A member of the Soviet Communist Party’s Politburo, Yakovlev had a falling out with other leaders and was sent off to be the Soviet Ambassador to Canada (1973-1983). After he returned, he helped make history as a key architect of two policies put forth by then-USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev: “perestroika” (restructuring) and “glasnost” (openness), breaking the decades of iron-fisted dominance by the Soviet government.
“He made an enormous contribution to the democratic processes and the transformation of the country,” Gorbachev said when he learned of Yakovlev’s death. Yakovlev pushed for more freedom in Soviet media, and allowed the truth of Josef Stalin’s purges and other Communist-era crimes to be published.
It didn’t go as smoothly as Yakovlev hoped. “I thought it would be enough to say ‘Look people, you are free’,” he said later. “But intellectuals raised their heads, then started whining – and everybody else did not give a damn.” But indeed they did: the Soviet Union fell, and Yakovlev was appointed head of then-President Boris Yeltsin’s commission for the rehabilitation of victims of Soviet political repression; he later founded the International Democracy Foundation, and chaired it until his death on October 18, at age 81.