Editing Alexander Yakovlev (section)

==Early life and education==
The first child of five, Yakovlev was born to a peasant family in a small village called Korolyovo, on the [[Volga River]], near [[Yaroslavl]]. He had four sisters, two of whom died in infancy. His father, Nikolai Alekseyevich Yakovlev, only attended school for four years, and his mother, Agafiya Mikhailovna, for three months. Yakovlev was sickly in childhood and suffered from [[Mycobacterial cervical lymphadenitis|scrofula]]. 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. Their house was set ablaze while he was seven, and the family moved to [[Krasnye Tkachi]].

=== World War II service ===
Yakovlev graduated from secondary school days before [[Operation Barbarossa|Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union]]. He was drafted into the [[Soviet Navy]] in November 1941, with brief training, and became part of the {{Ill|Marine Corps of the Soviet Union|lt=Soviet Marine Corps|ru|Морская пехота СССР}}. He served as a platoon commander of the {{Ill|6th Marine Brigade of the Baltic Fleet|ru|6-я бригада морской пехоты Балтийского флота}}, on the [[Volkhov Front]] during the [[Siege of Leningrad]].<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Yakovlev |first=Aleksandr |title=Кто есть кто в мировой политике |publisher=Politizdat |year=1990 |isbn=5250005136 |pages=550 |language=ru |trans-title=Who's Who in World Politics}}</ref> On 6 August 1942, he was leading 30 [[Chuvash people|Chuvash]] soldiers and was ordered to charge German positions in Vinyagolovo near [[Leningrad]] and was badly wounded.<ref name=":1" /> He was hospitalised until February 1943, and was subsequently demobilised.<ref name=":0" /> He became a member of the [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] in 1944. 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]].

=== Stalin and Khrushchev periods ===
In September 1945, he resumed education at the {{Interlanguage link|Yaroslavl Pedagogical Institute|ru|Ярославский государственный педагогический университет имени К. Д. Ушинского}} to study history. On September 8, 1945, he married Nina Ivanovna Smirnova. He graduated the same year and went to Moscow to attend the Higher Party School. In November 1946, he was appointed the instructor of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation in Yaroslavl, a post he held for a year and a half. Shortly after this, he had his first doubts about the regime, when he was shocked to see train after train carrying Soviet ex-prisoners-of-war being sent to labour camps. At the [[Yaroslavl railway station|Vspolye train station]], he saw weeping women and was dismayed at how they were treated. This memory troubled him deeply and never left him.

In March 1953, shortly after Stalin's death, he was assigned to the party's Central Committee as an instructor in the department of schools. On 25 February 1956, [[Khrushchev]]'s [[Secret Speech]] became the most traumatic event in Yakovlev's early Moscow life; he listened to the speech from a balcony in the Grand Kremlin Palace. After the [[20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union|20th Party Congress]], Yakovlev lost his previous enthusiasm for communism and led a double life. He wanted to turn to the original sources on Communism—[[Karl Marx|Marx]], [[Friedrich Engels|Engels]], [[Vladimir Lenin|Lenin]], German philosophers, French and Italian socialists and British economists. He asked to leave the Central Committee to enroll in the Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee. While twice refused, he was finally allowed to study there for two years and became convinced that [[Marxism-Leninism]] was hollow, impractical, and inhumane, as well as a prognostic fraud. This healed his internal political conflict following the 20th Party Congress. He began to agree with Khrushchev.{{Citation needed|date=November 2019}}

=== Studies at Columbia University ===
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 Program|Fulbright Programme]].<ref name="Keller 1989, pp.30-33">Keller, Bill. "Moscow's other Mastermind: Aleksandr Yakovlev", ''New York Times Magazine'', February 19, 1989, pp.30-33, 40-43. {{ISSN|0362-4331}}.</ref> Of the seventeen Soviet students, fourteen were selected by the KGB. Yakovlev and three others, including [[Oleg Kalugin]], went to Columbia. All other students besides Yakovlev were members of the KGB. He intensively studied the English language, Roosevelt and the New Deal, drawing connections between the United States at that time and the Soviet Union. At the end, in May 1959, the Soviet visitors were taken on a thirty-day tour of the United States, during which he stayed with families from [[Vermont]], [[Chicago]] and [[Iowa]]. However, his year in America did little to assuage his anti-Americanism because of the greed, racism, and other things that he witnessed. Yakovlev returned to the Central Committee to work on ideology and propaganda, and published several anti-American books. He defended a dissertation dealing with the historiography of US foreign policy, and received the degree of [[Candidate of Sciences]], the equivalent of a doctorate, in July 1960.