""In this slim, highly provocative book, Richard Pipes engages in a much-needed exercise in historical reparation. We have here the first biography of an ideologue turned heretic and then apostate, whose ideas begot, to a decisive extent, the collapse of Lenin's state.... In documenting Yakovlev's epiphany, Pipes makes a seminal contribution to the literature on disenchantment, apostasy, illumination, and awakening."-Times Higher Education
"We are in Richard Pipes's debt for calling our attention to the man whose ideas helped transform his own country and world politics during the late 1980s and early 1990s."-The New York Review of Books
"The doyen of historians of Russia, Richard Pipes provides the first full biography of Alexander Yakovlev-the Russian Henry Kissinger to Gorbachev. Unlike Henry, however, Alexander was kept in the shadows by his boss. Using Yakovlev's own writing, some available only in Russian, Pipes, Ronald Reagan's adviser, opens a gold mine from which future historians and analysts will extract other precious nuggets."-Jiri Valenta, author of Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968: Anatomy of a Decision and co-author of Gorbachev's New Thinking and Third World Conflicts
"Richard Pipes, the distinguished American historian of Soviet Russia, provides a notable scholarly and public service by writing [the] first biography that carefully follows every major stage in Yakovlev's career and political-ideological evolution."-The Washington Times
"This book introduces readers to an extremely important historical figure of the twentieth century about whom very little has been written."-Jonathan Daly, author of Autocracy under Siege (NIU Press, 1998) and The Watchful State (NIU Press, 2004)
"Richard Pipes has written an important biography about a man whose contributions to the fall of communism have been downplayed both by his former boss and by today's Russian leaders, who view the Soviet collapse as an unmitigated catastrophe."-Survival: Global Politics and Strategy"
