Perestroika: the Canadian connection

AMY KNIGHT

THE SOVIET AMBASSADOR The Making of the Radical Behind PerestroikaBy Christopher ShulganMcClelland & Stewart, 359 pages, $34.99Although he was not well known in the West, Alexander Yakovlev, Soviet ambassador to Canada from 1973 to 1983, was a pivotal figure in the development of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms in the second half of the 1980s. As Toronto-based journalist Christopher Shulgan points out in his well-researched and thoughtful biography of Yakovlev, who died in 2005, it was Yakovlev who persuaded Gorbachev to introduce a policy of glasnost, or openness, which resulted in unprecedented freedom of the press. Once the media were allowed to criticize the government openly, there was no turning back. The deep-seeded discontent of the Soviet people was publicly voiced and the foundations of the Communist-controlled Soviet regime began to collapse.