Sorry, it took me a while to find a new pdf of the book I’d read this in (Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union which despite the sort-of clickbait-y title is actually a very dry play-by-play about the Soviet economy, the background of various polices and officials, and a blow-by-blow account of what Soviet polices were over the course of the 80s and who was saying what about them) and then find the bit talking about this to refresh my memory. It was Alexander Yakovlev, the Soviet ambassador to Canada from 1973-83. Gorbachev apparently met him in 1983 and subsequently backed him for appointment to a series of prestigious offices and ultimately to head of Agitprop, where he worked to nominally decentralize the institution’s authority out to a bunch of more local editors that he himself had appointed or otherwise backed for their offices, while in practice wielding that authority on behalf of anticommunists and against critics of Gorbachev.
I will revise my earlier statement and say that Yakovlev wasn’t the only cause, though. He was one particularly odious voice in Gorbachev’s ear but clearly not the only one he brought into his inner circle. Part of my mistake seems to be that because all of this was happening behind closed doors and off the record the only source for a lot of the insights into what Gorbachev was allegedly thinking come from Yakovlev himself claiming to have been involved in this or that decision.
who was that diplomat and why did gorby entrust the USSR to their advice?
Sorry, it took me a while to find a new pdf of the book I’d read this in (Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union which despite the sort-of clickbait-y title is actually a very dry play-by-play about the Soviet economy, the background of various polices and officials, and a blow-by-blow account of what Soviet polices were over the course of the 80s and who was saying what about them) and then find the bit talking about this to refresh my memory. It was Alexander Yakovlev, the Soviet ambassador to Canada from 1973-83. Gorbachev apparently met him in 1983 and subsequently backed him for appointment to a series of prestigious offices and ultimately to head of Agitprop, where he worked to nominally decentralize the institution’s authority out to a bunch of more local editors that he himself had appointed or otherwise backed for their offices, while in practice wielding that authority on behalf of anticommunists and against critics of Gorbachev.
I will revise my earlier statement and say that Yakovlev wasn’t the only cause, though. He was one particularly odious voice in Gorbachev’s ear but clearly not the only one he brought into his inner circle. Part of my mistake seems to be that because all of this was happening behind closed doors and off the record the only source for a lot of the insights into what Gorbachev was allegedly thinking come from Yakovlev himself claiming to have been involved in this or that decision.