During the rule of Nikita Khrushchev, he became a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU, before resigning to study abroad as part of the Fulbright Programme, returning in 1960.

In response to his perceived importance in the reforms, he came under attack from hardliners such as Alexander Lebed and Gennady Zyuganov, eventually resigning two days prior to the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt.

His father served in the Red Cavalry during the Russian Civil War and was a devoted communist; he became the first chairman of a local collective farm.

At this time he regarded the Communist Party as "life's truth", and affirmed he was totally loyal and faithful to Soviet Union, and he was an ardent admirer of Joseph Stalin.

He wanted to turn to the original sources on Communism—Marx, Engels, Lenin, German philosophers, French and Italian socialists and British economists.

[citation needed] Beginning in 1958, he was chosen as a exchange student at Columbia University in the United States for one year, as part of the Fulbright Programme.

He intensively studied the English language, Roosevelt and the New Deal, drawing connections between the United States at that time and the Soviet Union.

He defended a dissertation dealing with the historiography of US foreign policy, and received the degree of kandidat nauk, the equivalent of a doctorate, in July 1960.

[5] 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 January 1970, he visited the United States again, meeting then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan, diplomat Henry Kissinger, and actress Jane Fonda, who warned him that Moscow "did not appreciate the full danger of American militarism".

The purpose of the visit was to tour Canadian farms and agricultural institutions, in the hopes of taking lessons that could be applied in the Soviet Union.

And then, verily, history plays tricks on one, we had a lot of time together as guests of then Liberal Minister of Agriculture Eugene Whelan in Canada who, himself, was too late for the reception because he was stuck with some striking farmers somewhere.

I somehow, for some reason, threw caution to the wind and started telling him about what I considered to be utter stupidities in the area of foreign affairs, especially about those SS-20 missiles that were being stationed in Europe and a lot of other things.

[8]Two weeks after the visit, as a result of Gorbachev's interventions, Yakovlev was recalled from Canada by Yuri Andropov and became Director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in Moscow on 16 August 1983; he was succeeded by his friend Yevgeny Primakov (himself later Prime Minister of Russia) in 1985.

Domestically, he argued in favour of the reform programmes that became known as glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) and played a key role in executing those policies.

to the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, labelling Yakovlev as a Jew and the main instigator of a course of action that would lead to the 'capitulation before the imperialists'.

As a result, the first multi-party elected Congress of Soviets since 1918 "passed the declaration admitting the existence of the secret protocols, condemning and denouncing them".

[12][13] As the communists opposed to liberalisation gained strength, his position became more tenuous; fiercely attacked by his former protégé Gennady Zyuganov in May 1991, he resigned from the CPSU two days before the August Coup in 1991.

In his book Inside the Stalin Archives (2008), Jonathan Brent relates that in 1991, when there were Lithuanian crowds demonstrating for independence from the Soviet Union, Gorbachev consulted Yakovlev about the wisdom of an armed repression against them.

He acted as the leader of the Russian Party of Social Democracy, which in the mid-1990s fused into the United Democrats, a pro-reform alliance that was later reorganised into the Union of Right Forces.

[16] In 2000, he publicly alleged that Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who became famous for his role in saving thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust, was shot and killed in Soviet secret police headquarters in 1947.