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370 Richard Pipes Alexander Yakovlev Is, Richard Pipes 370 Book Reviews Richard Pipes Alexander Yakovlev: The Man Whose Ideas Delivered Russia from Communism (DeKalb, il: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), 168 pp., $22.00 (pb), isbn 9780875807485. Alexander Yakovlev is, Richard Pipes argues, something of an “unsung hero” when it comes to understanding the course of those changes that ultimately led to the collapse of the ussr in 1991. For Pipes, Yakovlev was nothing less than the source of those ideas which propelled Mikhail Gorbachev’s pro- gram of perestroika and glasnost’ (and one should add demokratizatsiia) for reform of the ussr that ultimately ended in destroying that country. As such, for Pipes, Yakovlev “surely deserves a full-scale biography” (p. x); one reviewer cited on the back cover of this book refers to it as “the first full biography of Alexander Yakovlev.” (Jiri Valenta) Despite these claims, this book is not a bi- ography of Yakovlev. The twenty-two chapters dealing with his life cover a total of 80 pages; the remainder comprise translations of two of Yakovlev’s works, his 1972 article “Against Anti-historicism” published in Literaturnaia Gazeta, and his Memorandum of December 1985 in which he sets out some ideas for change in the Soviet Union. Pipes’ discussion of what Yakovlev actually did is very brief and sketchy and anyone lacking knowledge of Soviet political history would find it hard to gain an appreciation of his career. For example, the discussion of the rea- sons for Yakovlev’s “exile” as ambassador to Canada in 1973 cannot be under- stood without an appreciation of the growing strength of nationalist views at this time. To attribute it to party leaders’ dissatisfaction with his having pub- lished the Literaturnaia Gazeta article without their consent, or because of his opposition to the excessive laudation of Brezhnev, misses this broader con- text. Similarly Yakovlev’s crucial role in the dramatic unrolling of perestroika between 1985 and 1991 is given scant treatment. For example, his relationship with Gorbachev, clearly crucial to much of what happened, is discussed in two pages, and purely from Yakovlev’s perspective, his role in rebutting the Andreeva letter in March 1988 is mentioned in passing, while his actual role in foreign policy is practically ignored. His relationships with Yeltsin and with Ligachev, presumably his main opponent within the Soviet leadership, are ignored. The same could be said about all aspects of perestroika and his role in it. So this is nothing like a biography. The main focus of the book is given away in the sub-title: what Pipes is really interested in is the way in which Yakovlev’s ideas developed over time, so that he grew from a position of commitment to the Soviet regime and what it stood for through his realization of its need for reform, then transformation until he © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/18763324-00001252 <UN> Book Reviews 371 finally became towards the end of his life, what Pipes calls a “classical West- ern liberal”. The intellectual trajectory of such an influential political figure is clearly of interest to us if we wish to understand the course of Soviet develop- ment. The problem is that in charting this course, Pipes relies overwhelmingly on works written by Yakovlev either at the very end of the perestroika period or after the end of the ussr, that is very near the end of his intellectual trajec- tory. Looking back, Yakovlev has made comments about the development of his ideas and his view of Soviet possibilities, and he may be correct in describ- ing his attitude to Soviet reality at different times, but even with the best will in the world, memory can play tricks. Of course, given his position, Yakovlev cannot be expected to have published views critical of the Soviet Union prior to the late 1980s, so there is a dearth of material here that might lend credence to his later backward-looking reflections. But accepting that his views in, for example, 1970 were as he describes them in 1994 is problematic. Pipes does not raise this issue. Moreover when he does briefly discuss some books that Ya- kovlev wrote chiefly in the 1960s but also in the 1980s, he effectively dismisses them as reflective of Yakovlev’s true views; he is at a loss to explain why Ya- kovlev was so critical of the us (and Canada). Pipes dismisses much of it by saying it was “routine Communist blather, which Yakovlev seemed unable to shake off.” (p. 56) Perhaps he really believed it, but acknowledgement of this would not sit easily with Pipes’ picture of the onward march toward Western liberalism. The narrow source base of the book is difficult to understand, especially giv- en the plethora of memoir material on both the Soviet/Russian and American sides, the reams of primary material that has been and is still being published, and the vast library of secondary works that now cover the perestroika period. Even some of the Politburo proceedings from the period have been published, and these should be enlightening about the views that key players including Yakovlev expressed on current issues. But virtually none of this has been taken on board when it could have given at least more color to the analysis and may- be even provided material substantiation to Pipes’ account. Nevertheless the book does raise at the elite level a question others have sought to study at the more mass level: how people get by when they no longer believe the claims of the regime. This is, of course, a far more signifi- cant question for a member of the elite than it is for the man in the street, and regardless of whether for Yakovlev it became an issue in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s, he had to struggle with this while continuing to function political- ly. Pipes argues that despite his growing disillusionment, Yakovlev remained in the party because he believed that it was only through the party that real change could be brought about. This is logical, and it was also the position of the soviet and post-soviet review 44 (2017) 357-378 <UN>.
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