He participated in his share of injustice, including the oversight of propaganda efforts in support of the violent suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring. But within the upper ranks of the Communist Party, he was also waging a war to open up the Soviet Union, for example by allowing citizens to openly criticize the state. He frequently leveraged his connections to Brezhnev and other politburo members to prevent censors from banning articles in publications such as Novy Mir, the literary journal that first published Solzhenitsyn.
By 1972, Yakovlev had grown so disgusted with the increasingly power-hungry Soviet leadership that he published a long article criticizing the romanticization of the country’s pre-revolutionary past, one of the Communist Party’s most hypocritical policies. The stunt led to his demotion to ambassador and banishment to the Cold War backwater of Ottawa. He took over the Soviet embassy in July 1973.
At first, Yakovlev was inspired by Canada, which struck him as one of the world’s few healthy, functioning democracies, particularly when compared with its southern neighbour, which was reeling from Watergate and Vietnam. As ambassador, he developed friendships with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and the charismatic founder of McDonald’s of Canada, George Cohon, who dreamt of opening the first Western fast-food franchise behind the Iron Curtain. Excited by the prospect of improving his home country, Yakovlev wrote long memos to Moscow crammed with ideas from Canadian life — particularly its approaches to agriculture.
But by the end of the 1970s, Yakovlev had again grown discouraged. His missives had gone unheeded, and Brezhnev had become an embarrassment — a sleeping-pill-addicted stroke victim who often drifted off during official appearances. Amid the resulting leadership vacuum, Moscow spent billions on the military and ignored the rest of the country, causing massive food shortages that required the expenditure of additional billions to import grain from the West.
Back home, Yakovlev’s brethren justified their tactics by insisting that the Russian people required autocratic rule. This line, still used by some to justify the Putin/Medvedev autocracy, holds that Russians have a strength of character that allows them to do remarkable things, such as single-handedly fighting off the “Nazi menace” in the Second World War. This line of thinking has an unfortunate corollary, however: the Russian strength of character also prevents the nation’s citizens from responsibly using the sorts of freedoms enjoyed in the West.
Yakovlev was one of the few in the Communist Party to reject such arguments. He thought Russia would only improve if the police state were lifted. But his hope waned still further when he learned that the Soviets were equipping silos in Eastern Europe with easily transportable nuclear missiles called SS-20s, each armed with three independently targetable warheads. Then, on Christmas Day 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan.
As the official representative of the Soviet Union in Canada, Yakovlev was forced to confront the West’s response to these moves. He’d grown accustomed to blaming America for the Cold War’s most provocative strategies, but his own country was now inching the world closer to nuclear war. He describes this dark period in his memoirs:
You make yourself out to be an active, smiling man, but in actuality you are being moved by some inner clockwork spring that is independent of your true state of mind. Life loses its creative source, moves ahead as if in automatic drive. Healthy curiosity about people and events disappears. More and more frequently, my head was filled with bitter thoughts that my life was already behind me, while my country more and more perceptibly was becoming petrified and rapidly was falling behind world development. And I could see no new day dawning.At around the same time, Yakovlev began hearing about an unusual community of Russian émigrés known as the Doukhobors. The group was receiving frequent mention in the media, thanks to the conflict with the Freedomites in British Columbia. It was then that the honorary chairman of the orthodox sect, John J. Verigin Sr., contacted him to request a meeting.
Even a nondescript town of strip malls and parking lots like Castlegar, home to the cultural centre of the Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ (as the Doukhobors are formally known), improves when surrounded by mountain peaks and orchards, pastures and forest. The Doukhobors took a circuitous path to this inland paradise.
Details of the group’s earliest days are obscure because of the illiteracy of nearly all of its original members, but according to the scholars George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, the Doukhobor religion probably began as a response to Russian Orthodox teachings, taking root in rural Ukraine and then spreading to southern Russia. The first recorded use of the Doukhobor designation dates from 1785, when an Orthodox archbishop used the term, which translates loosely as “spirit wrestlers,” to indicate that the Doukhobors were fighting against the Holy Spirit. The sect soon reappropriated the name, taking it to mean that they were filled with the spirit of God as they wrestled their oppressors.
