132 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
in the entire style of Soviet politics. Cults were no longer appropriate.
Yakovlev had enjoyed Gorbachëv’s patronage since their Canadian
encounter in May 1983, when they had found out how much they had
in common. He had served as Ambassador to Ottawa for ten long
years after the Party Secretariat disciplined him for publishing an arti-
cle that condemned the growth of Russian nationalism – Brezhnev
administered the reprimand in person. The embassy posting had been
at his own request.^29 It seemed a good option at the time but soon felt
to him like a kind of banishment.^30 He was never one of Andropov’s
protégés. Andropov, while he was KGB Chairman, criticized Yakov-
lev’s interference with Soviet intelligence activities on Canadian soil.^31
Yakovlev thought seriously about what changes were needed to inte-
grate the USSR into the world economy. He entered talks with the
head of McDonald’s Corporation in Canada to establish a branch in
Moscow, and he persuaded the Soviet political leadership to discuss
this seriously for a while.^32
With Gorbachëv’s approval, Yakovlev began to write to him with
advice.^33 The two grew closer. But whereas Gorbachëv could contain
his impatience, Yakovlev disliked having to help him to draft a new
Party Programme on Chernenko’s behalf; he also resented the fact
that Alexander Alexandrov-Agentov, Chernenko’s senior aide, rejected
nearly all his suggestions.^34 Controversy began to dog him again. On
a visit to West Germany he declared that German reunification was
the business of the German people and no one else. Honecker pro-
tested to Moscow that there were two German peoples and never the
twain should meet in a single state. Yakovlev was called into the Party
Central Committee offices and told to be more cautious in his declar-
ations.^35
Yakovlev wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses and was pudgy and
bald; British Ambassador Rodric Braithwaite was to compare him
memorably to a ‘dyspeptic frog’.^36 He often appeared grumpy even
when he was in a good mood. Wounded as a young soldier in the
Second World War, he had a bad limp and found stairs difficult. Hold-
ing on to the banister, he hauled up his lame leg step by step: he was
nothing if not an independent personality.^37 His foreign experience
was extraordinary for a Soviet public figure. As a youngster in the
1950s he took part in an academic exchange with America and spent
a year studying at Columbia University, and he proceeded to publish
works on American capitalism. The intellectual impact of his stay in
New York endured. He learned to prefer the philosopher Immanuel