Background

Mr. Yakovlev, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you.

Let's go back to your early years. Tell us a little about what stands out in your childhood and your young adulthood that shaped what you became as a Russian leader.

It's very hard to talk about one's childhood in the modern language of today. You're always trying to straighten our what was circuitous and make simple what was complex because when you talk about childhood, you've got to speak your heart. If you don't mind, I'll tell you. I was born in a very, very tiny village in the Yaroslavl region on the Volga a long time ago. I am old enough to remember private peasant property. And probably one of the most influential factors to speak of in this connection is my memory of my father and mother working morning until night on that little piece of private land that they had. The other impression that I've carried all my life is that none of us in that village knew what it meant to lock your door. We didn't know what locks were. And the third impression, among the bright impressions, I remember the actual peasant cooperative whose function was for the peasants to help each other. I remember that.

And as a child, you were ill and read a lot? Is that correct?

Yes, unfortunately I was a sickly child. We called it zheltukha, it's a kind of skin disease [jaundice]. I can't recall now who it was that taught me how to read but I began reading at the age of five. I think it was my grandfather who taught me, although he himself was not very literate. But he probably showed me what letter meant what and taught me how to put letters together. And I remember very well the first books that I read before my schools started.

What were they?

The first book was on the Kolchak Rebellion, the Kolchak White Army Rebellion. Later on I really spent some time looking for this book, just to take another look at it. But it turned out that it had been banned, and that the book's author had been arrested and shot. Another interesting book that I read when I was in the first grade was Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don, and I couldn't quite understand what it was about. Why were these books my first books? It's just that they happened to be in the village, that's all.

I read that you used to have family reunions at which family members would discuss the problems with Russian -- Soviet -- society and that your mother would remind you all about how bad things had been in the past. Was that something that remained in your heart as you became a reformer and intellectual and learned even more of what was wrong with the society?

Let me tell you something. My family, and especially my late parents, their attitude toward me differed and was not so simple. My father was a literate man. He finished four years of parochial school. My mother didn't know how to read at all, she knew neither reading nor writing. She spent only three months at school, after which time she was sent to be a nanny. And she always was against my studies. She tolerated my finishing the 7th grade, but she said that all studies up to the 7th grade would either lead to my becoming a blind man or a fool.

And you became neither.

But my father was always supportive of my studiousness. When I was decommissioned and was walking on crutches, my mother looked at me and my crutches and cried out, "What am I going to do with you now?" My father was still at the front, and she had three other girls, my sisters, to take care of. And when my response was that I was planning to attend college, she was categorically opposed. I had to write to my father at the front. My father wrote back saying "Let Alexander do what he pleases." And so I enrolled at the college.

Next Page: Shaping of a Reformer (I)