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“... life which its leaders advocate, and of which there are some signs? The answers Richard Sakwa and Alexander Yakovlev give to these questions are discouraging, even where they are not meant to be. The shift in the politics of Russia which followed the December elections is very marked; it is also, as usual, murky. On one level, the result traumatised the ...”

“... that they died needlessly, foolishly, is reviled. But they did. Trying to get to a briefing with Alexander Yakovlev the next day, I found my car diverted from the central area and ended up in a jam near Dzerzhinsky Square. Crowds were streaming past, dancing with excitement. Leaving the car, I followed them. As I came round the corner of the Lubyanka ...”

“... and made it impossible to conduct politics through it. Gorbachev – and with him Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev, the foremost reformers since 1985 – have seemed unable to express their thoughts in public except by means of high-sounding generalisations. Shevardnadze’s The future belongs to freedom is another instance of the same tendency. They ...”

“... from the East had been long-time dissidents. Sakharov’s widow, Elena Bonner, stands out, as does Alexander Yakovlev, once Gorbachev’s closest ally, who now denounces everything about the Soviet era. Most are people with a lifetime of loyal and successful service to their regimes behind them, whose world has gone for ever. Nobody talks ...”

“... specialist’ and mostly that is to the good. The disadvantage is a certain carelessness: Alexander Yakovlev, whom Read correctly identifies as the most liberal member of Gorbachev’s Politburo, was not made director of State TV and Radio – that was Yegor Yakovlev, formerly editor of Moscow News. More ...”

“... default of Putinism, inherited from the late Soviet period: ‘Perestroika came much too late,’ Alexander Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev’s mentors, remembered. ‘The years of social stagnation almost killed social idealism … sowing cynicism, disbelief and social lassitude.’ In the 1990s this attitude was strengthened by reforms that weren’t ...”

“... because they have produced so few rewards for the many and so much corrupt wealth for the few. Alexander Yakovlev, the great liberalising force of the Gorbachev years, thanks to his brief in the Politburo – Ideology – took the podium first. His limp is one of the rare memories nowadays of the Great Patriotic War. The Communists and nationalists ...”

“... Yeltsin’s renunciation of his Party membership at the 28th Party Congress in July. Alexander Tsipko, deputy director of the Institute of the World Socialist System, told me in August that over a two-week period all of his colleagues at this prestigious institute handed in their cards – even its prominent director, Dr Oleg Bogomolov, a former ...”

“... years or decades. They include Anna Akhmatova’s Rekviem (written during and about the Purges), Alexander Tvardovsky’s long-suppressed By Right of Memory, dealing with collectivisation, Anatoly Zhigulin’s cycle of poems about his time in Stalinist prisons and camps, poems by long ignored émigrés or opponents such as Nikolai Gumilyev, Georgy ...”

“... Those whom Alksnis most criticised – Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Foreign Minister; Yegor Yakovlev, formerly Gorbachev’s closest aide in the Politburo; Vadim Bakatin, the relatively liberal former Interior Minister – have all been replaced. It is no longer the case, however, that such people are simply unpersoned, consigned for ever to pensioner ...”

“... stay with the Gorbachevs in Stavropol. Mlynář had by now become a bold advocate of what, under Alexander Dubček, would be named ‘socialism with a human face’. He had been in Moscow pleading for understanding of the coming changes, and Gorbachev listened, fascinated, to the plans for democratisation. But he said to Mlynář: ‘In your country all that ...”