presence in the parliament through articulate young leaders such as Alexei Arbatov, deputy chair of the defense committee. In November 1997 Yabloko’s Mikhail Zadornov, the head of the Duma’s budget committee, joined the government as finance minister. In May 1999 Yabloko voted for impeaching Yeltsin because of his actions in the first Chechen war. In August 1999 former prime minister and anticorruption campaign Sergei Stepashin chose to join Yabloko rather than the rival Right Cause. But in the December 1999 Duma elections Yabloko’s support slipped to 5.9 percent (yielding sixteen seats, plus four in the single mandates). It was probably hurt by Yavlinsky’s criticism of the government’s new war in Chechnya.
Yabloko mainly existed as a vehicle for its leader, Yavlinsky. The rise of Vladimir Putin sunk Yavlinsky’s presidential chances, leaving Yabloko as a visible but relatively powerless voice of opposition. See also: CONSTITUTION OF 1993; YAVLINSKY, GRIGORY ALEXEYEVICH; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Yabloko website, English version. (1999). «http://www .yabloko.ru/Engl/».
(1891-1938), state security official, general commissar of state security (1935).
Genrikh Grigorevich Yagoda was a native of Rybinsk, the son of an artisan and the second cousin of the revolutionary leader Yakov Sverdlov, to whose niece he was married. He finished eight classes of gymnasium in Nizhni Novgorod before joining an anarchist-communist group (1907), and
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later the Social Democratic Party (December 1907). In 1912 he was arrested and exiled to Simbirsk. After returning from exile, he joined the army as a soldier and corporal in the Fifth Corps (1914-1917) and was wounded in action. In 1917, Yagoda worked with the journal, Soldatskaya Pravda, before taking part in the October Revolution in Pet-rograd. He entered the Cheka (military intelligence service) in November 1919 and was attached to the Special (00) Branch (watchdog of the military), and by July 1920 was a member of the Cheka Collegium. He worked his way up in the Cheka-GPU-OGPU (Obyedinennoye Gosudarstvennoye Politich-eskoye Upravlenie, forerunner of the KGB), heading the Special Branch and later the Secret Political Department (watchdog of the intellectual life). In July 1927 he was the First Deputy Chairman of OGPU, but was later replaced by Ivan Akulov and demoted to deputy chairman. During the last two years, serving under the sickly Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, Yagoda actually ran the punitive organs. Taking an active part in working against Josef Stalin’s enemies, he was rewarded by being elected as candidate member of the Central Committee (1930) and later as a full member (1934). After Menzhinsky’s death in May 1934, the OGPU was re-formed as NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) on July 10, 1934, and Yagoda became its first commissar, the only Jew to hold this position. In 1935, when the rank of marshall of the Soviet Union was introduced in the Red Army, Yagoda received the equivalent rank of commissar general of state security, held by only two others (his successors Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria).
For the next two years, Yagoda faithfully served Stalin and played a major part in organizing the Great Terror. He worked closely with Andrei Vyshinsky in organizing the first show trials and in the slaughters of the Red Army high command. More than a quarter of a million people were arrested during 1934 and 1935. The Gulag was vastly expanded under Yagoda’s stewardship, and the use of slave labor became a major part of the Soviet economy. Stalin, however, was not satisfied with Yagoda’s performance and organized a campaign to remove him, using, among others, Lazar Kagano-vich, who began to complain about the organs’ lax-ness toward “Trotskyists.” Stalin’s telegram of August 25, 1936, from Sochi to members of the Politburo, sealed Yagoda’s fate. Yagoda was then appointed as the Commissar of Communications (1936-1937). Arrested on March 28, 1937,Yagoda was tried as a member of the “Right-Trotskyist Bloc” in the last of the show trials. Yagoda and other
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defendants had to face Vyshinsky and the hanging judge, Vasily Ulrikh, with whom Yagoda had worked closely in the past. The former chief of the secret police remained stoical despite the obvious measures used to extract the necessary confessions. Sentenced to death, he was executed on March 15, 1938, a fate shared by several members of his family, but his son miraculously survived. Yagoda has not been rehabilitated. See also: PURGES, THE GREAT; SHOW TRIALS; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF
Andrew, Christopher, and Gordievsky, Oleg. (1990). KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev. New York: HarperCollins.
(b. 1922), secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (March 1986 to mid-1990) and member of the Politburo (mid-1987 to mid-1990).
Alexander Yakovlev was General Secretary Gorbachev’s closest advisor and most loyal supporter in the Soviet leadership during the first five years of perestroika. During the 1960s and early 1970s Yakovlev held a series of responsible positions in the propaganda department of the Central Committee. In 1972, while serving as the acting director of the department, he published a scathing attack on the growing Russophile tendency within the Communist Party; this alienated a segment of the party leadership and led to his exile as ambassador to Canada, where he remained until 1983. When Gorbachev visited Canada that year as the head of a delegation from the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, he was reportedly so impressed with Yakovlev that he named him the director of the USSR Academy of Sciences’s major research institute on international affairs.
With Gorbachev’s selection as General Secretary in 1985, Yakovlev emerged as Gorbachev’s most influential advisor on both foreign and domestic policies. Yakovlev was often characterized as the architect of perestroika, but it is impossible to determine the accuracy of this assertion. He was
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Alexander Yakovlev drew upon his time in the United States and Canada to help formulate Gorbachev’s reforms. © PETER
named the director of the propaganda department of the Central Committee in 1985 and was a member of the small Soviet delegation to the first summit conference with President Reagan in November of that same year. He attended all subsequent summit meetings.
In early 1986 Yakovlev was named a Secretary of the Central Committee and soon became locked in a battle with Secretary Yegor Ligachev for control of the party’s ideological and cultural policies. Over the next two years he emerged as an articulate supporter of Gorbachev’s new thinking in international relations, championed democratization and glasnost at home, defined the objectives of cultural life in humanist rather than socialist terms, and challenged orthodox definitions of Marxism-Leninism. He often proved more radical than Gorbachev in his definition of democratization, his enthusiasm for the establishment of cooperatives, and for private economic activity.
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Yakovlev’s orientation seemed to change after the reform of the Secretariat and apparat in the fall of 1988, which led to his appointment as the director of the Central Committee’s new commission on international policy. Over the next two years he emerged as a social democrat and political liberal who insisted that the extension of individual freedom was the true objective of reform. After his selection as a deputy to the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989, he championed the extension of electoral politics, expressed doubts about the capacity of the Communist Party to lead reform, and endorsed a multiparty political system.
With Gorbachev’s selection as President of the USSR in March 1990, Yakovlev was named to Gorbachev’s advisory council and retired from his positions as Secretary of the Central Committee and member of the Politburo in mid-1990. Increasingly disillusioned with the Communist Party, in mid-1991 he helped to form an alternative, rival political movement, publicly repudiated Marxism, and resigned as Gorbachev’s advisor. In August 1991 he quit the
