Editing Alexander Yakovlev (section)

=== 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}}