ABSTRACT
Aleksandr N. Yakovlev, along with Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze, was one of the founding fathers ofperestroika and glasnost. A close associate of Gorbachev’s, he became a full member of the Party Politburo in 1987 and soon earned a reputation as the most outspoken advocate of radical change. Increasingly frustrated with the conservative Party apparat, he resigned from the Politburo at the Twenty-eighth Party Congress in the summer of 1990, remaining a prominent, though at times distant and critical, member of Gorbachev’s circle of advisers. Four days before the coup, he was expelledfrom the Party. The following interview was conducted by A. Shcherbakov, reporter for the magazine Ogonëk, where it appeared in the issue for August 31–September 7, 1991. During a visit to Berkeley and Stanford in February 1993, Yakovlev added some details to his account of the coup in an interview with Gregory Freidin. Excerpts from that conversation have been interpolated into the Ogonëk interview.
