Perestroika: the Canadian connection

theglobeandmail.com ^ | June 28, 2008 | AMY KNIGHT

[Tailgunner Joe]

THE SOVIET AMBASSADOR

The Making of the Radical Behind Perestroika

By Christopher Shulgan

McClelland & Stewart, 359 pages, $34.99

Christopher Shulgan has done an excellent job in documenting Yakovlev's career in the Soviet government and describing his exceptional role in the events that caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. But he skirts over one of the most significant episodes of Yakovlev's life - his chairmanship, beginning in 1988, of the Commission to Rehabilitate Victims of Political Repression. While he went to great efforts in disclosing the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, Yakovlev stopped short of looking into the repressions under the regimes of Stalin's successors, when countless political and religious dissidents were sent to labour camps and psychiatric hospitals for their beliefs.

This is not surprising, because for part of that time Yakovlev was in charge of the Soviet propaganda machine, which was essential to the KGB's campaign against dissent. ...Clearly, Yakovlev was not about to open up the archives on this period when he himself was complicit in the repression. ...

In order to achieve lasting democratic reforms after 1991, Russia needed to come to terms with its past, as the countries of Eastern Europe struggled to do. But with Yakovlev and other former apparatchiks in charge of the Russian archives, this could not happen. The records on the KGB's campaign against dissent were not opened up, and those who carried out the political repressions of the 1960s, '70s and '80s were never called to account.

Instead, Russians ended up in 2000 with a president who was an ex-KGB officer and who reversed perestroika and steered the country back toward authoritarianism. Whatever Yakovlev's accomplishments as a reformer in the Gorbachev period, he was one of the reasons that democracy in Russia ultimately failed.

[goldstategop]

The nomenklatura remained in charge of Russia even after the disappearance of the Soviet Union. There was no real change as in Eastern Europe to people who did not have any ties to past. Those in Russia today still do and still see their country as a successor to the Soviet Union.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus