reconstructed wing.

Yakovlev was an influence for good both on Soviet home and foreign policy during these years, but it was partly as a result of pressure from his conservative opponents that he was put in charge of international policy within the Central Committee Secretariat in 1988 as a way of keeping him away from domestic political and ideological issues.

That position turned out to be a key one in 1989, the year of the liberation from unwanted Communist regimes, of most of Eastern Europe. Yakovlev and the Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze were, after Gorbachev, the two key players from the Soviet side in the drama that unfolded during that year. He fully shared the Gorbachev-Shevardnadze view that, even if anti-Communist governments took power in Eastern Europe, there should be no return to military interventions from Moscow of the kind seen in the past.

Before Soviet-US relations warmed in the later 1980s Yakovlev was often a stern critic of the US and was sometimes viewed as anti-American.