Richard Pipes has written an important biography about a man whose contributions to the fall of communism have been downplayed both by his former boss and by today's Russian leaders, who view the Soviet collapse as an unmitigated catastrophe.(Survival: Global Politics and Strategy) Richard Pipes, the distinguished American historian of Soviet Russia, provides a notable scholarly and public service by writing [the] first biography that carefully follows every major stage in Yakovlev's career and political-ideological evolution.(The Washington Times) We are in Richard Pipes's debt for calling our attention to the man whose ideas helped transform his own country and world politics during the late 1980s and early 1990s.(The New York Review of Books) In this slim, highly provocative book, Richard Pipes engages in a much-needed exercise in historical reparation. We have here the first biography of an ideologue turned heretic and then apostate, whose ideas begot, to a decisive extent, the collapse of Lenin's state. In documenting Yakovlev's epiphany, Pipes makes a seminal contribution to the literature on disenchantment, apostasy, illumination, and awakening.(Times Higher Education)
