MOSCOW -- The owlish little man with the bushy eyebrows was strolling placidly through Red Square when a woman marched up and berated him. "Aren't you in jail yet?" she demanded.

Alexander Yakovlev grinned and gave an obscene reply. Then he walked on calmly. A decade after he left the Soviet Politburo, his enemies still blame him for every disaster that has befallen Russia. But at 77 years old, he accepts his fate.

Mr. Yakovlev was the intellectual father of glasnost, the policy of openness that blazed a path for the freedoms of today's Russia, and the architect of the reforms that helped trigger the Soviet Union's collapse. (One of his inspirations, he acknowledges, was Canada, where he served as a diplomat for a decade.)

He also was the man who shone a spotlight on the horrors of Soviet history, exposing the secrets of the Gulag, the mass executions, the millions who died in slave camps and prisons.

For this, the former Politburo member has been denounced as a traitor, a foreign spy and an "enemy of the people." Hate letters pour into his office. His foes have threatened to shoot him, to hang him, to imprison him. They have even placed funeral wreaths at his door.

Yet Mr. Yakovlev believes that his crusade -- the struggle to recover Russia's collective memory -- is the only way to repent for his life of privilege as a Soviet apparatchik.

Long past retirement age, he has one final mission. He wants to do what nobody has ever done: compile a formal count of the number of victims of Soviet repression.

By his estimate, as many as 35 million people were shot or died as a deliberate result of Soviet decisions. It is a stunning toll, the equivalent of almost one-quarter of Russia's population today.

He wants the Kremlin's approval for a study to verify his estimate.

"People should know!" he declares, thumping the table of his Moscow office, where his bookcases are lined with volumes that list the political prisoners and slain victims of the Soviet Union.

In 1988, when Mr. Yakovlev was a powerful Politburo member and an adviser to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, he became chairman of a special commission to rehabilitate the victims of Soviet jails and purges. Within three years, he had cleared the names of a million people and declared their innocence.

He admitted, even then, that it was "heavy, spiritually exhausting work."

Today, his commission has rehabilitated four million people, and it still has 400,000 cases to go.

In his new book, Maelstrom of Memory, Mr. Yakovlev lists some of the nightmares uncovered by his commission. More than 41 million Soviets were imprisoned from 1923 to 1953. More than 884,000 children were in internal exile by 1954. More than 85,000 Orthodox priests were shot in 1937 alone.

Five million people starved to death in the man-made famines of the 1930s. More than five million families were deported or exiled, and half of them died on their journeys into exile.

Step by step, for more than a decade, Mr. Yakovlev has been slowly descending what he calls the "bloody staircase" of Soviet history. Now, he has reached the bottom and he wants Russians to see the horrors he found in the cellar.

Most, however, are averting their eyes. Russia has been gripped by mass amnesia, and few are interested in historical truth.

"Russians are sentimental," Mr. Yakovlev says. "When one person dies, we moan and cry. But when millions die, we regard this as normal politics."

Instead of memory, there is a hazy nostalgia. Monuments of Vladimir Lenin still dominate the central squares of almost every Russian city. Lenin's embalmed corpse is still on display in Red Square. Dozens of KGB veterans are back in high office, including the President, Vladimir Putin.

Many Russians celebrate the Soviet secret police on the annual anniversary of its founding. The Communist Party remains the biggest party in the nation.

In December, Mr. Putin revived the melody of the Soviet national anthem -- the same one that glorified Stalin and Lenin -- and made it the basis for the new Russian national anthem.

"Russia is covered up to its horizons with bones and nameless graves. It's high time for us to think about it, to repent, to apologize to those who survived, to kneel before the millions who were shot, to wake up our sleeping consciences and to understand that it was us who helped the regime to enslave us," he writes in his new book.

"I am personally ashamed that we, the older generation, allowed those monsters Lenin and Stalin to kill us. We informed on our neighbours, applauded our 'leaders,' and shot our own countrymen. We were people without dignity . . ."

Mr. Yakovlev himself enjoyed a comfortable 45-year career as a Soviet functionary, loyally serving every leader since Stalin. It was only in the late years of his career that he abandoned communism.

Born in 1923, the son of a peasant family in a tiny village on the Volga River, he grew up as a fervent believer in the wisdom of Stalin. As a Red Army soldier in the Second World War, he was almost killed when he was sprayed by machine-gun fire in a battle near Leningrad.

By the 1960s, he had climbed the ranks to a senior post in the ideology department of the Central Committee. But when he wrote an article that criticized Russian nationalists, he was banished to the Canada, where he served as Soviet ambassador from 1973 to 1983.

"I gave 10 years of my life to Canada," he writes in his book. "I carefully studied Canadian life. It was a simple, pragmatic life, based on common sense. I wondered why we in the Soviet Union refused to give up our dogmas. My instructions from Moscow -- to criticize Canada and to promote our propaganda -- seemed so silly to me."

In 1983, when Mr. Gorbachev was a little-known Soviet agriculture secretary, Mr. Yakovlev accompanied him on a 10-day tour of Canadian cities and farms. They became friends and political allies. And when Mr. Gorbachev became the Soviet president, he recruited Mr.Yakovlev as a key adviser and his chief of ideology.

He was the intellectual power behind the throne. He drafted the first Kremlin policy on perestroika (restructuring) in 1985, and he led the battle for political freedoms, allowing the publishing of historical secrets for the first time.

By 1991, Communist hard-liners were denouncing him and trying to expel him from the party's top ranks. In August, he quit and warned that a Stalinist faction was plotting to grab power. Three days later, the hard-liners launched their coup. The putsch failed, and by December the Soviet Union was dead.

During his years in Canada, he was impressed by surveys showing how many young Canadians didn't even know the name of their prime minister. "That's a good thing," he argues. "Let people work, not waiting for anything from their leader. Why do so many Russians wait for their leader to solve things? He does not have magical powers."

He is not surprised that Russians are hostile to his crusade. "The best and most talented people were destroyed by the Soviet Union. . . . Most of those who survived were indifferent, half-literate, inactive and mediocre. We need many more years to restore the nation."

In the meantime, he will not abandon the fight for historical justice. "This is my destiny," he says. "The children of the former 'enemies of the people' are now elderly, . . . and they are the last witnesses of that terrible time."

"Why Father Of Glasnost Is Despised In Russia"
By Geoffrey York
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
March 9, 2001