Editing Alexander Yakovlev (section)

=== 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.