Alexander Yakovlev Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by S. Beth Atkin

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Lessons Learned

What lessons would you like people to draw from your life and career as a reformer?

When you undertake to make real changes, some program or another, you've got to convince yourself that you will not be allowed to continue with this program, that somebody will come and interfere with you. That, if you're successful, new heroes will appear. They will call themselves the pathfinders. They will call themselves the progenitors of the new revolution, and so forth. So you've got to tell yourself this is how it's going to be, and convince yourself. You shouldn't be frightened by that. If you're interested in politics, would like to have a career in politics, you've got to teach yourself the ability to leave power when you feel like you want to leave power and not regret it. And third, you've got to learn to take risks. Because reforms always involve risk.

A final question. What is your plan for the next phase of your career?

I no longer worry about my career. I am very happy with what I have right now. But I do have ambitions. What I would like, and during my earlier talk I already mentioned that, I would like to publish 30 or 40 volumes of documents and narrative history of Russia in the 20th century and Bolshevism. Documents, studies, that's my ambition. It's not just my personal ambition. I think this should be the ambition of everybody who is interested in the expansion of the democratic space in this world. We still have dictatorships. We, on our part, have not yet insured ourselves against the return of dictatorship. Even the West should not be complacent and think that they can never have some form of authoritarianism or dictatorship come back. That's where my ambition stems from. That's my career.

On that note, thank you very much for being with us today, Mr. Yakovlev, to share this tour, so to speak, of your extraordinary life.

Thank you very much for the invitation.

Thank you. And thank you Professor Freidan for joining us. And thank YOU very much for joining us for this "Conversation on International Affairs."

© Copyright 1997, Regents of the University of California

For further discussion on the Weimar analogy, see Weimar and Russia: Is there an Analogy? (April 1994 forum with Gerald Feldman, Harold James, Andrei Melville, and George Breslauer) and Yegor Gaidar's views on the Weimar analogy.